Whale by Cheon Myeong-kwan

The author sums it up best himself: stories are an exploration of a life filled with injustice. So ends the tale, as it began, about the unjust life of Chunhui, a gargantuan 27-year-old-woman nine days out of prison for arson and mass murder she may or may not have committed. The novel’s prologue returns Chunhui to her family’s previously thriving, now deserted brickyard outside the mountain town of Pyeongdae, Korea. There, in her prison uniform amid charred brick and daisy fleabane, Chunhui is overwhelmed by memories of kilns and flames; of the workers’ palpable disdain for her mute, unwieldy body; and of the gentle companionship and brickmaking tutelage of her stepfather, Mun. Alone and directionless but bent on survival, Chunhui catches and eats a snake. In a nearby river she bathes. She lives like a wild animal, and yet the story is one of humor, warmth, and humanity. It is also hard to categorize, but I very much enjoyed it and I haven't read anything quite like it before.

Bobi WIne: The People's President (2023)

This gripping documentary charts the inspiring activism of Bobi Wine, the pop star-turned-politician seeking to end Uganda's brutal dictatorship. Rising from the ghetto slums of Kampala to be one of the country's most beloved superstars, Bobi begins to use his music to call out corruption, then becomes an Independent Member of Parliament to defend the rights of his people. The country's institutions are controlled by President Museveni, an autocratic tyrant who has held power since 1986. Bobi and his wife Barbie choose to risk their careers, their family, and their lives to challenge him and bring democracy to their country. But the state, and the effective dictator, are determined to silence not only them, but anyone who supports their cause by using military and police force. The parallels between Putin and the death plan he had to stop the very charismatic Navalny (the documentary that won the Oscar last year) is chilling.

All The Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow

This book was longlisted for the Booker prize, and it is very much like books that get that nod--quirky, well written, and with a narrative that sucks you in with a story that is not often told, and that holds true for this book. The story begins on a bright, cool summer’s morning in the 1980s. A woman called Sunday whispers a Sicilian proverb, admires the fields that rise above her Lake District home and notices a stranger lying on next door’s lawn. This is Vita, and so begins the account of the intense friendship that builds between these two very different women, and its fraught aftermath. Confident, charming, privileged Vita has moved to Sunday’s small town from London. Sunday is autistic. Social interactions perplex her, and she is happier calming her twitching hands in the soil of the greenhouses where she works. She favors white food, cannot read clocks, and turns down any drink that is not cold and fizzy. Vita is delighted with her quirky new friend, and Sunday bathes in the warm light of her attention. She and her daughter Dolly start visiting Vita and her husband Rollo for weekly suppers. What unfolds over the years is told by Sunday, who doesn't quite follow the subtext--it is like The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night, where the reader knows what is going on long before Sunday does, and even she figures it out in the end. It is a well told story that is an enjoyable read.

The Eternal Memory (2023)

The two central characters portrayed are prominent people in their home country. Augusto Góngora was a television newscaster and interviewer from the early 1970s onward; he also produced films and books and acted in a miniseries for the great Raul Ruiz. He was on the front lines at a turbulent time in Chile's past and revealing what was happening carried a certain amount of risk. He was charismatic. smart and handsome. His wife Paulina Urrutia is 17 years his junior, which is important because she has got the youth and energy to manage. She is an actress with a solid filmography, not much of which has traveled to the United States. Alberdi’s movie chronicles their life together as they cope with Góngora’s condition, early onset Alzheimer’s disease. It is a horrible disease, which gradually robs you of yourself, and that is gently and persistently pointed out in this Oscar nominated documentary.

The Bird Way by Jennifer Ackerman

For once, I have read the author's books in the correct order. I am very new to tuning in to birds and bird behavior and this book, which follows The Genius of Birds, is a celebration of the dizzying variety of bird life. The book is arranged according to different aspects of bird behavior. It begins with birdsong, moving from the dawn chorus to alarm calls to mimicry; then there’s a series of chapters on “work” – how birds go about providing for themselves and their offspring. After this comes “play” and "love", which is more about reproduction. And most fascinating is the raising of the offspring. The parasitic behavior of cowbirds and fan-tailed cuckoos I was familiar with, but the cooperative chick rearing of the ani, with large collective nests and group guarding and feeding of unrelated offspring is very unusual and cool. All of these cover the science of what we have learned about birds--a remarkable story of progress--and then translating what that means by using stories from her continent-hopping succession of astonishing encounters with birds. It is an enjoyable read, and one that would appeal to anyone who is interested in biology and the natural world.

