communism
Charming and sympathetic portrayals by Alséni Bathily and Lyna Khoudri make Gagarine feel warmly satisfying and make it a peculiar French indie.
While the details and historical recreations are impeccable, Andrei Konchalovsky’s Dear Comrades! remains emotionally unmoving.
Mr. Jones is a harsh, masterful film about being wary of the lies being fed to you by your media and your government.
Warren Beatty’s Reds may be the final prestige picture that ideologically represents New Hollywood. Read our retrospective review of the 1981 epic.
Red Joan is suffocatingly mediocre, a political thriller with no interest in the politics of the story, or anything remotely thrilling.
The Americans is a show that asks you to examine what exactly it is about capitalism that you like, the effect those aspects of it have on other people, and whether your lifestyle is ethical.
Like Armando Iannucci’s other work, The Death of Stalin is a reliably funny romp—it’s just not going to be seen as one of his best efforts.
In our latest entry of The Nominated Film You May Have Missed series, we discuss the 2005 political drama Good Night, and Good Luck.
Afterimage is the swan song of legendary director Andrzej Wajda, depicting the artist Władysław Strzemiński during Stalinist-era Poland.
For Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, the artist was inextricably joined to his society, both its benefits and its ills. Tarkovsky defined these colloquies between society and an individual artist as “dialectics of personality.” In other words, individual development was indefinably caught-up within personal and distant interactions with a society.
People often tend to demarcate their lives by coordinating them with macro-narratives. For instance, the segment of your life that took place during the George W. Bush administration, or the Vietnam war.
In 1971 a particularly interesting film bestowed with an X rating made its way to a limited release in New York City and Los Angeles. This film was not a commercial success. It was a film that was so “out there” some reviewers refused to even see it.
The Coen Brothers have managed to put their own twist on noir, the buddy comedy, crime drama, romantic comedies, westerns, and spy films. They are clearly film historians, so they want to show their love of movies by tackling classic genre films that cannot be sold to modern audiences. How did they manage to do this?
Hollywood and the golden age of film have now all but faded into history, and any glimpse into that world is for that reason a glimpse into history itself. Trumbo is a look at the show business world following the Cold War, when Hollywood started to blacklist people solely due to their political alignments. Starring the very talented Bryan Cranston as the titular character, the film is not only a successful character study and biopic, it is also an engaging and entertaining glimpse at a very dark time in Hollywood’s history.
Frank Sinatra, whose 100th birthday would have been this December, was one of the great entertainers of the 20th century. He had an exceptional voice that made him perhaps the most influential vocalist in history, but Sinatra doesn’t sing a note in his best movie, the Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate (1962). This deft political drama, which wouldn’t have been made without Sinatra’s intervention, uncannily predicts many of the tumultuous events of the 1960s and beyond.
