Based on Gloria Steinem’s own memoir My Life on the Road, The Glorias painstakingly covers the feminist icon’s life from her childhood in the 1940s to the Women’s March in January 2016. That span of time feels as long as it sounds as portrayed in this biopic, which seems to be simultaneously worshipful, deferential, and …
Though Just Mercy is a relatively by-the-book procedural, it is actually better than its trailer suggests, portraying a solemn lawyer promising justice for an unjustly imprisoned death row inmate. With the swelling music of the trailer, and the cuts between concerned family members, furrowed brows, and evil lawyers and judges in business casual, you pretty …
In the trailer for Harriet, there is a tease of a visually arresting climactic scene showing abolitionist Harriet Tubman (Cynthia Erivo) cocking a rifle and firmly ordering, “Ready?” to the Union soldiers she is commandeering. On signal, hundreds of slaves flee from the woods toward them on the river, toward the ironclad warships that will …
Felicity Jones, in her first Big Time Starring Role, plays Ginsburg, and the film tracks her life and work from her first days at Harvard Law in 1956, where she was one of just a handful of women in a class of hundreds of men, to the groundbreaking 1970 sex-discrimination case she argued (as counsel …
Set in 1962, the film tracks the literal and figurative real-life journey of two unlikely traveling companions: hulking NYC club bouncer Tony “Lip” Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) and Don “Doc” Shirley (Mahershala Ali), the virtuoso pianist who hires Tony to be his muscle on a potentially dangerous eight-week concert tour through the racially divided Deep American …
At one point in the documentary Dolores, about American farm workers’ labor activist Dolores Huerta, her daughter says, “We need to set the record straight! Women cannot be written out of history!” That’s the prevailing theme in this fascinating documentary about an activist that seemingly should be celebrated alongside her more well-known peers, except for …
I won’t be the first to tell you that director Kathryn Bigelow knows her way around filming extremely intense sequences. From her praised war films The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, she now turns her lens on a homeland war. An infamous incident during the race riots in Detroit in 1967 takes center stage …
If a trial lawyer were to have a superpower, it would be his or her power of inquisition and persuasion. To take away a lawyer’s voice in trial is to muzzle their best weapon in a fight, and that is what happens to Thurgood Marshall in the 1941 case of Connecticut vs Joseph Spell. Thurgood …
There’s something so unreal and ephemeral about carnivals that it’s almost strange to think about them in practical terms. They appear every year with their dependable variations on rides, games, prizes, and food, but how often do we stop to think about the people who piece the rides together, construct the booths, and keep an …
In a performance that will inevitably draw comparisons to his role as Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, David Oyelowo stars as Khama, the heir to the throne of the British-ruled African country of what was then Bechuanaland. While studying abroad in post-Second World War London, he meets and quickly falls in love with office-worker …