I, Captain (2023)

This film from Italy chronicles the journey of two teenagers from Senegal trying to get to Europe to seek a better life for their their families. They are 16 years old and have not left their neighborhoods before they embark on the thousands of miles journey across Africa before they even get to the Mediterranean coast. The film opens outside of Dakar, Senegal’s capital, Seydou is first met waking up in the one-room house where he lives with his widowed mother and an uncountable number of little sisters, some of whom are seen dancing ecstatically in a local ceremony at which Seydou plays drums with his cousin Moussa. Seydou and Moussa have been secretly working on building sites for months to save money for a trip to Europe, where they hope to earn even more and perhaps become hip hop stars so famous that white people will want their autographs. Seydou is a largely obedient son, and so he tests the waters with his mother and asks what she’d think if he left for Europe, he says it would be to provide money for her and his sisters. Not that it matters to his mom. She flatly forbids him from going, warning that far too many people have died along the way, especially on the boats across the Mediterranean, words of warning that hang ominously in the air. Although Seydou will defy his mother’s wishes, he and Moussa take time before their departure to ask the local shaman to petition their ancestors for their leave to travel. Fortunately, permission is granted, and after paying a substantial amount of their savings to middlemen — thinking this should cover the whole journey to Europe — they set off on a bus headed west. They pass through Niger and at one point pick up fake passports. Their savings dwindle and the methods of transportation gradually get less comfortable and secure. The first sign of just how dangerous the journey will be, and how ruthless these traffickers are, comes when a man falls off the flatbed truck they’re all crammed into the back of as the driver races recklessly through the desert. There’s no chance that he’ll stop the truck to pick up the lost man, and it starts to dawn on Seydou that maybe his mother was right after all. Without giving too much away, she was right.

Time Shelter by Georgi Godspodinov

I really loved this book, even as I sit down to think and write about it and realize that I am not at all sure that I fully understood it. So it goes. This won the Book Prize for International Literature; in other words, something not originally written in English, and therefore the prize goes both to the author and the translator--interesting, as of course I have no way of knowing how exceptional the translation is, and one of the first comments that comes up about this book is someone averring that the translation is dreadful. So, all I can really say is that this is a mesmerizing book, maybe even better in Bulgarian, but excellent in it's English form (and also apparently in Italian, as it won a parallel award for that translation). The work has many themes, though few are as emphatic as humanity’s complex relationship to time. The novel asks a lot of intriguing questions revolving around time, our concept of it, the fact that we lead finite lives but instead of looking forward, many of us look backwards to the past, and then and a look at what actually living in the past might look like--what era would you choose? Why? Would it matter what the circumstances you lived in were? Should a European pick the 1980's? Even if living in Bulgaria, with the Soviet Union over lord until the end of that decade? What makes a time a good one? The novel doesn’t provide many answers, leaving those who read it to come to their own conclusions. For a novel so steeped in layers of nostalgia, this open-endedness works well because every reader brings different experiences of the past and so will have different opinions and reactions to interpretations of it. This tendency was most acute in the novel’s intentionally meandering metafictional conclusion, written as the mind of the narrator is fighting against what we all fear on some level, forgetting.

Society of the Snow (2023)

This is not the first attempt to the the story of the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in the Andes mountains on October 13, 1972. It has been told and re-told and re-told again, to varying degrees of success, although what "success" looks like is up to interpretation. This film, nominated for a number of Oscars this year, is the latest installment, an adaptation of Pablo Vierci’s 2009 book. This in itself is a new development--The standard text that has been used is Piers Paul Read's 1974 book Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors. The facts alone are terrifying. Most of the passengers onboard were killed instantly (the plane was, essentially, sliced in half by a mountain). After a number of days, the search was called off. The starving survivors resorted to cannibalism. They were buried under an avalanche at one point. Eventually, when the weather turned towards a thaw, two young members of the rugby team onboard set off west to try to reach Chile. They had no gear and no climbing experience. Against the odds, the two made it to civilization, and were able to guide rescue helicopters back to the crashed plane. Sixteen passengers were lifted out, alive. The story made international news. The take away message for me is about survival--it is a decision to survive, and once that decision has been reached, everything from then on flows from it. That alone is not enough, of course, and there is a miraculousness to the end result here, but the mental toughness the movie conveys as an essential ingredient is memorable as well as unsettling.

