Arts

Exploitation in Storytelling: The Conditions of Manga Artists in Japan
Anime and Manga are popular forms of storytelling from Japan that are becoming more and more popular in the West. Here we observe the labor conditions of Manga authors themselves as well as the general labor conditions in Japan.
Carmin Maffea
August 14, 2023Turning the Greatest Anti-war Novel Ever into Bourgeois Propaganda
All Quiet on the Western Front won four Oscars, and it’s not hard to see why. The production — depicting the horrors of World War I — is spectacular. Yet the producers did not at all understand Erich Maria Remarque’s novel. Spoilers follow.
Nathaniel Flakin
March 16, 2023Five Years after Ursula K. Le Guin’s Death, We Need Her More Than Ever
Ursula K. Le Guin tended the embers of revolt in a new age of imperialism and counterrevolution. She tasked us with stoking them into a blaze.
Jason Koslowski
January 22, 2023Glass Onion: Liberalism’s Dream
Netflix’s new movie, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, is the ruling class’s dream about itself.
Jason Koslowski
January 4, 2023Selling Suffering and the Spectacle of Blackness in Nope
In his new movie, Jordan Peele examines the ways in which the capitalist system forces us to place our lives in jeopardy and sell our own suffering. Spoiler alert!
Emma Boyhtari
October 14, 2022Women Directors Have Made Some of the Greatest Films Ever. Here Are 11 You Might Not Know.
Women have been important contributors to the development of cinema from the beginning, but films by women directors have often been underappreciated and overlooked. Here we present some of the greatest films made by women from around the world to enjoy during Women’s History Month and throughout the year.
Shalon van Tine
March 3, 2022‘Don’t Look Up’: Why the Climate Crisis Isn’t a Comet, and Why That Matters
'Don’t Look Up' presents an opportunity to reignite the climate movement. That means we have to look beyond its creators’ calls for individual action.
Emma Lee
January 1, 2022The New Matrix Film Could Have Been a Brilliant Satire — Instead We Get Corporate Slop
Matrix: Resurrections is a profoundly unnecessary film that exemplifies the blandness of Hollywood in the age of capitalism’s decline.
Nathaniel Flakin
December 31, 2021Against Subtlety: ‘Don’t Look Up’ Is the Movie for Our Moment
Don’t Look Up is The Movie about what it feels like to be alive right now. It’s a masterpiece of 21st-century climate anxiety and, more importantly, class rage.
Enid Brain
December 30, 2021‘Dune’ Is Anticolonialism as Imagined by Megacorporations
The new film based on Frank Herbert's epic is full of anti-imperialist imagery, but it amounts to nothing more than a Hollywood version of colonial resistance struggle.
Lily Cichanowicz
October 21, 2021