Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) is widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time. Based on Mario Puzo’s best-selling 1969 novel, The Godfather depicts the rise and legacy of the Corleone family, a fictional Italian-American organized crime family led by Vito Corleone and the transformation of his son Michael from a reluctant outsider to a ruthless mafia boss. The film, which features an ensemble cast of American film icons, including Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan...
No Other Land (2024) is the Oscar-winning documentary that shows the brutal destruction of a Palestinian community in the occupied West Bank. Recorded between 2019 to 2023, the film tells the story of Basel Adra, a young Palestinian activist, who has been protesting the Israeli army’s destruction of homes and eviction of villagers. Adra is assisted by Yuval Abraham, a Jewish Israeli journalist. (They are also two of the film’s four directors). To Adra and other Palestinians, the Israeli army ...
The Return of Martin Guerre is a 1982 French historical drama directed by Daniel Vigne and staring Gerard Depardieu. The film describes the historical case of Martin Guerre who leaves his young wife Bertrande (Nathalie Baye) in the small French village of Artigat to fight in a war and travel. Around eight years later, the false Martin (played by Depardieu) returns to the village to resume his life. The false Martin (whose real name is Arnaud du Tilh) persuades the people in the village that h...
This episode examines The Conformist, Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1970 political drama set in 1930s Italy. The film centers on Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a mid-level Fascist functionary who is ordered to assassinate his former professor, an anti-fascist dissident living in Paris. The film, which includes many flashbacks to Clerici’s early life and decision to join the secret police, provides powerful and chilling insights into the psychology of conformism and fascism The film, widel...
Dark Waters (2019), directed by Todd Haynes, tells the real-life story of how a lawyer, Rob Bilott (Mark Ruffalo), waged a twenty-year battle to hold the DuPont corporation accountable for contaminating a local water supply with carcinogenic chemicals that poisoned tens of thousands of people. While Bilott is ultimately able to achieve some degree of compensation and justice for the victims, the film shows the challenges of litigating against a powerful company bent on denying responsibility ...
This episode examines I Just Didn’t Do It, a 2007 Japanese film written and directed by Masayuki Suo. In the film, 26-year-old Teppei Kaneko (played by Ryo Kase) is traveling to a job interview on a packed Tokyo commuter train when a 15-year-old school girl, who was standing in front of him on the train and whom Kaneko hardly noticed, wrongly accuses him of groping (chikan). Kaneko is arrested. He is advised by a lawyer to plead guilty and pay a small fine, after which he will be freed....
This episode looks at On the Waterfront, the celebrated 1954 American film directed by Elia Kazan and written by Budd Schulberg. The film stars Marlon Brando as the ex-prize fighter turned New Jersey longshoreman Terry Malloy. Malloy struggles to stand up to mob-affiliated union boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) after Malloy is lured into setting up a fellow dockworker whom Friendly has murdered to prevent him from testifying before the Waterfront Crime Commission about violence and corrupti...
Muhammad Ali is widely recognized as one of the greatest athletes of all-time and one of the most important figures of the 20th century. In addition to his long and celebrated career as a boxer and three-time heavyweight champion of the world, Ali changed the conversation about race, religion, and politics in America. Ali’s refusal to be inducted into the U.S. military during the Vietnam War on religious grounds—a profound act of resistance that resulted not only in Ali’s three-plus-year exil...
Syriana is a 2005 geopolitical thriller written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, based loosely on former CIA case officer Robert Baer’s memoir, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism. The film weaves together multiple storylines that involve a CIA agent, a U.S. energy analyst, a major transnational law firm, and an oil-rich Persian Gulf kingdom. It tackles complex themes of corruption, power, and terrorism from a distinctly post-9/11 vantage point. The fi...
The Goldman Case (Le Procès Goldman) (2023), is a French courtroom drama based on the real-life 1976 trial of Pierre Goldman, a far-left Jewish militant who was accused of multiple armed robberies and four murders during a holdup of a pharmacy in Paris. The film, which was directed by Cedric Kahn from screenplay by Kahn and Nathalie Hertzberg, stars Arieh Worthalter as Goldman and Arthur Harari as his lead lawyer, Georges Kiejiman. The film is not only a gripping account of this celebrated tr...