Last Night At The Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

This book won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2021 and deservedly so. It is set in San Francisco in the 1950s, and tells the story of 17-year-old Lily Hu, a Chinese American who begins to question her sexuality after developing a relationship with Kath, a white girl in her class. The stand out aspect of it is that the beautiful and complex writing dares to offer up comparisons to novels that are published for adult readers. Where it really stands out, though, is in its balance of both historical realism and hope, a balance we so rarely see in queer stories. In many ways, Lily’s story evokes the expected joys of YA romance novels. We see the trope of the complicated first kiss. We watch a friendship — rooted in teenage angst — blossom into something more romantic. The simplistic third-person figural narrative allows us to see into Lily’s mind, which questions the experience of falling in love. However, the placement in society and it's insistence on realism makes the possibility for a happy ending something one could only hope for rather than expected. Did it happen? I hoped that Lily and Kath would run off together, move into their own small one-bedroom in the city and spend all their nights at the Telegraph Club (the fictional lesbian bar that brings the girls together) with their new network of queer friends.

Poor Things (2023)

Let me start off by saying that in our household, one thinks this should and will take away all the big awards. On the other hand, one thought it was frankly pornographic and had trouble moving beyond that. I am somewhere in between. This is based on a book of the same title and owes a lot to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Everything is wonderfully bizarre, from the performances and dialogue to the production and costume design. And yet at its core, it is about the awkwardness of forging a real human connection. We want to know each other and make ourselves known. The figure at the film’s center, Bella Baxter, seeks to achieve enlightenment, become her truest self, and establish enriching relationships with people who genuinely love her and don’t just want to control her. The nuts and bolts of this story may sound familiar: A young woman embarks on an odyssey of exploration and finds her identity was within her all along. The execution, however, is constantly astonishing. It's Victorian London, and Bella lives in a tasteful townhouse with the mad scientist who also serves as her father figure, Dr. Godwin Baxter. She is the experiment and in themidst of being observed she is whisked away byDuncan Wedderburn, an obvious cad, but also hysterically funny, both a charismatic Lothario and a preening buffoon. He’s also unexpectedly sexy, and, in time, amusingly pathetic. All of the characters in this deliver outstanding performances and the production design is sumptuous. This is a must see of the Oscar season.

Kingdom of Characters by Jing Tsu

There are so many problems with Mandarin as a written language, and this is a book that chronicles the ingenious ways around that. In 1900, China was a great power in steep decline. More than 80% of the population could neither read nor write, including most women. Nobody except officials spoke a standard language, and the numerous varieties of Chinese made communication beyond regional borders impossible. that was not unique to them, but the real trouble lay elsewhere: in the Chinese writing system itself. Ancient, revered and the vehicle of a great civilization, the character-based script had downsides that were becoming more and more pressing in a technological age. The main thing to understand is that it’s nothing like an alphabet, which typically consist of 20 to 40 letters that represent single sounds. Such a low number makes for convenient keyboards. It also keeps code sets for telegraphy (such as morse) and computers sweet and simple. Chinese characters, on the other hand, represent meaningful syllables, and there are many thousands. Quite a challenge, then, to build a mechanical typewriter, or to remember the correct morse code for each one. Moreover, the letters of an alphabet have a fixed sequence, and any user can rattle them off. Characters have no such order. And while workarounds were developed for the sake of dictionaries and catalogues they were error prone and time consuming. So how to fix that? This chronicles the steps towards the language of modern China. It is fascinating.

Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning (Part One) (2023)

Part One? Is it really necessary to have a plot for an action adventure movie that cannot be resolved within one 180 minute movie> Apparently it is. Other than that this entirely met my expectations. One reviewer points out that Tom Cruise has been doing this series, which now numbers seven films, for 30 years. When he started, Bill Clinton was president. Once again, the ever determined IMF (Impossible Mission Force) agent Ethan Hunt is fighting against forces much greater than himself (including his own government) to keep the world from imploding. We get a mix of familiar characters—Ving Rhames’s computer hacker Luther Stickell, ever the voice of sturdy reason since the very first film; Simon Pegg’s technician and communications expert Benji Dunn, who has long since outgrown his initial role as comic relief into a reliable dramatic mainstay; and Rebecca Ferguson’s supposed deceased spy/potential love interest Ilsa Faust. There is the return of Vanessa Kirby’s nefarious arms dealer The White Widow and the introduction of a new villain, the brutal Gabriel (Esai Morales), who has a tragic link back to Ethan’s pre-IMF past. We also get a new character in Grace (Hayley Atwell), a professional thief who is Ethan’s antagonist, then his partner, then his antagonist again. All through out there are thrilling escape sequences that as always dazzle the viewer and there while there are many unexpected twists and turns in the action, the outcome is never in doubt.

Life From Scratch by Sasha Martin

I would say that the difficulty getting through this memoir outweighs its merits, for me at least. In the interest of full disclosure, I do not read food blogs in general and I have not read the author's blog, Global Table Adventure, which is very likely what led to her being able to get this memoir published. It does contain the inception of her blog, which was to cook a meal or an iconic dish from every country on the planet and write about it. A laudable feat which she was ill-prepared to accomplish (she did go to culinary school, but had little experience actually cooking) but managed to do a bang up job of it. The preamble to that is an accounting of her childhood, which is where the problem lies. She was born to a fly by night dad (who she never had much to do with and who died before that could change) and a mother who is an unattractive blend of an irrepressible, eccentric, free-spirited single mother and an unlucky, unhappy depressive burdened by the weight of family responsibilities who gives up custody of all five of her children. Three go with their father, who wisely moved away from the dumpster fire and two she gives to relative strangers who have money but poor parenting skills. The trouble is the forgiveness part of the memoir--in my mind to get forgiveness you have to ask for it, mean that you understand the heartbreak you have caused, but I see none of that here, and so in the end, I was dissatisfied with this. All told, it is well written.

Indiana Jones: Dial of Destiny (2023)

This is a bit of a conundrum. One reviewer noted that it is somehow both never boring and never really entertaining. It walks a line of modest interest in what’s going to happen next thanks in equal parts to the story transitions and the foundation of nostalgia that everyone brings to any sequel. The movie opens in the waning days of WWII. The Nazis, everybody's bad guys, have stumbled upon half of the Antikythera, or Archimedes’ Dial. This is an object based on a real Ancient Greek item that could reportedly predict astronomical positions for decades, but had none of the supposed powers it is embued with here. Flash forward to 1969. An elderly Indiana Jones is retiring from Hunter College, unsure of what comes next in part because he’s separated from Marion after the death of their son Mutt in the Vietnam War. He quickly gets reacquainted with Helena Shaw, the daughter of Basil and goddaughter of Indy. It turns out that Basil became obsessed with the dial after their encounter with it a quarter-century ago, Helena is committed to reunited the halves, some bad guys want it as well, and we are off to the races. It’s an alternating series of frustrating choices, promising beats, and general goodwill for a legendary actor donning one of the most famous hats in movie history yet again. It should be better. It could have been worse.

We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian

At it's heart this is a romance novel. It occasionally veers off its true course into politics, but mostly it stays on the core mission of being a feel good story. It belongs on the shelves of high school libraries, both to offer hope as well as perspective that while things are going in the wrong direction in Red State America, it has been worse. This is about two men who work for a newspaper in New York City in the late 1950s who fall in love. Nick Russo worked his way up the ranks to become a reporter for the Chronicle, a reputable progressive newspaper. As a gay man, he keeps his personal life private. Even outside of work, he’s cautious about his actions since he knows cops regularly throw people like him in jail. Andy Fleming is set to inherit the newspaper from his father, but first he has to get experience by working in the newsroom with Nick. Scatterbrained, amiable Andy becomes unlikely friends with grouchy Nick, but after Andy is jilted by his fiancée and moves in with Nick, their friendship deepens into more. The story is grounded in its time and place with specific New York references, including visits to Yankee Stadium, and thoughtful mentions of real historical heroes and queer media. The hardships queer people faced because of intolerance are present, yet love can be had.

