No Other Land (2024)

The documentary that could not get a U.S. distributer (it is a political hot potato) and few interviews (one of the directors is Palestinean) won the Best Documentary at this year's Oscars, as well as at many other award ceremonies. It is directed by the courageous Palestinian-Israeli filmmaking collective of Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor and it is compassionate, thoughtful, and even revolutionary. It is a devastating profile of the community of Masafer Yatta (a group of Palestinian villages in the West Bank constantly on the brink of destruction), the people living in perpetual uncertainty, and the way state violence consumes entire generations. This battle is mostly seen through the young eyes of Basel. A 28-year-old Palestinian activist, filmmaker and journalist, he has spent all of his life living in the shadow of annihilation as the documentary captures how the Israeli military routinely destroys their homes with bulldozers. In every shot where we see these convoys of destruction approaching on the horizon, there is a sense of grim familiarity and impending loss seen in the faces of the people we cut to. It’s a compassionately constructed film — it never looks away from the grimness.

Bright I Burn by Molly Aitken

I loved this book, which while set in the 13th century, it feels familiar on a number of levels. Alice Kyteler was born in 1280 in County Kilkenny, Ireland. Her father was an innkeeper and a money lender. As the only child, she was schooled in these matters, which was most unusual for a woman at the time. Of course, she also was expected to marry --- and marry she did, early and then often in her remarkably long life. Alice is based on a real historical figure, but her voice and the more intimate details of her life are fictional. While Alice was prepared by both her parents with skills to successfully navigate life, Alice was abused by her father and as a result she was driven to murder him, using poisons that she learned from her mother. Her four husbands also died in turn, some under suspicious circumstances. It was these deaths, along with the growing scrutiny of Alice's success financially, that led to her being tried and convicted as a witch, the first woman in Ireland to have done so. The attitudes of those around her to her remarkable success in life seem very similar to modern attitudes, leaving me with feeling like while centuries have passed, the barriers remain.

The Nickel Boys (2024)

The book is brutal to read and I kind of dreaded watching the movie because of the intense brutality of it, literally killing black children sadistically and repeatedly, and I just wasn't sure how I could watch it unfold in living color. I was right to brace myself for the impact, it wasn't what I was expecting either. I did not know this when I watched it, but the director's previous feature was the Oscar-nominated 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening. As documentaries go, it was a lightning-strike cinematic discovery. With a certain kind of fragmented, intimate lyricism, it immersed the viewer in the details of Black life in a small Alabama town, gradually centering on a few years in the lives of two teens. It was impactful, truthful, and horrible without being overly gruesome. This one is quite different, but has some sameness as well. The stories of two Black teens confined to a brutal Florida reform school, is told from the point of view of his protagonists (which I learned from a reviewer that this is called the subjective camera, and people almost uniformly dislike it, so it is risky, but I thought it was successful in conveying the pain as well as engendering sympathy). Whitehead’s novel is sad and infuriating. It starts off as the story of Elwood Curtis, a precocious introvert growing up in a rural town in the Jim Crow–era South. He winds up at Nickel Academy after he hitches a ride with the wrong man on what would have been his first day taking classes at a nearby college. He meets the laid-back cynic Turner, a Houston native who’s on his second stint at Nickel and has few illusions about anyone’s chances of getting out of this nightmare through official means. The filme slips back and forth between their time at Nickel and the present day, and between the optimistic Elwood and the realistic Turner--the so-called reform school was modeled after the real-life Dozier School for Boys, a monstrously abusive institution from whose grounds nearly a hundred burials have been discovered in recent years, and for me, knowing the real life ending for so many who were there makes it all the more horrible to watch unfold, but this story is beautifully told in this film.

