Newsletter

HOLY SPIDER CELEBRATES A WOMAN WHO STOPPED A MASS MURDER During the year 2000, bad news came from the holy city of Mashhad, Iran. Women were being murdered, and the local police appeared unable to stop the continuing slaughter. Accordingly, in 2001 journalist Rahimi (played by Zar Amir-Ebrahimi) goes from Iran to Mashhad to investigate […]

SHE SAID TRACES THE BEGINNING OF #MeToo Women no longer play traditional roles. They work alongside men at most occupations today, including all layers of the film industry. However, gossip in Hollywood has long indicated that men doing the hiring impose a requirement on women when they open their pants during a job interview. Even

TILL HONORS THE WOMAN WHO STARTED THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT The film Till begins on August 1955. The initial focus is on a happy African American extended family living in Chicago. Mamie Till-Mobley (played by Danielle Deadwyler) is the only Black working in an air force office. Her son, Emmett Till (Jalyn Hall), is 14

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT PROVIDES A GERMAN PERSPECTIVE The 1928 novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of World War I, All Quiet on the Western Front, has now been made a third time. The actual German title is Im Westen Nichts Neues, translated as “In the West Nothing New.” An anti-war

ARGENTINA, 1985 FEATURES NUREMBERG #2 In 1816, Argentina declared independence but had a checkered political history until 1983, when a military junta stepped aside, and Argentina has been a democracy ever since. One reason the military relinquished power was that they lost public support in the “dirty war,” when an estimated 30,000 citizens disappeared, some

OPERATION MINCEMEAT REVEALS MORE WORLD WAR II SECRETS As more classified information about World War II is revealed, Operation Mincemeat reveals why the British landing on Sicily occurred with minimal casualties, based on a nonfiction book with the same title by Ben Macintyre, who updates information about the plot that was previously presented in the

WATERMAN CELEBRATES THE LIFE OF DUKE KAHANAMOKU The only American with statues erected in his honor in several countries of the world is Duke Paoa Kahinu Mokoe Hulikohola Kahanamoku. But he was not born in the United States. He was born in 1890 in the Kingdom of Hawaiʽi and began living from the age of

DONBASS SHOWS LIFE IN EASTERN UKRAINE BEFORE 2022 Before the Russian offensive against Ukraine in 2022, a chuck of Eastern Ukraine had been seized by Russians in 2014 and governed as “New Russia.” Donbass, directed by Sergey Loznitsa, provides slices of life in that region in about 2015. Each of thirteen scenes is self-contained but

DEATH ON THE NILE TESTS ONE’S ABILITY TO SPOT CLUES In the beginning of Death on the Nile, Agatha Christie’s creation, Hercule Poirot (played by the director, Kenneth Branagh), is a soldier in a trench during World War I (something added by screenplay writer Michael Green along with prominent Black actresses to distinguish the film