Past Lives (2023)

This is writer Celine Song’s feature debut, and she took a page out of the Greta Gerwig playbook and did a semi-autobiographical story. This is a story of lost love and the lasting endurance of a childhood crush, the access to the past that is possible with digital and social media; the roads not taken, the lives not led, the unrelenting power of regret. It is also a movie that speaks to the migrant experience and the way this creates lifelong alternative realities in the mind: the self that could have stayed behind in the old country, versus the one that went abroad for a new future. The movie covers three different time periods that start when a 12-year-old Na-young is walking home after school with Hae-sung. She and her parents are leaving South Korea for North America. The next section happens 12 years later. Na-young has anglicized her name to Nora and is now a budding writer in New York. Hae-sung is trudging through his military service back in Seoul and studying engineering. The two connect via Facebook, and the beaming excitement of their conversations will have you thinking they might have a future. The movie screen is flooded with their happiness and a single unasked question: should they be together? Our hopes are then dashed, and their meeting when they are yet again 12 years older, and is a wrap up of where their relationship is and has been-- Na-young/Nora talks about the Korean concept of “in-yun”, the karmic bringing together of people who were lovers in past lives. This wonderful film suggests a secular, 21st-century version: the past lives of Na-young and Hae-sung are their childhoods, preserved and exalted in their memory and by modern communications. Past Lives is a great date movie, and a movie for every occasion, too.

The Unsettled by Ayana Mathis

This novel follows three generations in a family divided between the North and the South in 1980s America. It makes a strong case for the fact that the past can never truly be shaken off. The book follows three central characters across time and space: the emotionally delicate Ava, a young mother trying to create a sense of home for herself and her son in 1980s Philadelphia; her charismatic and formidable mother, Dutchess, who still lives in Ava’s tiny, all-Black hometown in Alabama; and Ava’s precocious son, Toussaint, who inexplicably heads back to Alabama when every other person of color is heading north. Toussaint is named for the formerly enslaved Haitian general who led the Haitian Revolution and became a hero in the African diaspora. Bonaparte itself is reminiscent of Alabama’s historic Africatown, founded by descendants of the stolen passengers on the slave ship Clotilda, and these historical references are sprinkled throughout. Ava is recruited for a commune of sorts in Philadelphia while Dutchess is trying to save Bonaparte from white supremacists seeking to displace her from her land, which has been occupied by formerly enslaved African Americans since Reconstruction. She is the stronger of the two, but the stories are interwoven and connected to American history, culminating with the 1985 bombing by the Philadelphia Police Department of the West Philadelphia rowhouse that was home to MOVE, a collective of radical Black activists. While the topics are heavy, the prose is light, and it is a very good read.

Rustin (2023)

This film acts as a a portrait of Rayard Rustin, the gay civil-rights activist, close adviser to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Pacifist, ex-con, singer, lutist, socialist — he had many lives, but he remains best known as the main organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The movie opens with Rustin losing an argument about marching at the Democratic National Convention in 1960. Rustin’s concept of the purpose of such a march would be to send a message to the party and it’s nominee that unless the Democrats take a stand against segregation, that “our people will not show up for them.” He gets soundly shut down, but it is an echo to the future, where a similar headline ran in the New York Times in January of this year. Don’t worry though, Rustin gets his day. The story picks up three years later shortly before Rustin begins organizing the 1963 march, shifting the movie into high gear with bustling characters, clacking typewriters and ringing phones. The movie has been criticized as flawed, but the scenes depicting the organizational skills required to pull off such a huge feat—250,000 people being transported to and from Washington, DC and fed in between without a whiff of trouble from the protesters is in itself quite remarkable and a joy to watch. This is primarily about Rustin as a political force, rather than his struggles as a mostly closeted gay man. The former has been largely forgotten and the later might explain why that happened.

