Before becoming a punch line for tabloid-huffing, talkshow-loving misery vampires, Amy Winehouse wasn’t just a star talent, she was a constellation unto herself. Bursting into the moribund pop music scene of the early 2000s with verve and danger, she came on like some savvier Billie Holiday in a field of Auto-Tune tarts. There’s a heavy dose […]
Tag: documentary
Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck
Brett Morgen’s deft and fascinating documentary about America’s last true rock star is shot through with inevitability. But that never detracts from the raw emotional power of a film made up mostly of Kurt Cobain’s nakedly confessional journals and recordings. Whether it’s Cobain’s mother Wendy O’Connor talking about how “Kurt had to be born,” or […]
Merchants of Doubt
One watches the earnestly comic documentary Merchants of Doubt with some confusion. That’s not because the story, about the professional deceivers who make a living pretending terribly dangerous things (smoking, climate change) aren’t so bad, is hard to follow. What’s difficult to parse is the PG-13 rating. This is, after all, a film in which […]
Ballet 422
There is no such thing as a permanent piece of art. Paper yellows, paint cracks, celluloid burns, memories fade. But compared to those ephemeral forms, dance is even more transitory. The choreography can be recorded, but not the swing of limb and flair of line that exists for a moment on stage and then only […]
Life Itself
There is a beautiful symmetry to Steve James’s Roger Ebert documentary, Life Itself. From its recollections of Ebert’s fiery arguments with TV co-host Gene Siskel to the stark images of his final post-operative days when he could not speak or walk unassisted, the film overflows with humor and pathos and crankiness and ambition and a […]
Tales of the Grim Sleeper
Most mysteries start with an assumption: Somebody, somewhere, cares that the killer or killers are brought to justice. The mystery at the core of Nick Broomfield’s gripping, sickening documentary Tales of the Grim Sleeper is of a different sort. It’s a riveting story: A serial killer initially suspected of killing ten women in Los Angeles during […]
National Gallery
“A painting,” one of the lecturers in National Gallery explains carefully, “has the speed of light to tell you a story.” He’s comparing a painting to a film or a novel, which has hours or weeks to impress itself upon your consciousness with multiple scenes, whereas a painting has one shot to get it right. […]
The Great Invisible
The hot lowlands sprawling around where the Mississippi River flows into the Gulf of Mexico seem both disaster-prone and fated to be ignored when it comes time for clean-up. When the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20, 2010, 11 workers were killed and millions of gallons of oil dumped into the gulf. It was […]
Last Days in Vietnam
The stark simplicity of Rory Kennedy’s masterful and Oscar-worthy Last Days in Vietnam stands in contrast to the drama of this complex and little discussed historical moment. When modern wars end, they are normally summed up in terms of strategies and battles, of winners and losers, how they impacted the great game of geopolitical gamesmanship. […]
Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger
Intentionally or not, the tired myth of the noble gangster gets another rigorous workout in Joe Berlinger’s promising but undercooked Whitey Bulger documentary. Fortuitously hitting theaters well before Scott Cooper’s fictional (and likely mythological) take on Bulger’s life, Whitey doesn’t try to be the feature-length nonfiction take on the South Boston crime lord. Instead, true-crime […]
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Anita
Anita is a functional film about an astounding person who faced the whirlwind and didn’t blink. It doesn’t do meaningful service to the larger story of persecution and discrimination and never scratches the surface of the poisonous vituperation that swirled around it. None of these things may have been necessary, though. Director Freida Lee Mock […]
The Act of Killing
In 1965, the Indonesian government was overthrown by the military. To do their bidding afterward, the army went out and recruited what were known as “movie theater gangsters” — young men who sold movie tickets on the black market and occasionally engaged in more violent activities. These gangsters were turned into death squads, their methods […]