Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
The film Wasp Network has recently arrived on Netflix. It tells the story of the heroes known as the Cuban Five who successfully infiltrated anti-communist terrorist groups in Miami. The Wasp Network (La Red Avispa) was a creation of Cuban intelligence to thwart the efforts of such groups as Alpha […]
Russian cinema today explores capitalism against the backdrop of a past socialist experience. Open-minded visitors to former socialist states, and particularly to Russia, will come across this living memory and frequently an acknowledgement of the loss of humanist values since the defeat of socialism in Europe. It is interesting too, […]
Panos Cosmatos’s film Mandy (2018) has received widespread acclaim for its visually arresting murder-and-revenge story, set in a heavily aestheticised 1980s rural America (thanks to the cinematography of Benjamin Loeb). This article is not so much a review of the film as a critical assessment of some of the political […]
A Star Is Born has been remade for the fourth time and was released in Irish cinemas on 5 October. The retelling follows the familiar story of an aging male star—this time the country singer Jackson Maine (played by Bradley Cooper)—who happens across an ordinary woman whose talent is being […]
Winner of the Golden Globe for best foreign-language film, In the Fade, by the Turkish-German director Fatih Akın, is one of the more important new political films on the state of Germany today. It is loosely based on the NSU (National Socialist Underground—i.e. fascist) trials, which were concluded this summer […]
BlacKkKlansman is Spike Lee’s latest cinematic offering, a dramatic dark comedy that is based on a true story of a black detective who goes undercover in the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s. The film has suffered criticism for being “anti-white” (the irony is tangible on that one) and for […]
No Stone Unturned (2017) is a documentary film about the Loughinisland massacre, directed by Alex Gibney. For those unaware of what happened in Loughinisland or, like me, who were born after the events took place, the two-hour documentary is well worth watching; and for those who remember the events well […]
Following the American Civil War there was a brief period of Reconstruction in the former Confederate states before the imperialist war was resumed against the Indigenous peoples of America, when the colonialists gave full expression to the policy of “manifest destiny” in both extending the borders of the United States […]