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Joanne Laurier

Tomatometer-approved critic
Biography:

Born in Massachusetts, a regular contributor on film and art to the World Socialist Web Site since 2000.

Publications:

Reviews

Movies 온라인카지노추천 Shows
Borderland: The Line Within (2024) “The film is an incisive exploration of the “border industrial complex,” a term used to describe the profitable systems, worth billions of dollars annually, built around capturing, incarcerating and deporting immigrants. ” – World Socialist Web Site Apr 24, 2025 Full Review The Room Next Door (2024) 81% “Does being able to die at one’s own hand at the moment one chooses really seem the most pressing issue in America or the world today?” – World Socialist Web Site Apr 24, 2025 Full Review Hard Truths (2024) 95% “The film is deliberate, conscious of its aims, but also contains the contradictoriness and unexpectedness of real life.” – World Socialist Web Site Apr 24, 2025 Full Review Alam (2022) 100% “Alam is a sincere and honest film. Its thoughtful presentation of its central character’s dilemma—the desire to live a normal life under conditions of perpetual repression and violence ...—has a resonance beyond the borders of the Middle East.” – World Socialist Web Site Jan 13, 2025 Full Review H2: The Occupation Lab (2022) “In their 2022 documentary H2: The Occupation Lab, Israeli filmmakers Idit Avrahami and Noam Sheizaf detail the impact of fascistic Jewish settlers, backed by the Israeli military, on the Palestinian city of Hebron and its population.” – World Socialist Web Site Jan 13, 2025 Full Review Where Olive Trees Weep (2024) “Where Olive Trees Weep is a sensitively and movingly made film about the plight of the Palestinian people, filmed in 2022 in the occupied West Bank, directed by Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo” – World Socialist Web Site Jan 13, 2025 Full Review The Goat Life (2024) 78% “The filmmakers in this case have confronted an immense injustice and tragedy of our time head-on and deserve full credit.” – World Socialist Web Site Oct 4, 2024 Full Review One Life (2023) 90% “For filmmaking to portray the barbarism of fascism in all its aspects therefore retains its burning relevance and necessity.” – World Socialist Web Site Aug 26, 2024 Full Review Thieves Like Us (1974) 81% “The film was made at a time of upheaval and convulsion, even chaos, qualities that the master improviser Altman thrived on. The period’s rebelliousness undoubtedly played a role in making Thieves Like Us one of his most compelling films.” – World Socialist Web Site May 30, 2024 Full Review Empty Nets (2023) 100% “Empty Nets is an affecting film. Cinematographer Ashkan Ashkani adds to the strong, suggestive atmosphere, contrasting the natural turbulence of the ocean to the violence of an irrational social order.” – World Socialist Web Site May 30, 2024 Full Review The Teacher (2023) 82% “The immense moral and political pressures brought to bear on the Palestinian population ... bring to mind similar strains and terrors for people in those portions of Europe and elsewhere under Nazi rule during World War II.” – World Socialist Web Site May 30, 2024 Full Review The Zone of Interest (2023) 93% “The Zone of Interest is a misguided and disoriented work, one that conceals the concrete historical circumstances that produced someone like Höss, and therefore weakens the ability of the population today to defeat and destroy the fascist menace.” – World Socialist Web Site Mar 8, 2024 Full Review American Fiction (2023) 93% “In the end, what the film counterposes to “black trauma porn,” as Monk refers to it, which coins fortunes from backwardness, is a bland middle class household full of doctors.” – World Socialist Web Site Feb 23, 2024 Full Review The Holdovers (2023) 97% “A pleasant, digestible film and the three leads are appealing. ... It is not a genuine advance for the director. The comedy-drama’s general trajectory and ultimately heartwarming denouement are set out for all to see virtually from its opening sequence.” – World Socialist Web Site Feb 2, 2024 Full Review The Present (2020) “The short film treats the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, focusing on the brutal checkpoint system.” – World Socialist Web Site Nov 2, 2023 Full Review El Conde (2023) 83% “Chilean director Pablo Larraín ... has made a horror-satire, the award-winning El Conde (The Count), which imagines Pinochet as a 250-year-old vampire. It is a complicated, dark, disturbing film about fascism, bourgeois corruption and counterrevolution.” – World Socialist Web Site Nov 2, 2023 Full Review Barbie (2023) 88% “Barbie is strained and smug without much wit. One should bear in mind that Mattel, with revenue of $42 billion in 2022, partnered with Warner Bros. on the making of the movie. ” – World Socialist Web Site Jul 29, 2023 Full Review Guantanamo Diary Revisited (2022) “In Guantánamo Diary Revisited, Slahi—who endured countless forms of abuse at the hands of the nefarious “special projects” team between 2002 and 2004—and the filmmakers attempt to track down his torturers in the military and intelligence apparatus.” – World Socialist Web Site Jul 20, 2023 Full Review King Coal (2023) 89% “The present actuality of mine closures, devastated towns, COVID pandemic and a drug epidemic cannot be scrubbed away with fetching façades and charming dance moves.” – World Socialist Web Site May 27, 2023 Full Review Bad Press (2023) 100% 2/4 “Rebecca Landsberry-Baker and Joe Peeler’s Bad Press opens with the revealing fact that only five of 574 sovereign Native American nations legally guarantee freedom of the press,” – World Socialist Web Site May 27, 2023 Full Review Daughter of Rage (2022) 57% 2/4 “To borrow a phrase, ideas never lead beyond the status quo but only beyond the ideas of the status quo (and sometimes not even that). Baumeister’s film is gut-wrenching, but the viewer is left hanging because of a lack of context.” – World Socialist Web Site May 27, 2023 Full Review Babylon (2022) 57% “Babylon is ambitious, and costly—and almost a complete shambles. It is badly constructed and unconvincingly done, providing little or no insight into the film industry, culture in general or American society.” – World Socialist Web Site Mar 24, 2023 Full Review The Swimmers (2022) 82% “The Swimmers indelibly depicts the horrors of the refugee crisis. ... The film makes no attempt, however, to explore why millions of Syrians, for example, have been forced to flee their homeland or to name those responsible.” – World Socialist Web Site Mar 24, 2023 Full Review Living (2022) 96% “The film’s thrust is humane, but its themes and satirical efforts are somewhat diluted and diffuse.” – World Socialist Web Site Feb 26, 2023 Full Review Tantura (2022) 94% “Given the current official state of Israeli politics, with a new coalition government that includes a fascist party, Schwarz’s effort took some courage.” – World Socialist Web Site Jan 15, 2023 Full Review
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