GOOD VIBRATIONS (2012) Are teenage dreams so hard to beat? The story of music legend Terri Hooley, a key figure in Belfast’s punk rock scene. Hooley founded the Good Vibrations store from which a record label sprung, representing bands such as The Undertones, Rudi and The Outcasts. Lisa Barros D'Sa and Glenn Leyburn have directed a terrifically warm and entirely lovable movie about Terri Hooley, Belfast's chaotic godfather of punk. In the 70s, Hooley defied the miseries and ugly tribalism of the Troubles by opening a record shop in the middle of the city, quixotically called Good Vibrations. This tiny...

LA BRUNE ET MOI (1980, France, 50 min.) Considered by many who lived through it to be the high point of rock 'n' roll in France, the years 1977 - 1982 saw a burst of creative angst in Gallic music. Bands like Métal Urbain, The Dogs, Bijou, Asphalt Jungle and Ici Paris heard the noise going on in England and quickly echoed back. Unlike in the sixties where France was a good 5 years behind the U.S.A. these musicians were concurrent with The Dead Kennedy's, X and The Germs. Unfortunately though, punk was a subculture in France and insufficient record...

The Dupes (Al-makhdu'un) 1972 Set in the 1950s, The Dupes traces the destinies of three different men brought together by their dispossession, their despair and their hope for a better future. The protagonists are Palestinian refugees who are trying to make their way across the border from Iraq into Kuwait, the 'Promised Land,' concealed in the steel tank of a truck. Representing different dimensions of the Palestinian experience, each one believes he can make a new life for himself, but as the film’s title suggests, their flight is no solution. One of the first Arab films to address the Palestinian...

WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) What does the energy harnessed through orgasm have to do with the state of communist Yugoslavia circa 1971? Only counterculture filmmaker extraordinaire Dušan Makavejev has the answers (or the questions). His surreal documentary-fiction collision WR: Mysteries of the Organism begins as an investigation into the life and work of controversial psychologist and philosopher Wilhelm Reich and then explodes into a free-form narrative of a beautiful young Slavic girl’s sexual liberation. Banned upon its release in the director’s homeland, the art-house smash WR is both whimsical and bold in its blending of politics and sexuality....

The movie version of The East is Red is a filmed adaptation of a stage performance, although the two versions aren’t entirely similar. Some scenes from the stage were cut, but all six of the story’s main sections do appear, each of them depicting the history of the Communist Party. In the opening scene, Chinese workers rebel against a European-looking man with a whip, symbolizing opposition to Western imperialism. The founding of the CCP leads to a dramatization of the Guomindang’s massacre of Shanghai Communists, then the Communists’ reprisal in the Nanchang Uprising. The other key events are just as...

Matewan (1987) Written and directed by John Sayles, this wrenching historical drama recounts the true story of a West Virginia coal town where the local miners’ struggle to form a union rose to the pitch of all-out war in 1920. When Matewan’s miners go on strike, organizer Joe Kenehan (Chris Cooper, in his film debut) arrives to help them, uniting workers white and black, Appalachia-born and immigrant, while urging patience in the face of the coal company’s violent provocations. With a crackerjack ensemble cast—including James Earl Jones, David Strathairn, Mary McDonnell, and Will Oldham—and Oscar-nominated cinematography by Haskell Wexler, Matewan...