Newsletter

BALLOTING FOR BEST POLITICAL FILMS OF 2001 BEGINS Polls are now open for Political Film Society members to choose the best political films of 2001. Click on film titles on the Society’s website for more complete reviews, mark your ballots below, and return to the Society’s email address. For the category promoting the goal of […]

KANDAHAR RECEIVES THE FIRST AWARD NOMINATION OF 2002 Kandahar (Safar e Ghandehar) is an Iranian film, with a lot of spoken English, which proceeds as if a documentary because the conditions portrayed are real. Nafas (played by Nelofer Pazira), an Afghani refugee who fled to Canada when the Taliban came to power, receives word in

POLLS CLOSE ON NOMINATIONS FOR BEST POLITICAL FILMS OF 2001 December 31, 2001, was the last day to nominate films for Political Film Society awards. Films made outside the United States were noticeably numerous among the nominees for 2001. Two categories had more than five nominations, so the number of competing films must be reduced

ALI DELIVERS A KNOCKOUT PUNCH TO HIS CRITICS & APPLAUSE TO HOWARD KOSELL Of all the boxers, Muhammad Ali was perhaps the most politically savvy. The film Ali attempts to weave politics into what might otherwise seem a conventional biopic, with many minutes of fight scenes, love stories, and musical interludes. Directed by Michael Mann,

A BLACKLISTED HOLLYWOOD SCREENWRITER SUFFERS A BLACKOUT IN THE MAJESTIC Far from Washington, Hollywood is an easy target for those in Congress to find scapegoats. After World War II, the pattern of emergence of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, involving the media in part, frightened some Americans into believing that a similar fate was in

UPRISING IN THE WARSAW GHETTO SHOWS HOW TO RESPOND TO BARBARITY WITH HONOR In 1943 the Warsaw Ghetto, created by the occupying Germans to contain the Jewish population of the city, erupted in guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. In Uprising, director Jon Avnet provides a docudrama of the era, from prewar Warsaw to the end

AN AMERICAN SOLDIER SEES THE EVILS OF THE BOSNIAN WAR WHILE AWAITING RESCUE In the midst of the Bosnian War, American naval aircraft in the Adriatic Sea were assigned by NATO command to conduct aerial surveillance of the combat while negotiations to end the conflict were in progress. On one such mission in 1995, a

ARTHUR MILLER BRINGS ETHNIC HATRED INTO FOCUS Arthur Miller’s novel Focus (1945) has been brought to the screen by director Neal Slavin at a time of national hysteria over international terrorism. Whereas filmviewers will recall how Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) featured a Gentile news reporter who pretends to be a Jew to dig up a story

A GENERAL LEADS A PRIVATE WAR IN THE LAST CASTLE A three-star general pleads guilty in a court-martial and is sentenced to ten years at Leavenworth in The Last Castle, directed by Rod Lurie. The offense is to disobey orders and ignore intelligence by authorizing a foray in Burundi that results in the death of

THE HIDDEN HALF EXPOSES THE ROLE OF FEMALES IN IRAN Many recent films from Iran focus on the oppression of women in post-revolutionary Iran, but none so deeply as feminist Tahmineh Milani’s The Hidden Half (Nimeh-Ye Penhan). Indeed, she was arrested, charged by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Court of supporting “those waging war against God” and