The Ruins of Lifta (Daum & Rudavsky, 2016)
Lifta is described in this documentary's press materials as "the only Palestinian village abandoned during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that has not been destoryed or repopulated by Jews."
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Miss Stevens (Hart, 2016)
Josh Wartel catches up with this award winner from SXSW film festival and is not quite as charmed as the festival jury....
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The Unknown Girl (Dardenne & Dardenne, 2016)
Why do we hate her inscrutability so much? Why do we want another, more cynical explanation except, perhaps, to feel better about ourselves? Why is it so much easier to be inspired by and cheer the one big gesture than the daily minute ones?
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3 Days of Terror: The Charlie Hebdo Attacks (Reed, 2016)
In fifty-nine exhausting minutes, the film deftly interweaves archival footage of Paris in January of 2015. In a seventy-two hour span, attacks from ISIS and Al-Qaeda targeted the offices of Charlie Hebdo and a related standoff at a kosher supermarket in the same city.
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TIFF 2016 Preview: Queen of Katwe
The following teaser trailer pushed me off the fence. This definitely looks like a major studio production with Christian themes as opposed to a Christian-niche movie. Check out the featurette and see if you don't agree.
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Robb Skyler is Howard Cosell in Hands of Stone
Cosell helped shape the events that became part of sports history, and the makers of the new Roberto Duran biopic Hands of Stone needed an actor who could not only mimic the broadcasters patter but who also understood the man behind the showman. They turned to veteran comedian and character actor Robb Skyler.
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Fred Zinnemann: Oklahoma!
No song is shot completely in one take, but whenever the camera can move instead of cut, it does
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The Witness (Solomon, 2015)
The Witness is a powerfully messy film.
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An Art That Nature Makes: The Work of Rosamond Purcell (Bernstein, 2015)
If I had the film on DVD, I would be seriously tempted to play it through once with no sound, just savoring the images, and then go back and listen to the commentary.
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Before You Offer LGBTQ People “Thoughts and Prayers” …
News of the mass murder of forty-nine people at a gay nightclub in Orlando spread through social and mainstream media last month, prompting a now familiar pattern of shock, anger, denial, and accusations.