Mr. Untouchable, a 2007 documentary directed by Marc Levin, describes the rise and fall of former New York City drug kingpin, Leroy (“Nicky”) Barnes. In the early 1970s, Barnes formed “The Council,” an organized crime syndicate that controlled a significant part of the heroin trade in Harlem. Inspired by the Italian-American mafia, Barnes became one of the most powerful and notorious figures in New York City. A flashy and flamboyant fixture on the free-wheeling social scene of the period, Bar...
This episode looks at two films about the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s: First They Killed My Father (dir. Angelina Jolie), and The Gate (or Les Temps des Aveux) (dir. Régis Wargnier). First They Killed My Father is based on the memoir of Loung Ung, who was a five-year-old girl when the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia in 1975. Loung Ung was forced to flee Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital, with her family. Loung Ung’s parents were killed, and Loung Ung was separated from her siblings; aft...
Matewan (written and directed by John Sayles) dramatizes the events of the Battle of Matewan, a coal miners’ strike in 1920 in a small town in the hills of West Virginia. In the film, Joe Kenehan (Chris Cooper, in his film debut), an ex-Wobbly organizer for the United Mine Workers (also known as the “Wobblies”), arrives in Matewan, to organize miners against the Stone Mountain Coal Company. Kenehan and his supporters must battle the company’s use of scabs and outright violence, resist the com...
This episode looks at two films that examine the environmental disaster in Minamata, Japan: Noriaki Tsuchimoto’s documentary, Minamata: The Victims and the World (1971), and Andre Levitas’s Minamata (2020), a Hollywood feature film that tells the story through the famous American photographer, W. Eugene Smith. From 1932 to 1968, the Chisso Corporation, a local petrochemical and plastics maker, dumped approximately 27 tons of mercury into Minamata bay, poisoning fish and, ultimately, the peopl...
Black Hawk Down (2001) describes the plight of the U.S. crew of a Black Hawk helicopter that is shot down during the Battle of Mogadishu during the civil war in Somalia in October 1993. The battle resulted in the death of 18 American soldiers and hundreds of Somalis; it also prompted the U.S. withdrawal from Somalia after images of dead U.S. soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu by enraged Somalis were broadcast on American television. Directed by Ridley Scott from a book by...
A Separation (2011) is an Iranian drama written and directed by Asghar Farhadi. The film depicts the martial separation between a middle-class couple, Nadar (Peyman Moaadi) and his wife Simin (Leila Hatami). Simin wants the family to leave Iran to make a better life for their 10-year-old daughter Termeh, but Nadar does not want to leave his father who is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. So Nadar refuses to go and also refuses to give permission for their daughter to leave. The film also de...
This episode explores Bridge of Spies (2015), the Cold War legal and political thriller directed by Steven Spielberg (and written by Matt Charman, Ethan Coen, and Joel Coen). The film is based on the true story of American attorney James Donovan, who is assigned to represent Soviet spy Rudolf Abel after Abel is arrested in New York and prosecuted for espionage. The story takes a turn when American pilot Francis Gary Powers is captured by the Russians after his plane is shot down over the Sovi...
Chinatown (1974) is a neo-noir crime thriller, directed by Roman Polanski from a screenplay by Robert Towne. Based loosely on the Owens Valley water wars in Los Angeles from the early twentieth century, the film follows private investigator J.J. (“Jake”) Gittes (Jack Nicholson) as he pursues a series of leads that take him into the dark underbelly of power and corruption in 1930s Los Angeles. A woman claiming to be "Evelyn Mulwray” initially hires Gittes to follow her husband Hollis, whom she...
The Verdict (1982) tells the story of down-on-his-luck Boston lawyer, Frank Galvin (Paul Newman). Galvin had been a rising star until he was framed for jury tampering by a partner at his elite Boston law firm because he planned to expose the firm's illegalities. Galvin left the firm and his marriage and career fell apart. After Galvin hits rock bottom, his former partner and friend Mickey Morrisey (Jack Warden) sends him a medical malpractice case as a favor; the case involves a botched ...
Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007) centers on the plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I of England, the arrest and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (Elizabeth’s cousin), and King Phillip II of Spain’s attempt to topple Elizabeth and install a Catholic monarch on the English throne, which culminates in England’s defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. The film also portrays the complex emotional triangle involving Elizabeth, the English statemen, soldier, and explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, and Eliz...