Dead End Drive-in: a clever and political genre movie
Brian Trenchard-Smith’s film Dead End Drive-in is a low-budget action movie centred on a teenage couple trapped in a drive-in cinema – but it is much more than that. It’s one of the most political films I’ve ever seen.
Subversion on screen: a tribute to the film maker George Romero
In 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive, the assassination of Martin Luther King and the stand of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the Olympic Games in Mexico, a little-known filmmaker from Pittsburgh made a movie The Night of the Living Dead. Its central theme was of a smart, assertive, compassionate black man surviving the zombie apocalypse, only to be murdered by nervous whites the next morning.
Fifty years of Star Trek – a socialist perspective
Star Trek has reached its 50th anniversary. But does it really offer a picture of a brave new world? Sasha Simic weighs up the sci-fi classic
From Soylent Green to The Hunger Games: why is the future on film so grim?
As the latest Hunger Games film nears its release date Sasha Simic examines the grim visions of the future on film and why the cinema offers such a harsh outlook
October 2015 Tracks of the Month: Birth of a Nation
Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.
Lanzmann’s films on the Holocaust
Today is the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany.