Activist & Political · Directors · Documentaries
Bowling a Strike for Columbine: Michael Moore hits the screen with both barrels blasting
Michael Moore hits the screen with both barrels blasting.
Category: Documentaries
Documentaries · DVD & Blu-ray · Music & Musicals · Reviews
The Sound of Jazz, the Sound of Gene: New DVDs offer rare TV appearances by jazz greats Billie Holiday, Gene Krupa, Coleman Hawkins, and Benny Goodman
New DVDs offer rare TV appearances by jazz greats Billie Holiday, Gene Krupa, Coleman Hawkins, and Benny Goodman. But where’s Thelonious?
Fast, Cheap, & Out of Control on DVD
“We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception … To become a crowd is to keep out death. To break off from the crowd is to risk death as[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries · Reviews
Estela Bravo’s Fidel (2001), a Documentary
This documentary offers an affectionate, in-depth portrait of the enduring world leader who stood up to the U.S. Over the course of the last 40 years, the CIA has tried[…]
Documentaries · Noir · Reviews
DVD Sampler: Cuban Story, The Vanishing, The Joke, Salesman, and Strange Illusion
In DVD land, the world’s your oyster – pearls included (sometimes) Cuban Story (Victor Pahlen, 1959) By the mid-1950s, Errol Flynn was enjoying the low high life of a bloated[…]
Rare Docs on French Filmmakers: Bresson and Akerman on VHS
Two of the most elusive auteurs tell all, or at least some. ROBERT BRESSON: WITHOUT A TRACE A documentary about Robert Bresson (1901?-1999), with the director cooperating – indeed, appearing[…]
Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
The Revolution Starts with Glitter! David Weissman and Bill Weber’s Documentary The Cockettes
The legendary campsters of the counterculture take a bow in this diverting documentary The Cockettes – fondly, if sometimes barely remembered as curios in the camp canon – are reborn[…]
Documentaries · Historical & Epic
Beauty and the Beast: The Architecture of Doom, a Documentary
The artistic underpinnings of Nazi terror The puzzle of Hitler and the Holocaust continues to twist in and out of the popular consciousness like a particularly hardy virus, most recently[…]
Mondo Tranny: Monika Treut’s Gendernauts
This love letter to San Francisco’s tranny community is a little too loving Gendernauts (1999) opens with a curious and none too appetizing image – a mangy old spotted hyena.[…]
Occupied Territory: Sylvie Groulx’s In the Shadow of Hollywood
America’s cultural colonizing is scored in a French-Canadian documentary you’ll probably never see Imagine if you walked into your local Starbucks and could only order caramel lattes. No cappuccinos, no[…]
Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · Music & Musicals
Rave On: Five Indie Music Docs on Four DVDs: Dancin’ Barefoot/Blank Generation; Rage: 20 Years of Punk Rock West Coast Style; Songs for Cassavetes; Better Living Through Circuitry
Every social movement needs a soundtrack, and, despite widespread reports of apathetic youth and political stasis, the twilight years of the twentieth century were rife with both. The indie movements[…]
Cinematographers · Documentaries
Fear of Darkness: Profiling Sven Nykvist in Light Keeps Me Company
Bergman’s cinematographer found more solace on the set than in real life Cinematographer Sven Nykvist’s work with Ingmar Bergman is considered one of the key collaborations in modern cinema, and[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries · Reviews
Bob Dylan in D. A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back (1967)
The dude with the ‘tude “If Bob Dylan is a poet, so is Cassius Clay.” So sneered Norman Mailer in 1965, before he realized what the sixties were about, and[…]
Documentaries · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Feedback from the Global Village: Culture Docs
From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China offers three documentaries for the price of one; Genghis Blues is too shaggy for words The collapse of Cold War rigidities and[…]
Documentaries · Festivals & Awards · Reviews
San Francisco’s 2001 Human Rights Watch International Film Festival
Celebrating activism and exposing some of the more chaotic corners of world politics Despite an avalanche of news and quasi-news programs, tabloid yakfests, and crudities like Cops, Survivor, and the[…]
Documentaries · Festivals & Awards · LGBT & Queer
Something to Come Out To: Gay Documentaries Triumph in the 2001 SFILGFF
A bumper crop of docs scale the heights and trawl the depths of queer culture “There was nothing to come out to. We never heard the word homosexual. The media[…]
Documentaries · Exploitation & Erotica
Cass Paley’s Wadd: The Life and Times of John Holmes (1999)
Livin’ large with the Hung One Porn has had its share of superstars, but none were bigger – in every sense – than John Holmes. This “little boy with a[…]
Documentaries · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Don McGlynn’s Louis Prima: The Wildest! (1999): A Documentary
The illustrious history of the king of the hepcats (and the queen of deadpan) Louis Prima and his wife Keely Smith were a staple of ’50s and ’60s variety TV,[…]
Documentaries · Festivals & Awards · Reviews
Yugoslavia in Focus: Observations from the 3rd Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival (2001)
Archival footage, dramatizations, and dark satire capture the dire end-of-century events in the former Yugoslavia Film after film bombards the eye with images of destruction: buildings split open, their wire[…]
Documentaries · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Too Haute to Handle: Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1959)
The best jazz documentary just got better Turn a fashion photographer loose on the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958, and what do you get? Lots of artsy-fartsy shots of sea,[…]
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