Portside

Chie Hayakawa's raw and sobering debut imagines a near-future Japan in which the elderly are encouraged to volunteer for euthanization. The scariest thing about Hayakawa’s film isn’t its familiar depiction of a society that privileges human output over human dignity, but rather its soft dystopian sketch of a society that’s able to soft-shoe around dehumanization and/or sell it as an act of grace.

Manuela Martelli’s new film examines the Pinochet dictatorship through the eyes of a woman who never intended to play an active role.

125 years after his birth, Paul Robeson, the civil rights titan, remains a role model for battling racism and fascism. The words written on his gravestone: “The artist must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.”

A new movie from the director Saim Sadiq, "Joyland", Pakisitan's 2023 Oscar entry, depicts queer love against the backdrop of a Pakistani household and feels as familiar as our families are to us here.The film follows a man who gets a job in a burlesque show and falls in love with a trans woman. Banned in Pakistan, “Joyland” earned accolades at the Cannes Film Festival.

Making art in all its everyday glory: In their latest movie together, Michelle Williams and director Kelly Reichardt paint a portrait of an artist who’s a real and wonderful piece of work.

Iranian American screen polymath Payman Maadi (who made such an impact in films such as Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation) is Samad, a cop waging an apparently unwinnable war on drugs in the Iranian capital. Having rounded up a vast community of addicts living and dying within a hellscape of giant concrete pipes, Samad and his deputy, Hamid (Houman Kiai), treat their captives like cattle, stripping and humiliating them, herding them from one overcrowded prison space to the next.

A new documentary by Alain Gomis turns footage from an interview with Thelonious Monk into a commentary on the submerged violence of the star-making process.

'Ithaka' the documentary produced by the WikiLeaks founder’s half brother offers a close-up look at one of the world’s most famous political prisoners. 'Ithaka' stresses that if Assange is extradited to America, supporters fear he’d face extremely harsh conditions. He would also become the first journalist ever convicted under the draconian Espionage Act, a blow against journalism, transparency, and democracy.

Doug Liman’s “Justice,” a breathtaking documentary about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s silenced sexual assault accusers, goes a long way to proving the reality of the fears at the heart of this particular case. Mainly, that there was such a desire at several levels of government to see Kavanaugh on the bench that due diligence wasn’t followed, and barely even attempted. A compelling piece of journalism.