ORIGIN EXPLAINS HOW ISABEL WILKERSON CONDUCTED RESEARCH Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents, published in 2000, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Director Ava DuVernay decided to make a film to demonstrate not only the thesis of the book but how she did her field research to derive insights stated in the book. […]
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
The film Napoleon has brought to the screen the rise and fall of Napoléon Bonaparte (played by Joaquin Phoenix) with particular emphasis on his military career and his love life with Empress Josephine (Vanessa Kirby). Financed by Cinémathèque Français and Netflix, the film is a modern restoration of a 1927 French film classic. His early
WAIKIKI MOURNS THE LIVES OF MANY NATIVE HAWAIIANS Christopher Kahunahana, the first Native Hawaiian to direct a film, has decided to portray how some people occupying islands for more than a thousand years now feel strangers in their own land. The focus is on Kea (played by Danielle Zalopany), who is employed as a hula
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
THE BURIAL DEMONSTRATES HOW CLEVER ATTORNEYS IMPRESS JURIES Much less is known about the lawsuit in The Burial, directed by Maggie Betts. Jeremiah O’Keefe (played by an aging Tommy Lee Jones) is the owner of several burial companies as well as a burial insurance company in Mississippi. After World War II, O’Keefe contributed to civil
GOLDA TRIES TO REDEEM THE REPUTATION OF GOLDA MEIR Israel’s prime minister Golda Meir, sometimes known as the “Iron Lady,” has been blamed for unnecessary deaths in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, but when her conduct before, during, and after the war are examined in Golda, filmviewers may make a very different assessment. Directed
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