Released in 2013, Tula: The Revolt suffers from the weak dialogue, characterization, and bland cinematography. The film follows Tula, the leader of a slave uprising on the Dutch Colonial Island of Curacao. More so a character study rather than a historical epic, the film tends to focus on Tula’s actions and beliefs as the fearless […]

As both history and drama, Mary Silliman’s War satisfies many of the potential goals of historians and filmmakers.  The film is a unique look at the civilian experience in the American Revolution. The story follows Mary Silliman coming to terms with her standing on the war while putting every effort to return her husband home. […]

Amazing Grace portrays the life and work of the British politician and abolitionist campaigner William Wilberforce. The film concentrates on the period of the 1780s and the early 1800s, during which Wilberforce was involved in the movement to abolish the trade in enslaved Africans. The film features a number of high-profile British actors, including, Michael […]

It is Brazilian filmmaker Carlos Diegues’s gift to be able to create entrancing, sensual film epics from his country’s tumultuous experience. Diegues’s film Quilombo, a word referring to a community of free men, carries an echo of the original Quilombo dos Palmares, or Palm Nation, which was founded in the early 17th century by runaway […]

  Desmundo is a sensitive story of the plight of a young, orphaned woman who is destroyed by a heartless patriarchal society. Sent to Brazil by royal decree to marry a European colonist, upon her arrival Brazil Oribela reluctantly agrees to marry Francisco de Albuquerque. After her failed escape attempt she is alone and devastated, […]

In a conference room in southern California, producer Jerry Bruckheimer was pitching to the Walt Disney Company CEO (at the time) Michael Eisner a pirate film similar to those swashbuckling stories starring Burt Lancaster in the 1950s. That resulted in an irrevocable no from the head of the Disney company. But Bruckheimer persisted, saying the […]

Robert Egger’s debut film, The Witch, is made like a true veteran of horror. Set in Puritan New England, the film tells a story of a teenage girl named Thomasin and her family as they are tormented by a supernatural presence in the woods. Eggers builds tension with his use of negative space and a […]

In the 1990s, films about or containing indigenous people were relatively coaxed as stories that were sympathetic to the Native Americans. However, Hollywood understood that the white man could not be the bad guy, so they created the ‘good’ white man, one in touch with nature and the native Americans, and the bad white man […]

La Otra Conquista (The Other Conquest), directed by Salvador Carrasco, tells the story of the oppression of the Aztecs by the Spanish Conquistadors. Interestingly, the film is not from just one perspective, particularly the conquerors, which happens to be the case in most historical dramas but rather a film in which the oppressed are seen. […]

     1492: The Conquest of Paradise substantially misrepresents the events of Christopher Columbus, particularly his relationship with the natives, which tends to lean toward the high school textbook definition of the encounter. The film has a thin layer of protection in regards to its accuracy. It also has an undeveloped frame narrative that relies on the […]