Chain Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

I found this to be a tough read, not because I think it is wrong about anything, just that the brutality of it was too much for me. The book revolves around anti-Black violence (violence against clack people), the prison system, and racialized capitalism, all the while insistently reminding us of the blood we have on our hands for mostly ignoring it. The stories have an exaggerated quality, but only just, especially if we remember back to the Trump Administration and his words of violence against people of color and his expansion of private prisons for immigrants, where children were separated from their parents and place in cages--all verified--and then the allegations that these private prisons were involved in sexual abuse of children and then trafficking them is less well substantiated but entirely believable. If re-elected, the former president promises expansion of these prison camps. So, yes, the Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, which garners millions of dollars for the private prison industry, and centers on gladiatorial combat: CAPE participants belong to teams of inmates called Chains who fight to the death, is all too believable. The book also shines a light on corporations that profit from the multi-billion dollar prison industry and turns a blind eye to all the violence contained within.

Maestro (2023)

This is all about the legendary composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein--it is at the same time technically dazzling and emotionally frustrating. The script follows a well-trod, episodic path: This happened, then this happened, then this happened. Ultimately, it falls into the same trap as so many biopics, especially prestige pictures with major award aspirations: In covering a huge swath of an extremely famous person’s life, it ends up feeling superficial. This, for me, was at the heart of the frustration. And yet, you should see it. Yes, this sounds contradictory, but the film is so consistently spectacular from an aesthetic perspective that it’s worth watching. The cinematography, costumes, and production design are all evocative and precise as they evolve with the times over 40 some-odd years of Bernstein’s life. It makes you feel as if you’re watching a movie that was made in the ’40s and continues to do so with each era. The one thing that is missing, for me, is the music. While Bernstein’s music is woven throughout—including an amusing use of his “West Side Story” prologue during a period of marital discord—we never truly understand him deeply as a musician or a man. He’s a legend, a larger-than-life cultural force in mid-century America whose persona extends far beyond the rarefied circles of the classical music world. Maybe saving that for the next biopic.

Solito by Javier Zamora

If you are going to only read a book or two about the Central and South American immigrant experience, I would recommend this one, which details the author's story about leaving El Salvador largely alone (his grandfather travels with him to southern Mexico, but then leaves him with his coyote) as a nine year old boy to reach his parents, who had already illegally immigrated to the United States. It is absolutely not the most harrowing of accounts out there--for one thing he makes it, and for another he is not imprisoned (for long) nor is he raped or human trafficked, both of which are exceedingly common experiences for children who immigrate, either if they travel with family of if they travel alone. Women and girls use birth control for immigration because 85% will be raped and they do not want to bear the children of their rapists. The reason to choose this one is that the author is smart, he is a good writer, and he is worthy of our attention. Zamora is best known for his poetry, which shows in his gorgeous descriptions of nature, borne at least in part, from childlike wonder and attention to detail. The audiobook, narrated by Zamora himself, at times takes on the lilt of spoken word, a feature that makes the story more immersive and heart-wrenching. For those who don’t speak Spanish, the audiobook offers an opportunity to glean intent from tone and inflection rather than pausing to translate. Zamora’s English writing often adopts Spanish grammar in a hugely successful formal choice that emphasizes the link between language and identity.

Anatomy Of A Fall (2023)

This is such an unusual film. It takes place in the French Alps, and while we do not see much of the relationship, we hear quite a lot about it as the film unfolds. It opens with Sandra in the midst of an interview about her life as a famous author. As the interview goes on and gets a bit flirtatious, loud music begins to pump from upstairs. It’s her husband Samuel, playing an instrumental version of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” On repeat. And it gets louder and louder. He’s aggressively trying to derail the interview, and he succeeds. The interviewer leaves, as does their son Daniel takes the dog Snoop for a long walk. When he returns, he finds Samuel in the snow, a bloody wound in his head. Did he fall from the attic in which he was working? Did he jump? Or was he pushed? The film goes through the investigation into what happened, which reveals a lot of detail about the couple’s marriage. So it starts with a traditional mystery but becomes an analysis of a different kind of fall than the literal one at its center. It’s about the decline of a partnership and how often these marital falls can happen in slow-motion, over years of resentments and betrayals. At its center is Sandra who finds herself in the middle of a nightmare when a French court indicts her for the murder of her husband. The court room drama is intense, entirely foreign to an American audience—there is a lot of supposition and hypothesis rather than entirely fact based prosecution. The Napoleonic Code introduced the assumption that any suspect was innocent until proven guilty, but the ways to be proven guilty are quite different than an American court room drama. And all through it, their son hears it all. This is intense and impressive movie, one of the Oscar nominees not to miss.

