Following the announcement of this year’s Academy Award nominations on January 31, one commentator noted, “Most of the films seeking the top prize come from outside the major studio system, and are heavy on social messages”; another observed that “low-budget alternative films dominated” the nominations. Taking into account that Hollywood’s notion of “low-budget” and “alternative” may be somewhat skewed, that can’t be all bad, can it?

Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg, written by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, based on Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team, by George Jonas

Munich, Steven Spielberg’s latest work, concerns itself with the efforts of a team of Israeli agents to track down and kill Palestinian leaders allegedly responsible for masterminding the hostage-taking episode at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich that resulted in the deaths of eleven Israeli athletes. As the bloody act of revenge proceeds, the team members grow increasingly skeptical about the morality and efficacy of their operation.

Ousmane Sembène, Senegalese author, scenarist and film director, has been making films for over 40 years. New Yorker Video has recently released two of Sembène’s earliest and most remarkable cinematic works on DVD: one short film, Borom Sarret (1963), and Black Girl (1966), which also holds the distinction of being Africa’s first feature film.

In their attempts to argue that Marx is ‘scientific’, by which they mean respectable and elevated above the comprehension of ordinary mortals, academic Marxists ignore his frequent use of Charles Fourier, the French utopian theorist and writer of biting satires and crazy proposals…

Soviet era posters on display at London’s Tate Modern museum are a powerful record of how the bureaucratic degeneration represented by the rise of Stalinism destroyed the young workers’ state founded on the basis of Bolshevik internationalism.

The exhibition charts the change from vivid and inspirational posters drawn in a multitude of styles in the immediate post-revolutionary period to dull and hackneyed socialist realist lithographs of the Stalinist regime.