Directors · Documentaries · Interviews
Paradise Betrayed: Talking with Terence Davies About Of Time and the City
“You can’t stop time. It stops you.”
Category: Documentaries
America is Hard to See (Emile De Antonio; 1970)
Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 Presidential campaign started on a premise that would sound downright exotic coming from a member of the United States Senate today. He believed that US military agression[…]
Directors · Documentaries · Festivals & Awards · Interviews
What’s Up, Docs? Nonstandard Operating Procedures in Recent Documentaries, and Interviews with Patricio Henriquez and Doug Pray
“Why didn’t you just stick to the truth?”
Documentaries · Religion & Spirituality
Innocence Lost or Regained? The Clear-Eyed Vision of Jesus Camp
“Real things happening to real people”
Documentaries · Festivals & Awards · War
Onward and Inward: On the 2007 Thessaloniki International Film Festival
“Each work limns a moral dilemma that has no discernible answer.”
The Passion of the Auteurist: On Man of Cinema: Pierre Rissient
“It’s not enough to like this movie” He has been called the Kissinger of Cinema and the King of Cannes. Quentin Tarantino describes him as “a samurai warrior for films[…]
Made in China: Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky on Their Travels Across Manufactured Landscapes
“We’ve created a world that buffers us from nature.” In the past few years, there has been a healthy emission of premium-grade eco-conscious documentaries — Darwin’s Nightmare, Our Daily Bread,[…]
Stay Well, or Else . . . Michael Moore’s Sicko
“What these Americans have could happen to us. And this is frightening.” Michael Moore’s Sicko begins with clips of what happens to Americans who don’t have health insurance. A man[…]
Herzog’s Tricky Rescue Dawn
Most critics have approached Werner Herzog’s latest film Rescue Dawn with qualifying kid gloves, as if it would be impolite to question a late work from such a grand old[…]
Documentaries · Genres · Movies · Reviews
Treed by the Family: On 51 Birch Street
For boomers, “the idea that Mom and Dad are flawed human beings with complicated histories and real feelings can be hard to accept.” The straight out of a first-grade primer[…]
Documentaries · Genres · Movies · Reviews
Cultural Equity: On the Documentary Lomax the Songhunter
“Every smallest branch of the human family at one time or another has carved its dreams out of the rock on which it has lived.” – Alan Lomax It was a remarkable[…]
This is The Town and These Are the People
[dailymotion id=23yvenWOLheom26Si]The Town(Josef von Sternberg; 1945) Produced under the imprimatur of the U.S. Office of War Information, The Town was the only film directed in its entirety by Josef von[…]
The Image-Makers, at Dusk: On the documentary Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography
“Glassman uncovers networks of influence and inference, whole microhistories around the camera . . . “ Interviewed by Peter Cowie for Cowie’s book Revolution! The Explosion of World Cinema in[…]
Eco-Apocalypse and the Powerpoint Film: Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth
“The film is a kind of subtle argumentation by analogy, whose success rests on the viewer’s desire to identify with Gore.” Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth may get the honor[…]
Documentaries · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Leonard Cohen, Ungloomed
A group of rather spectacular performers – Nick Cave, Rufus Wainwright, Anna McGarrigle, Martha Wainwright, Kate McGarrigle and Antony among them — gathered at the Sydney Opera House in 2005[…]
Documentaries · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
Speaking Out: Pioneering Doc Word Is Out Turns 29
Assimilate this Like any marginalized culture, queerdom carries on its own constant internal debate: to separate or assimilate? Separation means embracing the inner pervert, celebrating the diversity in the community[…]
Documentaries · Visual Artists
Surreal Women: Leonor Fini and Kay Sage Documentaries
“All there is to do now is scream.” One view of “outsider art” is that it’s often the product of a hyper-productive, typically male naif who’s closer to his own[…]
Buried Alive: On Frederick Wiseman’s Juvenile Court
“The great legal scholar Lenny Bruce once observed that in the halls of justice the only justice is in the halls . . .” The long, astonishing final sequence of[…]
Riefenstahl’s Heights and Wiseman’s Follies: Allegories of Flesh in Olympia and Titicut Follies
The body beautiful meets the body besieged Leni Riefenstahl and Fred Wiseman, though rarely grouped together, are in a category apart from most documentary filmmakers in that they both used[…]
Activist & Political · Directors · Documentaries · Reviews
Rebel Girls: Six Documentaries by Kim Longinotto
On Dream Girls, The Day I Will Never Forget, Divorce Iranian Style, Shinjuku Boys, Gaea Girls, and Runaway The combination of reality TV and George W. Bush’s ascendancy (one wants[…]
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