The Town of Babylon by Alejandro Varela

Let me start out by saying that I enjoyed this book, because some of what I say about it might lead you to think otherwise. Andrés, the protagonist of the novel, is a gay Latino professor of public health who is on the rocks with his spouse who recently cheated on him but wants to repair the relationship. He decides to go back to his home town, Babylon, a fictional suburban community of an unnamed urban city, to support his sick father and caretaker mother. His parents, immigrants from El Salvador and Colombia, settled in the town to raise Andrés and his older brother, Henry. Against his better judgment, Andrés also decides to attend his 20-year high school reunion, which brings up all sorts of emotions and memories, not the least of which is growing up both gay and the child of brown-skinned immigrants. That is largely the subtext--the test is the reliving of previous relationships with men in high school who are now married with children. The subtitle of this would be "you Can't Go Home--But If You Do, Be Prepared". It is the emotional roller coaster you would expect.

Four Daughters (2023)

This movie, along with 20 Days in Mariupol, were short listed for an Oscar in two categories: Best International Movie and Best Documentary. That means that Tunisia and Ukraine picked these movies as their submission for consideration, which is a great feat for a documentary to achieve. They both made the nomination, but only in the documentary category. They are competing against each other, along with three other documentaries from countries across the globe. This is an intimate attempt to unravel what attracts women to ISIS and radical Islam. Olfa Hamrouni has four daughters: Eya, Tayssir, Ghofrane, and Rahma. The two eldest, Ghofrane and Rahma, disappeared from their home years ago, radicalized to run away and join ISIS. As Olfa and her youngest two daughters recount the memories of their lives before and after they left, they are also describing the realities for women who live in rigid patriarchal societies. Olfa, Eya, and Tayssir are around to tell their side of the story. Ghofrane and Rahma are not, so two actresses fill their space in the film. Together they dissect the worlds and histories that have built them and bring to the forefront of their minds the subconscious yearning for all women to experience control over their lives. The thing most memorable to me is that these women experience abuse of the kind that is for certain not acceptable religiously, but is so commonly reported in restrictive patriarchal societies, regardless of the reigious framework.

Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris

The 1660 Act of Oblivion of the title was the edict in the wake of the fall of the English Commonwealth that pardoned all those who took up arms against the king save those who had a direct hand in Charles I’s execution. Many of these so-called regicides are already dead – Cromwell himself had died two years prior to the Restoration in 1660. But one of the most prominent names on the decree that sealed Charles’s fate was that of Colonel Edward Whalley, a cousin and childhood friend of Cromwell who has fled to America with his son-in-law, another regicide, Colonel Will Goffe. The two high tail it out of England for America and are hunted men ever after. The book follow the turbulent paths of the fugitives in the Puritan communities of New England. Both have left families behind in England and their stories too are woven into the narrative, particularly that of Frances, Goffe’s wife. The men are not young – Whalley is in his 60s, Goffe in his early 40s – and the lives of fugitives are not easy. Goffe misses his young family, which he manages to keep in touch with but not enough to put them in danger. It is a good read especially if you are fond of historical fiction.

