Civil War (or, Who Do We Think We Are)
One of the most revelatory “social issues” docs to hit theaters this year (NYC and LA on September 17) is the provocatively titled Civil War (or, Who Do We Think We Are), the latest from veteran...
Author: Lauren Wissot
Handling the Truth: On Spike Lee’s inclusion (and subsequent removal) of 9/11 Truthers from NYC Epicenters 9/11➔2021½
Twenty years on, perhaps the one thing our highly polarized American electorate can agree upon is that A) We don’t have the full truth about 9/11 (hence the public demand to release the government...
Review: Pier Kids
Pier Kids, the latest doc from Elegance Bratton (executive producer and creator of Viceland’s My House) captures both the struggles and the joys of three queer and trans youth who make their home...
Whose Pride? (or the tyranny of heteronormativity)
Corporate-sponsored lip service. Calls for the kink community to go back in the closet for the sake of a family-friendly Pride. And now the so-called “liberal” media (i.e., The Washington Post...
American exceptionalism is killing America
As the Covid-19 vaccine rollout gets underway here in the hard-hit US, chaos continues to reign. Down in go-it-alone Texas - yes, that state with its own standalone, cheap energy-providing electrical...
Dating While Distancing: Pacho Velez’s Sundance-premiering Searchers
“New York is a dysfunctional relationship itself,” a woman laments in Pacho Velez’s Searchers, a cinematic sociological study of online dating via the POV of a wide range of New Yorkers during...
Unmasking MAGA Hispanic Man
As a liberal American who has never lived in a state where my presidential vote counted (thanks to our white, male, landowning founders having created a little system of disenfranchisement called the...
Three true crime docuseries for end-of-summer streaming
With the summer theatrical blockbuster now a remnant of the pre-pandemic past, streaming services of every corporate stripe have rushed in to fill the void. And since the true crime genre has long...
White blindness: the original sin
When white people play the “I don’t see race” card they are either A) lying (to others and/or themselves) or B) being racist (as it follows that “not seeing race” literally means not seeing...
Recalibrate the media, reconstruct the system, reimagine the police: pointing the way through movies (and a podcast and a web-series)
With trust in the media, in institutions, in each other at a depressing low, it’s important to know how we got here - and how to flip the script. Which is why I’ve compiled an eclectic...