Sparing the viewer such extremes as the smug condescension of skeptical inquiry and the awful awe-filled wonder of crystal-toting New Age neo-pagans, CROP CIRCLES: QUEST FOR TRUTH, has only one agenda in its exploration of crop circles, listening to people with something to say beyond those extremes I mentioned before and then letting us draw… Read More »
TROUBLE THE WATER
Tia Lessen and Carl Deal went to Louisiana just days after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans with the idea of making a documentary about the Louisiana National Guard troops who returning home from Iraq to find their homes changed forever. Instead, while doing an interview for that film, two people walked up and introduced themselves.… Read More »
BALLAST
Set in the rural Mississippi delta, BALLAST brings home the effects and consequences of self-imposed isolation with one arresting image: a stain on a wall. It got there when Lawrence (Michael J. Smith, Sr.) attempted suicide in the wake of his twin brother’s death. Though a neighbor was there to check on him, though that… Read More »
YOU, THE LIVING (DU LEVANDE)
The somnambulant denizens of Roy Andersonns YOU, THE LIVING (DU LEVANDE) inhabit a dreary world that barely has color and, for the living of the title, barely any present tense. Theirs is a placidity that is barely two steps from torpor, even in the face of emotion, even in the face of death. The several… Read More »
CRUDE
Click here to listen to the interview with Joe Berlinger (17:47).The best moment in Joe Berlingers documentary CRUDE is when a slick Florida lawyer, attempting to make Chevrons case that it isnt responsible for the environmental catastrophe in the Ecuadorian Amazon mis-speaks. Eduardo Reis Veiga is going over, point-by-point, how Chevron cleaned up the jungle.… Read More »
BURMA VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country
BURMA VJ is a riveting cinema verite-style documentary that uses its rough-and-tumble covert camera work to its advantage. Covering the popular uprisings in Burma in 2007 that began as a protest against the doubling of fuel prices and grew so quickly and so virulently that the oppressive military regime saw itself as being threatened by… Read More »
EARTH DAYS
Its not like the environmental crisis snuck up on us, a point made in the opening montage of Robert Stones documentary, EARTH DAYS. Starting with John F. Kennedy, ending with George W. Bush, and with every president in between, the looming consequences of living out of harmony with nature are expounded forcefully and with dire,… Read More »
I’M STILL HERE — THE LOST YEARS OF JOAQUIN PHOENIX
IM STILL HERE: THE LOST YEARS OF JOAQUIN PHOENIX begins as yet another chronicle of celebrity excess and self-indulgence and ends in jaw-dropping excursion into the self-destruction of a once-respected artist. Its one that is all-access, with brother-in-law Casey Affleck recording the pivotal moments of a year in turmoil, the year Phoenix announced his retirement… Read More »
GHOST ACTRESS (aka DON
GHOST ACTRESS details the odd doings at a movie studio in Japan. Unlike the usual make-them-jump-and-scream approach to telling this story, writer/ director Hideo Nakata, who wrote and directed the Japanese film, THE RING, on which the current American release is based, has opted for creating a mood of gradually increasing unease tempered with the… Read More »
LORD OF THE DANCE 3D
It was not the most intuitive hit of a road show, traditional Irish folk dancing, both classical and tweaked into modernity, married to the slightest wisp of an overbaked melodrama based in Irish folk culture. Yet in the hands and flying feet of Michael Flatley, LORD OF THE DANCE sold out performance after performance in… Read More »
- 1
- 2
- 3
- …
- 8
- Next Page »