COUNTERPUNCH, MAY 1, 2020
When New York movie theaters closed down on March 15th, so did invitations to the press screenings needed for my reviews. Unlike other film critics, I don’t cover Hollywood films. My beat consists of documentaries, foreign-language and American independent films that get screened in places like the Film Forum and Cinema Village in New York, the Laemmle in Los Angeles, et al.
This month, while Hollywood lies dormant and the entertainment press troubles itself over its impending doom, there are a number of films that came my way that CounterPunch readers should find interesting. While I have referred to them in the past as VOD, the film distributors, who are connected to the art theaters, have come up with a new term to describe the films under consideration below. They are part of the Virtual Cinema world, a term I guess that is meant to evoke virtual reality.
Whatever you call it, it is an opportunity to see leading edge cinema unlike most of the escapist fare featured on Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, et al. Indeed, they are far more relevant to the current pandemic crisis insofar as they imagine that another world is possible.
Films covered in review:
Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist 
Beanpole played in Chicago, Feb. 28-March 5,’20. Kathleen Sachs wrote a review in the Chicago Reader, Feb.25, with some interesting remarks on Balakov.
Comment by Peter Byrne — May 1, 2020 @ 4:37 pm