A Wilder Shore by Camille Peri

Robert Louis Stevenson was not a man who wrote about women--his novels contain few female characters and so it is hard to know how much he understood about women—but there is no doubt about the main influence on the second half of his life was his wife, and this book delineates the how of it, if not the why. Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne was a married woman from Indiana when Stevenson met her in 1876. He was 25, she 10 years older than he with a lot more life experience. At that time she was a mother of two, and soon to be separated from her genial, improvident philanderer of a husband, Sam. He went to a Nevada silver mine, she to an artists’ colony in France--he was more of a con artist, a seeker of fortune, and she was more of a seeker of knowledge. Stevenson courted her at Fontainebleau, near Paris, and he could not have been more different from the man she left behind. He had talent written all over him, for one thing. Among other qualities that appealed to Fanny and her children were Stevenson’s integrity and his irrepressible desire for adventure, in defiance of poor health. The two of them sought adventure in their time together, and that spirit is evident in the writing that he left behind. This is an unusual love story and gives a window into who the author was.

Alien: Romulus (2024)

I watched this in my quest to watch every Oscar nominated movie this year--and I have to say that while the Visual Effects category is almost always filled with movies that I would not otherwise watch, that is the whole point of the undertaking, to stretch yourself with a list that has been curated by people who really care about this stuff and then try to see what it is that made them choose each one. Sometimes--not this time, but sometimes I find a real gem, and so the quest continues. One review I read started off with: "An amazing addition to the Alien universe." This is one clue as to why this did not resonate with me, because my knee jerk thought is "What Alien universe?" So clearly I do not get it. My first thought as the movie got underway was that this is the third horror movie I had watched in the 2025 Oscar watch party. A personal high, I think, and not a genre that I like either. My spouse and one of my kids watched The Substance without me and my offspring noted "Mom is *not* going to want to watch this." Right on brand for me--this one was kind of an action adventure horror movie, and I will say that the actors gave it their all. The movie delivers a gritty experience reminiscent of the original film, with impressive world-building and and majorly creepy villians that make its nomination in this category well-deserved.

Stolen Pride by Arlie Russell Hochschild

In the week after the 2024 election I was having dinner with long time friends and two of their children. One of them is an elected legislator in a red state and the other worked for a democratic candidate in a different red state. The former was sanguine about the results, noting the inflation economy is a predictable barrier to overcome, but the other was adamant that we need to understand why people voted for an outspoken racist who is clearly out for both revenge and personal gain. This book seeks to answer some of those questions. He spent a lot of time in Kentucky in areas that have diminished opportunities, especially for those without an education beyond high school, poverty, and that are predominantly (94%) white. He talked to mostly white men and found that they have pretty fragile senses of self-worth. The availability of good paying jobs (mostly mining jobs) was a source of pride for them, and as coal's star is setting, the lack of adequate paying jobs is a source of shame for them. Then comes the hard to fix part--they do not blame corporations for this shift, or climate change, but rather seemingly they fix their anger on whoever the GOP tells them is to blame. So while making a massive effort to engage this population that votes against their self interest makes sense, it seems like the appeal to their injured masculine pride has won the day. This is age old, but worsening as the economy shifts and substance abuse worsens, and those who support candidates who would help change the tide have zero interest in them because of their voting record. That is the damage done, though, with no insights on how to repair it.

The Girl With The Needle (2024)

This is the Oscar nominee for Best International movie, which is from Denmark. To say that it is on the dark side is to ill prepare the viewer for what is to come. This is a relentlessly grim movie, one that serves as a reminder that women on the fringe of the economic ladder have been marginalized for generations, around the world. I did not know this, but read in a review that it is based on the true story of a Danish serial killer named Dagmar Overbye, which only becomes apparent later. What is apparent is that the movie becomes almost numbing in its brutality. The main character is Karolina, who is being evicted from her apartment for non-payment of rent when the movie opens. Her husband is a soldier in WWI and she has not heard from him, and what she makes at her job as a seamstress. Things go from bad to worse when her husband returns severely disfigured as well as psychologically damaged from the war, and she is abandoned by her wealthy lover when she becomes pregnant and his mother doesn't approve. She meets up with a woman who offers to help her find a home for her baby. She never quite turns the corner to a better life, but her journey is unexpected.