Killers Of The Flower Moon (2023)

This is a real horror film, all the worse because it is what really happened, and why. When the Osage discovered oil on their land, which they were 100% entitled to benefit from, white men conspired to not only swindle them out of their wealth, but also time and time again they killed them. The film maker is Marin Scorsese, and he has always been a master at telling a story, and the grimmer the story the better he is at telling it. He is not widely known for doing so concisely, but he does it well. The 3 ½-hour story of how white power brokers of the early 20th century reacted to the discovery of oil on the land of the Osage Native Americans touches on themes Scorsese has explored from the beginning: greed, murder, and the rewriting of history. Robert DeNiro is phenomenal as he manages to craft the portrait of a businessman who exudes a Harry S. Truman-sort of friendliness — while plotting to steal every possible penny from the Osage, no matter what the cost, up to and including killing off all the heirs. As his naïve but willing nephew, Leonardo DiCaprio gives a nuanced performance, even assimilating DeNiro’s trademark upside-down, sinister smile. Best of all is Lily Gladstone as DiCaprio’s proud, strong-willed Osage wife, although neither the movie nor the book really address what the attraction is for the Osage in all of this. A strange and dark period in history and one of the very few times that J. Edgar Hoover comes across as the good guy--he sends in the FBI to investigate when all the good old boys in local law enforcement are looking the other way to murder and mayhem on their turf.

A Living Remedy by Nicole Chung

This is an interesting memoir that explores the nature of family, grief, mourning, and memory. The author is a Korean-American who is given up by her birth parents and adopted by a white couple who live in southern Oregon, where she looks very different from everyone else. In her 30s, she was hit hard by loss: Both of her adoptive parents died within two years of each other, both of their deaths were complicated by a lack of health insurance and therefore a lack of access to health care. So in addition to the usual tropes on the meaning of home and family, she explores this difficult emotional terrain while also delivering a powerful social commentary that poses vital questions about access to medical care. The other thread is that of how one lives on. The loss of her parents drives home the idea that this is the end of their bloodline, because they have no biological children, and Chung’s own children are biologically connected to the birth parents who gave her up for adoption. She does find a biological sister, and they form a support network, but the idea that the people who raised her do not win in the genetic lottery, but the people who abandoned her do. It is a thoughtful memoir.

20 Days in Mariupol (2023)

This film was made by Ukranian AP reporters who were on the ground in Mariupol prior to the Russian invasion, and while the rest of the press fled (appropriately so, unfortunately), they stayed, never expecting to be witness to such atrocities that they saw but feeling like they needed to tell the story of what happened in their country. It is therefore about the first 20 days of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and it spares very few sensibilities. It goes on a short list of great documentaries that the viewer will never want to watch again and likely won't need to because some of the stories and the images that accompany them are so gruesome and the context so upsetting that they'll be burned into your memory. Although the movie begins at the end, it quickly transforms into a linear report of what the journalists saw. This movie is culled from approximately 25 hours of material that Chernov's team recorded on-site. The journalists start off being confident that civilian neighborhoods and public buildings will be spared, that notion is quickly abandoned—instead civilians are specifically targeted, and the last thing they chronicle before getting smuggled out of Mariupol is the bombing of a maternity hospital, with pregnant women and their children being killed by Russian bombs. A big part of what makes the movie so fascinating, valuable, and intense is how it lets certain events unfold in what feels like real-time, even though there are edits for the sake of compression and clarity. This is powerful as well as tolerable—it could have been so much bloodier and more gruesome, so while the narrative doesn’t spare us, a lot of the visuals are not the stuff of nightmares. Everyone should watch this.

Running Out by Lucas Bessire

The subtitle is "In Search of Water on the High Plains" and it is terrifying, from a whole bunch of different ways of looking at it. This is a poignant critique of dramatic groundwater decline in southwest Kansas and resistance to addressing it offers perspective on our failure to confront the change. The human-caused crises of declining aquifers and our heating climate are both rooted in a reality-denying world view. The region is blessed with vast underground waters from the ancient Ogallala Aquifer—an irregular spongelike formation of water harbored in pockets of sand and gravel—southwest Kansas again faces desiccation. Today, the deep well pumping for irrigation that began in the 1940s threatens to exhaust the non-renewable fossil water that gave farming a second chance after the Dust Bowl. The bottom line is that potable water is going to be hard to come by, and there are a lot of examples, including here, where the writing is on the wall, and yet, much like climate change, the powers that be have their heads in the sand. It is compounded by the fact that conservatives seem to do a lot less planning for the future than liberals do, and the affected area is a Republican stronghold. So basically they are screwed.