![]() ![]() Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. ![]() ![]() Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism? How to watch it: Armageddon Time is playing in theaters and available to digitally rent or buy. ![]() It’s a truly poignant, troubling, and ultimately brilliant work of memory and self-implication. Meanwhile, Paul is caught between his left-leaning family and the children at his new school who casually drop racial slurs or pump their fists and chant “Reagan! Reagan!” at the mention of an upcoming election. Paul’s family is navigating the gluey border between being the target of antisemitism and enjoying the opportunities and social standing that their Black neighbors will never have. The film features a jolt of a cameo with political implications that appear midway through - I don’t want to ruin it - but the film’s broader aim is to excavate the layers of privilege that the protagonist, whose ancestors fled the Holocaust, is slowly coming to realize. James Gray’s Armageddon Time is a semi-autofictional story of a sixth grader named Paul (Banks Repeta) growing up in Queens in the 1980s who, after some trouble in his public school, ends up at a private academy at the behest of his grandfather (Anthony Hopkins). How to watch it: Donbass is available to digitally rent or purchase. The question isn’t what the fix is it’s whether we’ll ever stop thinking it’s an easy one. In the way that The Wire unpacked something vital about the layered mess of American cities, Donbass digs with the grimmest of grins into a conflict that has been going on for a long time. In 13 vignettes, Loznitsa fills in an image of a region gone haywire, falling apart in the mess of conflict and deceit that has sprung up in the fighting between pro-Russian separatists, backed by Putin’s government, and Ukrainian government forces. Set in the mid-2010s, Donbass is a festival of absurdism. Now, with the name “Donbass” (sometimes rendered “Donbas”) - the region in eastern Ukraine that has been the seat of pro-Putin, pro-Russian unrest since 2014 - newly recognizable to American audiences, it’s finally been released in the US. Then it seemed to disappear, at least in the US. The film made the festival rounds in 2018 and was selected by Ukraine as its entry for the 2019 Oscars, but the Academy didn’t nominate it. Sergei Loznitsa, perhaps Ukraine’s most well-known filmmaker, sank his teeth into the problem of propaganda with his barbed, satirical Donbass. How to watch it: Women Talking opens in theaters on December 2. It’s a skillfully made, conversation-forward movie that unpacks various ways women have responded to violence and abuse over centuries and across the world: living with subjugation, fighting it, fleeing it, or trying to reform society from within. With a cast that includes Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, Ben Whishaw, and Frances McDormand (in a tiny but thematically crucial role), she tells a story about learning to unlearn oppression, about embracing freedom after violence, as the women of the colony decide whether to stay, fight, or flee. For the film version, writer and director Sarah Polley did what every good adaptation should do and found her version of the story inside the original. The story of Women Talking springs out of a horrifying true story from 2011, in which seven men from an ultra-conservative Mennonite colony in Bolivia (populated by the descendants of the Eastern Europeans who settled there in 1874) were convicted of drugging and serially raping over 100 women from their community. ![]()
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