Category Archives: film

She’s Everything and Everywhere: Riffs on Barbie and the Barbie Movie

Posted on 02/11/2024 by Audrey Wells

Barbie deserved her own biopic. More than one billion Barbie dolls have been shipped and sold around the world since her premier in 1959, and factories in Asia are still spewing her out. From her hair down to the pink … Continue reading →

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Pre-Roe Reproductive Rights Underground: The Story of the Janes

Posted on 11/18/2023 by Pat Simpson

We are back in pre-Roe Chicago. A doctor speaks about sepsis, the emergency rooms overflowing daily with feverish women dying from botched efforts to rid themselves of unwanted pregnancies. Another woman recalls her phone interactions with a mob operative. Yes, … Continue reading →

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Passing: Can One Ever “Pass”?

Posted on 03/31/2022 by Jim Barrett

I recently watched one of the most beautiful and perhaps also one of the most significant movies I have seen in a long time. Passing, based on a 1929 novel by the Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larson (1891–1964), is a … Continue reading →

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Filmmaker Raoul Peck: “Do We Wish for a Common History?”

Posted on 02/09/2022 by Audrey Wells

Pristine wilderness. Sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it? A place untouched. But does the phrase “pristine wilderness,” connoting unsullied land, serve as a cultural myth that ironically reeks of genocide? Raoul Peck makes this case and many others in … Continue reading →

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Slightly Out of Focus: A Review of One Night in Miami and Judas and the Black Messiah

Posted on 08/03/2021 by Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua

For more than 70 years and over a century, respectively, television and cinema have presented demeaning images of Black people. And for equally as long, African Americans have responded with boycotts, pickets and alternative visions that “depict[ed] our men and … Continue reading →

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The Quiet Strength of Bamboo: Three Wonderful Films from the Pacific to Stream

Posted on 08/03/2021 by Audrey Wells

Add these three visually stunning and thoughtful films to your watch list. Each, to varying degrees, tells a story of indigenous culture from an insider’s point of view, and each offers the special pleasure of real people playing themselves in … Continue reading →

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“The Big Scary ‘S’ Word” is Coming for your Children

Posted on 12/06/2020 by Audrey Wells

  Did you know that Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx had a correspondence; that Helen Keller was a socialist, as was Francis Bellamy, who authored the Pledge of Allegiance; that North Dakota practices public banking; and that in the 1840s … Continue reading →

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Unacceptable Levels—Our Body Burden, Our Planet Burden

Posted on 05/08/2019 by Lois Kain

Our planet is drowning in synthetic chemicals. Our bodies have become synthetic chemical processing plants. A 2005 Environmental Working Group study of umbilical cord blood revealed that babies are born already pre-polluted with over 200 industrial contaminates. Hundreds of the … Continue reading →

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What to Watch for Dinner Tonight: Trump Through the Looking Glass

Posted on 11/14/2018 by Audrey Wells

Who does Trump see when he looks in the mirror? Like many of us over the proverbial hill, he likely does not acknowledge his elderly self; he sees his younger self, glamorized through the pronounced image he cultivated over decades … Continue reading →

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Stream some Laughs: Four Political Comedies from Mexico, Spain, and Puerto Rico

Posted on 12/07/2017 by Audrey Wells

Subtitles don’t bite. Turn them on, if you need, and check out a superb satire from Mexican director Luis Estrada, The Perfect Dictatorship (La Dictadura Perfecta, 2014), streaming on Netflix. Prepare to laugh and squirm. In this uncomfortably relevant and … Continue reading →

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Women’s Lib as Projected on the Screen

Posted on 12/27/2016 by Audrey Wells

“You need some vitamin F.” That’s the teasing advice Claudine gets from her women friends after she complains of not sleeping well. “Could you live without a man around the house?” Alice Hyatt and her neighbor Bea ponder this question. … Continue reading →

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