Let me begin with some background not covered in the film. Dirty War derives from “La Salle Guerre”, the term the French applied to their counter-terror campaign in Algeria, circa 1954-1961. Algeria wanted independence, and France resisted.
Like subject people everywhere, the Algerians were (...)
This month’s historic disclosures about the US National Security Agency by tireless journalist Glenn Greenwald have embarrassed the Obama administration and its allies. Greenwald’s source is Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor who has blown the whistle on a massive global snooping programme. (...)
Fifteen years ago when I began posting film reviews on the Internet, I sought to do for film what I had already been doing for politics, namely to draw people’s attention to what was undeservedly neglected. Whether it was a low-budget but hard-hitting documentary that was in and out of NY (...)
Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby may not be the best movie on the planet, but it’s also far from the worst. It is an excessive, indulgent, melodramatic romantic tragedy based on a book that is revered as much as the Bible, so there is no way it will escape (...)
Among the many casualties of the War on Terror, one of the most unmourned is the human impulse to revere beauty. Where does it come from, that sense of wonder upon witnessing the migration of butterflies, or a vast, kaleidoscopic sea, or a mountain too tall and steep for snow to stick, giving (...)