Films that demonstrate how governments or quasigovernmental groups have violated or promoted the values in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
THE OLD OAK SHOWS HOW RELICS OF THE PAST MIGHT ENJOY THE FUTURE Director Ken Loach has a knack for depicting how forgotten people view their worlds. In his The Old Oak he focuses on a pub called The Old Oak in a small town near Durham, northeast England, during the year 2016. Once upon […]
ONE LIFE IS A BIOPIC WITH TWO HIGH POINTS Nicholas Winton (played by Johnny Flynn) is the person who organized the rescue of 669 Jewish children from Prague before the Nazis took full control of Czechoslovakia in 1939. One Life, directed by James Hawes, begins in 1987, when Winton (played by Anthony Hopkins) is 78
LA SYNDICALISTE EXPOSES ONE OF CHINA’S QUESTS TO DOMINATE THE GLOBAL MARKET Directed by Jean-Paul Salomé, La Syndicaliste is a biopic with three stories. The first is how Maureen Kearney (played by Isabelle Huppert) spent twenty years as a trade union firebrand (whence the title), fighting on behalf of 50,000 union workers to relieve their
RUSTIN CELEBRATES THE ORGANIZERS OF THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON A biopic of Bayard Rustin (played by Colman Domingo), the film Rustin reveals that the March on Washington of August 28, 1963, was a goal he sought since 1941. He was frustrated that nothing much happened in Congress after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that schools
THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AIDS THE OSAGE NATION IN KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON Director Martin Scorsese begins the film as if seated on the stage in front of the curtain to assert that the film is made to correct the record, presumably hinting that he had some personal interest. But the film takes place in
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MIRANDA’S VICTIM FOCUSES ON THE WOMAN RAPED BY MIRANDA A lawyer for Ernesto Miranda (Sebastian Quinn) successfully argued that his kidnapping and rape confession was coerced because he was denied an attorney before and during interrogation. The case was the most prominent of four similar cases that were reviewed in which the U.S. Supreme Court
AURORA’S SUNRISE Graphically Explains the Armenian Genocide A biopic about Arshaluys Mardiganian, Aurora’s Sunrise is also a biopic and mini-critique of the previously forgotten film Auction of Souls (1919). The latter film is a story (though she was renamed Aurora to sell to an American audience), of a 14-year-old who is evicted from her home
THE WIND AND THE RECKONING DESCRIBES AN ANTI-COLONIAL STRUGGLE IN HAWAIʽI After titles inform filmviewers that the Kingdom of Hawaiʽi was overthrown in 1893, the context is on a new law of the Republic of Hawaiʽi that required all persons with leprosy (Hansen’s disease) to be rounded up and sent to a “leper colony” on
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CHEVALIER FEATURES WHITE SUPREMACY Historical information about Joseph Bologne has been pieced together, and the film Chevalier has a lot of interesting subplots that are doubtless fictional. But the message of the film is one of the most fascinating of 2023 and seems very timely indeed, with White males infuriated by an upstart Black whom
SWEETWATER REMINDS FILMVIEWERS OF THE EARLY DAYS OF CIVIL RIGHTS PROGRESS In 1990, a man by the name of Nathaniel Clifton (played at age 78 by Everett Osborne) is driving a Chicago taxi. After his rider asks to increase the volume of an ongoing basketball game, a discussion begins, and the driver reveals that he