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This article examines the films "Sully" and "Flight" and their portrayal of prevailing ideologies. Released during Barack Obama's presidency, both films focus on skilled pilots rather than passengers. "Sully" presents a white male hero who opposes regulation, while "Flight" features an African American antihero who finds redemption in jail. Both films affirm mainstream ideologies of individualism and redemption, while also highlighting the challenges and contradictions within the United States. The article argues that both films ultimately reinforce American nationalism and fail to address the social and political realities of their time. [Extracted from the article]

This study of British director Andrea Arnold and her award-winning films addresses auteur theory and its implications for woman filmmakers. I argue that the important difference between men and women in assuming the director's chair has been opportunity – and not a matter of essentialized gender differences. Pivoting to readings of Arnold's films, the analysis addresses the stylistic signatures and thematic motifs that characterize her feature films: Red Road (2006), Fish Tank (2009), Wuthering Heights (2011), American Honey (2016) and the short films Milk (1998) and Wasp (2003). I will discuss the implications of Arnold's film style vis-à-vis gender and the discourse on what constitutes social realist film in the U.K. As for thematic motifs, Arnold's films return to voyeurism, primal scenes and nature's persistence in seemingly denatured environments. The analysis further examines identities (marked by age, class and gender) as motifs that circulate through Arnold's work; a concern with identity that, nonetheless, refuses sentimentality and essentialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This investigation introduces a concept that bookends Herman and Chomsky's seminal theorization of flak. While both Kevlar and flak are deployed on contentious grounds, flak goes on the attack against ideological opponents whereas discursive Kevlar assumes a posture of defense. Kevlar is also distinct from media management strategies that coopt news media and create a Teflon coating around an administration. A case study of National Review's coverage of the first Trump impeachment maps out Kevlar tendencies. The investigation analyzes the array of Trump-affirming defenses that National Review marshaled during the impeachment. Despite its rarefied reputation, National Review's discourses were saturated with punditry that refused considered analysis; exceptions to the rule of Kevlar on behalf of Trump are also discussed. National Review's Kevlar campaign included pervasive attempts to delegitimize the Democratic Party, beginning with vagueness that glossed over the proximal cause of impeachment: Trump's extortive shakedown of Ukraine's government over congressionally-certified funds in an effort to seed news narratives favorable to Trump's 2020 campaign. National Review constructed further Kevlar defenses through "whataboutism" toward Democrats while the publication's misgivings about Trump were tempered by "confirming criticisms." One implication is that Trump's illiberal political project has been immeasurably assisted by elite ("tree-tops") rightwing platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michael Winterbottom 'Code 46', which within its scientific trappings deals with the problems brought on by globalization and biotechnology is also a commentary on the contemporary political and social situation. It is additionally demonstrated that 'Code 46' presents an implicit but forceful critique of the 'Narrative of Progress'.

Paul Thomas Anderson's first 3 motion pictures, 'Hard Eight,' 'Boogie Nights,' and 'Magnolia,' sympathetically portray marginal cultural figures. Anderson's cinematic style challenges dominant market ideology and patriarchal values, although these films do involve dominant and submissive relations and surrogate families.

The New York Times, in most of the over 300 articles published since 1993, often mentioned support for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) from the Clinton administration and the private sector. The Times's treatment of NAFTA opposition was often encased within personalized narratives that avoided substantive analysis.

The signature Scottish film Trainspotting (1996) and its continuation T2: Trainspotting (2017) vibrate with symptoms of the United Kingdom's post-1970s neoliberal economic program. Trainspotting channels neoliberal Thatcherite subjectivity in the relative eclipse of class consciousness and the ensemble of characters' concerns with (licit and illicit) consumption—albeit, with contradictory elements that implicate the film's highly stylized evocation of poverty and marginality. Twenty years later, in T2: Trainspotting, Edinburgh is constructed as transformed by neoliberalism's convulsions that also drive intensified globalization, manifested by the Bulgarian immigrant (quasi- femme fatale Veronika) and the film's tourism motif. T2 presents the ravages of the neoliberal regime on the ensemble of now middle-aged men (but not "phallically sufficient") men while also cross-examining the dead-end of Brexit populism. In its closing, T2 retreats from critique into traditionalism in answer to what troubles the U.K., 40 years after the launch of neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flak may be concisely defined as political harassment and is detrimental to community for its strained ethical posture, cynicism and corrosive impact on social and political bonds of trust. Following conceptualization of flak that differentiates it from scandal and activism, this investigation focuses on Project Veritas as its case study. Veritas is a right-wing flak mill that, using media, has set out to professionally damage people and organizations across almost a decade. The investigation telescopes in on two Veritas stunts that provoked reviews by the justice systems of California and Texas. In these cases, the California Attorney General and Texas special prosecutors delivered astringent criticisms of Verita's covertly-recorded "sting" videos, while largely or wholly exonerating their flak targets (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now [ACORN], Battleground Texas). Along with conceptualizing and critiquing flak, the investigation concludes with a call for news that extends beyond fact-checking and the limited, complacent techniques of objectivity in favor of more ambitious pursuit of truth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary Spanish horror auteur Jaume Balagueró's films are animated by thematic motifs that surround traditionally marginal 'Others.' This study focuses on Balagueró's more recent works, which include three films in the [·REC] series and Mientras Duermes. Specifically, this study reads Balagueró's film symptomatically, drawing on auteur theory and the horror genre as well as its relation to Spain. The psychoanalytically inflected concept of the Monster teases out the films' sociopolitical symptoms that surround traditionally marginalized people (immigrants, women, children). The 'archaic mother' and 'final girl' further flesh out the sociopolitical meanings around Balagueró's conjuring of zombies and viruses. The analysis also encompasses Balagueró's relation to the 'found footage' horror sub-genre and his male characters' lack of 'phallic sufficiency.' While Balagueró's work can be interpreted as tacitly right-wing (despite channeling strong doubts about male authority), the films present one moment within a larger sociopolitical national discourse. That is, Balagueró's films do not perform a simple 'mirror' function - even as they are deeply embedded in Spain today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An analysis of Alex Cox's 1986 independent film, Sid & Nancy, examines the strains between allusion and illusion and discusses the early punk era to which they belonged.

Following the argument that the very act of reporting shapes the raw material of news, this investigation examines “Us” and “Them” dichotomization as it is routinely insinuated into news narratives. Specifically, this investigation analyzes 215 articles from the “hard news” and commentary sections of the International Herald Tribune (IHT), the globally circulating, hard-copy emissary of The New York Times. Us/Them dichotomization pervasively structures news narratives in IHT with the United States cast as “Us” and the rest of the world largely constructed as “Them”. Whereas We are orderly, harmonious, and steeped in democratic mystique in IHT's news narratives, They are characterized by constant struggles for unity and all shades of illiberalism (e.g., Statism, corruption, mayhem). These constructions mutually reinforce each other when they appear side by side on newsprint, day after day. Particular emphases in the analysis concern coverage of China, Russia, the coup in Egypt, the “world historic” gravitas of Barack H. Obama, and the aftermath of Edward Snowden's whistle-blowing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]