** "I can't do something that I don't believe in. But it's always been a struggle, I suspect it always will be - surviving artistically and persistently outside the mainstream..."

Benediction: A Conversation With Terence Davies. The esteemed veteran director phones in from London to discuss his latest dramatic feature about the turbulent life and times no less relevant today, of acclaimed World War I British anti-war poet, Siegfried Sassoon.

A complex writer and human being who refused to continue fighting in the war, which led to his detention in a mental hospital, Sassoon emerged as a leading anti-war voice of his time - broken by the horrors of war and consumed in his life journey on a quest for salvation, for benediction.

Terence Davies, a novelist as well, is the director of the biographical features Distant Voices, Still Lives, The Long Day Closes, The House Of Mirth, Of Time And The City, Sunset Song - and most recently A Quiet Passion, about the life and poetry of Emily Dickinson.

** "A long time ago, everyone in Britain got in a big old boat. And we set sail and we robbed - and this will sound far fetched - everyone in the world!"

Book Corner: Shimrit Lee Talks 'Decolonize Museums.' With connections to Raiders Of The Lost Ark and Black Panther; ivory tusks, masks, the price of a dozen eggs, and the skulls of enslaved Africans in Cuba; the Philadelphia racialized state violence of the MOVE bombing; German genocide and artifacts on display at the NYC Museum Of Natural History - and a museum in Senegal with entire empty rooms awaiting the return of their acquisitions still held in European institutions.

** "If the now disbanded Baltimore Gun Trace Task Force were actually tracking arms to their source, they might have arrested the 16,693 US arms makers, who the Department Of Justice acknowledged manufactured 71 million arms in 2020."

Bro On The Global Television Beat: Killer Cops In New Baltimore and Paris Series. Arts Express Paris Correspondent Professor Dennis Broe on Baltimore cops terrorizing the black community there over the last decade - and the case of an Algerian student beaten to death by Paris police in 1986... 

Peace In The Valley Review

A film title actually describing anything but, Peace In The Valley probes the emotional fallout visited upon a suddenly widowed suburban housewife Ashley, played by Brit Shaw, in the aftermath of a supermarket shooting where her husband John (Michael Abbott Jr. is killed. The portrayal of how to survive mentally following what has become an all too common event in the country, is the sensitively conveyed heart of this story.

Written and directed by Tyler Riggs, Peace In The Valley impresses as a portrait of individual grief and survival after loss. What the narrative lacks, however, is context. Was this a mass shooting, or simply an armed robbery gone wrong. And the subsequent controversial inclusion of household guns appears without commentary or relevance.

In effect, without these pressing issues discussed or resolved in any way, takes away from an impressive film that would have stood on its own minus the questions it never assumes as part of its conclusion. A Tribeca Film Festival release.

Prairie Miller