The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota

I read this book as part of my immersion program on the cusp of a winter trip across Southern India. It is a book divided-- In the first half, the book alternates between shorter chapters about the four characters in Sheffield, England and then novella-length sections about each of them prior to their arrival there. The first story is that of Tochi, a chamar or “untouchable” in an India of heightened Hindu nationalism where a man risks everything by merely being perceived as trying to break out of the strict rules of caste. The following novella-length section bringing together the tales of Avtar and Randeep reveals why their relationship is caught somewhere between acquaintances and friends. Former neighbors, whose lives in the world of the middle class in India prove to be precarious, they are propelled, respectively, by love and shame to travel to England in search of work. The final story is that of Narindar, a devout British Sikh woman for whom goodness is at the heart of religious practice. The second half of the novel moves forward, as the characters’ relationships with each other grow more tangled, and their situations more fraught. Tabloid phrases such as “scam marriages”, “illegal workers”, “abuse of student visas” are placed within the context of lives filled with love and desperation. There are quite a few questions raised, and most of them are left to the reader to sort out, but the groundwork is laid, and this is a thought provoking book.

The Six Triple Eight (2024)

There is a lot to like about this movie, especially if you are a bit of a Tyler Perry fan--I admit that there is a lot of melodrama in his writing and directing, but he is a star when it comes to telling stories about African-Americans and his actors are largely black, which I appreciate. This is based on a true story of the women of the all-Black 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion who faced ruthless racism while serving during World War II. It is told through the eyes of Lena Derriecott King, a woman who joins up after her true love is killed in action, and Major Charity Adams, her commanding officer. The situation is this--the black regiment is marginalized in blatantly racist ways--but then Mary McLeod Bethune, a close personal friend of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, took up their cause and volunteers them for a Herculean task. Mail was not leaving the front and it wasn't being delivered there either and it was easy to relate to the idea that it was causing morale problems for the troops and a lot of anxiety for loved ones at home. Ms. Bethune, who was able to advance the stature of African American women through her friendship with Roosevelt, put forth that the 6888 could do the task of sorting the mail--which they did, despite enormous obstacles, both real and manufactured. They were the only black women to serve in Europe during the war, and the end of the movie shows a number of them who are still alive today--at 100 years old, more or less. This is nominated for an Academy Award in the Original Song category, and you have to watch to the end to listen to it.

The Anarchy by William Dalrymple

This is the unmasking of what the East India Company was all about. I must say I didn't really understand the in's and out's of it, and I think that was a deliberate masking of the truth on the part of the Brits themselves. This is an attempt to set the record straight. The British company arrived on the scene in the early 1600's at a time when the Mughals were in charge--they had the largest standing army in the world and it wasn't until there was a waning of that power that there was any chance of taking charge. The tide starts to turn with Robert Clive, once celebrated as “Clive of India”, who enters here as a juvenile delinquent from Shropshire who arrived in Madras in 1744 as an 18-year-old clerk, but found his vocation as a thuggish fighter in the company’s small security force. At the Battle of Plassey of 1757, which won the company control of Bengal and which generations of British schoolchildren would memorize as a glorious imperial victory, the real story was substantially more complicated. The volatile, widely disliked Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daula, had made an intractable enemy of Bengal’s Marwari bankers, the Jagat Seths, who saw better prospects in investing with the East India Company than supporting him. The Jagat Seths offered the company substantial amounts of money to unseat Siraj ud-Daula and install a compliant collaborator in his stead. Clive, who stood to make an immense personal fortune, gladly accepted. Plassey was in truth a “palace coup”, executed by a greedy opportunist, won by bribery and betrayal. The rest is a very violent and bloody history, where the East India Company committed hundreds of atrocities and plundered the wealth of a nation--all as a corporation, not as a government . There was an attempt to hold the East India Company responsible for their actions, with the trial of Warren Hastings, which through court testimony brought the practices of the company to light--and while he was eventually acquitted, his reputation, and that of the company, were tarnished. It is a tale of corporate greed, no accountability, and while the British control of India became a government run operation, it did not start out that way. It is a fascinating, if grim, read.