What a nothing of a movie. As I make clear in the review I wrote about Kurt Vincent’s The Lost Arcade, which is up at The Playlist, this isn’t a “bad” film by any real stretch of the means, though it is “bad” in the sense that it isn’t about much of anything. At the very least, … Continue reading
If a person tells you that Gleason, the two hour documentary about Steve Gleason, the erstwhile safety for the New Orleans Saints and the man credited as an icon of the city’s post-Katrina recovery in 2006 thanks to one blocked punt, is inspiring, and if that is the only adjective that a person uses to describe the film, … Continue reading
I don’t like to have beef with other critics, but when a critic writes something, anything, whatever, that I find to be grossly inept, or offensive, or cruel, or just plain old dumb, I tend to get my hackles up. Such is the tale of my review of Roger Ross Williams’ Life, Animated, a documentary about … Continue reading
Nuts!, documentary filmmaker Penny Lane’s latest venture, is the kind of movie that needs to be seen to be believed. People say that about a lot of movies, or a lot of television shows, or performances, or whatever, and in most cases they’re just saying it to say it. In the case of Nuts!, it’s 100% … Continue reading
Try fitting all of that text into your mouth at once. You can’t! It’s a big, beefy title directed by two guys. That’s a lot of verbiage. But what Raiders!: The Story Of The Greatest Fan Film Ever Made lacks in succinctness it makes up for with compelling storytelling. Messy, compelling storytelling, sure, but storytelling that’s no … Continue reading
Maybe the fact that this here image of Full Court: The Spencer Haywood Story‘s poster is the best I could find tells you all you need to know about the film’s level of perceived respectability. This is a small doc with a narrow angle, and which very clearly loves its subject – enough, at least, to … Continue reading
In my first review for The Playlist (The Playlist!), I tackled a little doc called Unlocking the Cage that tells the story of Steven Wise, an animal protection lawyer who fought, and is still fighting, for the personhood of animals in the eyes of the U.S. judicial system. I liked it! It helps that it’s by Chris Hegedus … Continue reading
Does Charles Ferguson’s Time to Choose count as pro-environmental propaganda? That’s a loaded label to sling at any film, especially a well-intentioned documentarian attempt at courting our sense of obligation to our planet. The Earth’s slow-burn ruination is one of humanity’s great shames, after all; we’re the ones gutting its depths, scarring its face, and … Continue reading
The general rule about formatting interview questions is that they have to be short. They have to be short so that the answers are longer than the questions. You see variations on this rule all over the place, and in some instances and settings you’ll that rule be treated as more of a guideline, as … Continue reading
“Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack sounds like the stuff of fiction on paper, but, of course, the film is drawn from real life. The doc tells the story of the Angulo clan, a family living in a Lower East Side apartment in New York City, though “living” doesn’t quite describe their delimited existence. The Angulo children … Continue reading
“The Neolithic Hongshan of China, Cambodia’s Khmer Empire, the inhabitants of Pakistan’s Indus Valley, the Anasazi—cultures up and vanish all the time in world history. And as tragic as the loss of these cultures may be, it might be more tragic that in certain cases we’re not even sure what, exactly, happened to them. Solving … Continue reading
“So here we are, up to our elbows in the ignorance of polemic B.S., puzzling over when exactly America came to the saturation of Trumps and Huckabees braying cultural calumnies in the press. If you need a convenient scapegoat for all the jackasses jockeying for position in today’s presidential rodeo, maybe you should just blame … Continue reading
“Joshua Oppenheimer has dedicated the last decade of his life to exposing the Indonesian genocide that occurred between 1965 and 1966, but he first began to tell his story to the world back in 2013, when Drafthouse Films released Oppenheimer’s film The Act of Killing to critical acclaim and an eventual Oscar nomination. The doc … Continue reading
“On August 15th, 1982, as the festivities of Chicago’s annual Bud Billiken Day Parade petered out and the city grew quiet under a blanket of seasonal heat, teenagers Marilyn Green and Jerry Hillard were gunned down near a Washington Park swimming pool. Testimony from six eyewitnesses put the spotlight of suspicion on Anthony Porter, whom … Continue reading
“If you’ve been paying the slightest attention, you may have heard: Baltimore is on fire. If you’ve paid more attention than that, you might be aware that the United States of America has lately had a problem with police-involved shootings—though it doesn’t take a true scholar of our law enforcement’s history with racialized killings to … Continue reading
“The first few minutes of Death Metal Angola don’t feel like the introduction to a documentary. They’re something more akin to the opening sequence of a horror film. We’re presented with a quick lesson on Angola’s history in the 20th century—the 15-year war its people fought to regain their independence from Portugal (ending in 1975), … Continue reading
As documentaries go, Senna may be best characterized as unabashedly partisan. From the moment the film begins, director Asif Kapadia clearly wants us to come to root for Ayrton Senna, the eponymous and deceased Brazilian Formula One racer. Kapadia’s concerned little and less with objectivity. He’s an admirer, and largely his film rides on the hope … Continue reading
Beats, Rhymes, & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest could signal Michael Rappaport’s transition from actor to real-deal documentary filmmaker. Blending both an overview of hip hop history dating back to the late 80s and an in-depth dissection of the conflicts that ultimately drove apart the eponymous monumentally influential rap group, Beats, Rhymes, & … Continue reading
Leave it to the incomparable Werner Herzog to take the experience of filming chicken-scratch paintings on the walls of a long-sealed cave in the mountains of southern France and turn it into a rumination on the aspirations of humanity and an examination of art’s purpose throughout the history of our species. Herzog, the eccentric and … Continue reading
I like to think that modern audiences understand and accept that the performers, filmmakers, and other media personalities they admire and support are actual people underneath the images they project. So in theory, a movie like Rodman Flender’s Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop should feel like a no-brainer, and the sight of the titular beloved comedian … Continue reading
A Constant Visual Feast 