By Michael Sandlin. Despite its low-budget workmanlike feel, this documentary from Emmy-winning directors Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar – and produced by Spanish directorial titan Pedro Almodovar – just may be one of the most socio-historically significant European documentaries of recent years. Although it may not have the depth and […]
Taming a Wild Man: Matteo Garrone’s Dogman
Thomas Puhr
May 6, 2019
By Thomas Puhr. He is a slight man: short and hunched, as if perpetually carrying a heavy load. His head and eyes constantly dart around, almost bug-like. Only when with his dogs, or spending a few days with his estranged daughter, does he seem slightly less on edge. This unease […]
Planning and Execution: Werner Herzog’s Scenarios II and Meeting Gorbachev
John Duncan Talbird
May 3, 2019
By John Duncan Talbird. Werner Herzog should win the Nobel Prize in Literature. If Bob Dylan can win it, I don’t see why a filmmaker can’t and it’s hard to think of another director who has done so much for both the narrative and documentary film, in fact, who has […]
Portraits and Passions: Tribeca Film Festival 2019
May 2, 2019
By Gary M. Kramer. The Tribeca Film Festival, April 24-May 5, offers a variety of features, shorts, documentaries, television and new media productions from new and established filmmakers. This year’s programs offered some impressive and ambitious films. Here is a rundown of seven distinctive titles. One of the gems of […]
Documenting the Past and Gender: Istanbul Film Festival, 38th Edition
May 1, 2019
By N. Buket Cengiz. Held only a couple of days after a social democrat mayor has won the elections in the city after long years, Istanbul Film Festival, organized by Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV) for the 38th time on 5-16 April 2019, has been attended by over […]
The Struggle for a City’s Soul: Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (Criterion Collection)
Jeremy Carr
April 30, 2019
By Jeremy Carr. Newly released from Tegal Prison, Franz Biberkopf cautiously looks over a custodial stretch of land just inside the wall that separates the penitentiary from the city streets. He walks a bit, hesitantly but with a slight smile. The camera is close on Franz, tracking this emphatically prolonged […]
Never Look Away: Art Against Death
Christopher Sharrett
April 29, 2019
By Christopher Sharrett. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Never Look Away is a good – but not great – film of this past season that deserves recognition; I wanted to wait to remark on it until a Region 1 Blu-ray arrived, which apparently won’t happen until the fall, so I purchased […]
Trick and Treat: Penny Lane’s Hail Satan?
Elias Savada
April 29, 2019
By Elias Savada. Never has a Penny Lane film been this funny. An academic-now-turned-full-professional-documentary-filmmaker, she has provided a window into the weird and wonderful for the last half-dozen or so years with her handful of features and several compelling shorts. She loves to take unusual relics of our planet and […]
I Made the Documentary The Cult of JT LeRoy, and I Must Discuss Savannah Knoop’s New Film
Marjorie Sturm
April 26, 2019
By Marjorie Sturm. The fact that JT LeRoy swallows and sings Albert’s platitudes makes the film fairly unwatchable for those who are hip to or suffered from the story.” I am the director and producer of the The Cult of JT LeRoy, the documentary that explores the elaborate literary hoax perpetrated […]
Daredevils of the Red Circle and Other Cliffhangers: Lone Pine and Daredevils of the West (1943)
April 25, 2019
“Daredevils of the Red Circle and Other Cliffhangers” is a blog on serials by Geoffrey Mayer, the author of Encyclopedia of American Film Serials (McFarland, 2017). The Good Lord really made this place [Lone Pine] for movies. There’s everything there. There’s sand, there’s rivers, its made for motion pictures. – Budd Boetticher Lone Pine, or more […]