One of my favorite cinema stories is about KING KONG and the trouble it ran into with the censors even in that pre-Code time of 1933. It wasn’t Fay Wray in her slinky satin negligee, it wasn’t dinosaurs tearing each other apart. No, the only censored bit of KING KONG was the sound of Kong… Read More »
INTENT TO DESTROY: DEATH, DENIAL, & DEPICTION
It comes across as a gimmick, using clips and behind-the-scene footage of 2017’s THE PROMISE to tell the story of the Armenian Genocide, and of Turkey’s ongoing campaign of denial about it. Yet, Joe Berlinger’s moving and maddening documentary, INTENT TO DESTROY: DEATH, DENIAL, & DEPICTION, is anything but a gimmick. By cutting and those… Read More »
ANGKOR AWAKENS: A PORTRAIT OF CAMBODIA
Robert H. Lieberman’s ANGKOR AWAKENS: A PORTRAIT OF CAMBODIA asks difficult questions and provides answers that are as illuminating as they are troubling. His portrait of Cambodia is refracted through the genocide that was inflicted on it by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, a genocide that reduced the number of doctors in in a once prosperous… Read More »
MIDSUMMER IN NEWTOWN
The word “safe” comes up over and over again in MIDSUMMER IN NEWTOWN, Lloyd Kramer’s elegiac yet emotionally gripping documentary about the aftereffects of the Sandy Hook Massacre on the survivors. As in, the sense of being safe has been taken from everyone involved forever. The question becomes how to deal with it. Kramer’s film… Read More »
TOWER
On August 1, 1966, a sniper took aim from the observation deck of the tower on the University of Texas campus at Austin and reigned 90 minutes of chaos and terror on the people below. TOWER, a partly animated documentary by Keith Maitland, tells that story in real time from the perspective of the eyewitnesses… Read More »
KAMPAI! FOR THE LOVE OF SAKE
Full disclosure. KAMPAI! FOR THE LOVE OF SAKE will make you want to seek out your nearest sake tasting. This, ahem, intoxicating documentary about the national drink of Japan, and the people who have made it their life’s work, is a paean to more than just rice wine. It is a consideration of tradition in… Read More »
The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years
The problem confronting any documentary about The Beatles is that of finding something new to say about them. Their music, their personalities, their history, their influences, their influence, the phenomenon of world fame on a scale never seen before or, putatively, since they hit the big time in 1962, it’s all been dissected. So THE… Read More »
Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World
Werner Herzog brings his dour brand of whimsy to LO AND BEHOLD, REVERIES OF THE CONNECTED WORLD, his consideration of cyberspace. The result is a thought-provoking piece that brings up little-known issues and implications, placing them side by side with the more conventional topics of security and dependence. Indeed, the most arresting moment in the… Read More »
THE FIRST MONDAY IN MAY
It was the year that Sarah Jessica Parker showed up in a literally flamboyant head piece, and the year that Kim Kardashian showed up in (almost) literally nothing, and never has so much ridden on the strategic placement and secure fastening of paillettes and lace appliques. It was the 2015 Met Gala, the one that… Read More »
THE CREEPING GARDEN
THE CREEPING GARDEN is a documentary that successfully challenges everything we thought we knew about life on earth. The result is both fascinating and discomfiting, not unlike its subject, the slime mold, a life form that confounds all attempts to classify it as animal, vegetable, or fungal. It moves from place to place on its… Read More »
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