Review: Burn: One Year On the Front Lines of the Battle To Save Detroit
RECOMMENDED Tom Putnam and Brenna Sanchez’s “Burn: One Year On the Front Lines of the Battle To Save Detroit” documents Detroit, the American city with more fires than any other, and in the process,...
View ArticleReview: The Central Park Five
RECOMMENDED Ken Burns and co-directors David McMahon and Sarah Burns (his son-in-law and daughter) serve up outrage over the 1989 case of five black and Latino teens from Harlem who were charged with...
View ArticleReview: Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present
RECOMMENDED Matthew Akers’ “Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present” considers serious high art as fantastic ritual, creating a hypnotic portrait of four decades of work by the Serbian-born performance...
View ArticleReview: Beauty Is Embarrassing
RECOMMENDED Neil Berkeley’s dynamic, headlong, genially indulgent “Beauty Is Embarrassing” is the most rambunctious art-doc I’ve seen since Jody Lee Lipes’ 2009 “Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be...
View ArticleReview: Chronicle of a Summer
RECOMMENDED (Chronique d’un été) Even today, “Are you happy?” isn’t a question you expect to be asked by someone wielding a camera. Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s “Chronicle of a Summer” is a fascinating...
View ArticleInnocents Unchained: Some Time With “West of Memphis”‘ Damien Echols
By Ray Pride Damien Echols is a tall man, thirty-eight, shoulder-length black hair. Lines of black ink along his forearms, black boots up on a chair in the Peninsula hotel suite. Dark glasses. Nearly...
View ArticlePicture This: Documentaries Keep Getting Better
By Ray Pride The first films I saw at Sundance 2013 started on a political note, and the list of nonfiction entries to come look to be even more charged. Two documentaries made a schizophrenic double...
View ArticleReview: 56 Up
RECOMMENDED Michael Apted’s “56 Up,” worn with familiarity with its fine footage, is not the marvel that the entire decades-long enterprise has been—a film crew dipping into the lives of a small number...
View ArticleReview: Happy People: A Year In The Taiga
RECOMMENDED If someone’s going to recut your lengthy ethnographic documentary into something punchy and mythic, it might as well be Werner Herzog. Herzog takes co-directing credit for “Happy People: A...
View ArticleUnthinking the Speakable: The Words of “The Gatekeepers”
By Ray Pride Leon Panetta, Porter Goss, George H. W. Bush and David Petraeus walk into a bar… The Wild Bill Donovan Saloon and Grill… or better yet, a television studio… Let’s say one with Bill Moyers...
View ArticleReview: Koch
RECOMMENDED Edward Irving Koch was the 105th mayor of New York City, and one of those self-loving New York edifices that seemed to loom more with age, edged with nostalgic patina. Even after his three...
View ArticleReview: Caesar Must Die
RECOMMENDED “Think of the world.” The Taviani brothers, Paolo (81) and Vittorio (83), haven’t released a feature since 2007, but their earlier masterpieces include “Padre Padrone” (1977) and “Night of...
View ArticleReview: War Witch
RECOMMENDED More international magical mystery from a Québec filmmaker: Kim Nguyen’s “War Witch” (Rebelle) seems a cousin to Denis Villeneuve’s 2010 “Incendies,” coursing its myth across the Middle...
View ArticleReview: Mental
RECOMMENDED After a middle career making movies in the U. S. like “My Best Friend’s Wedding” and “Peter Pan” (2003), PJ Hogan returns to his Australian roots with the autobiographical “Mental,” two...
View ArticleReview: Room 237
RECOMMENDED A sinister lark that functions at once as satire of both the obsession of fans and the niggling habits of film critics, Rodney Ascher’s “Room 237″ uses Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” as...
View ArticleReview: Bert Stern: Original Mad Man
Shannah Laumeister’s ragged, sometimes laughably awful documentary, “Bert Stern: Original Mad Man” (2011) is a tagalong to the career of photographer Bert Stern in autumn, from his days as a magazine...
View ArticleReview: No Place On Earth
RECOMMENDED One of the least likely adventure movies of any given year, Janet Tobias’ “No Place On Earth” tells the story of 511 days spent by thirty-eight members of five Ukrainian Jewish families...
View ArticleReview: Unmade in China
RECOMMENDED Gonzo is seldom the way to go in documentary, but there is a blithe prankishness and sweet-souled don’t-give-a-fuck to some, if not all, of Tanner King Barklow and Gil Kofman’s “Unmade in...
View ArticleReview: Harvest of Empire: The Untold Story of Latinos in America
RECOMMENDED Effective agitprop bristling with clear-headed outrage, Peter Getzels and Eduardo López’s “Harvest of Empire: The Untold Story of Latinos in America” presents a punchy history of a...
View ArticleReview: Hava Nagila
A Kickstarter-supported film that has nothing to with “Veronica Mars” or the mind of Zach Braff, Roberta Grossman’s pat, threadbare “Hava Nagila,” more suited to television than a bigger screen, is...
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