Some of my favorite documentaries are about stories that change drastically as they are being filmed. Lauren Greenfield’s The Queen of Versailles is one example. What begins as a straightforward… Continue reading "Storm Lake (Levinson and Risius, 2021)"
A famous G. K. Chesterton quote states, "Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable."
These people, incidentally just as my own parents, were Lenin’s Pioneers growing up behind the Iron Curtain, who witnessed the breakdown of the USSR and were shocked by the instability of their country, their lives, and the concept of truth itself.
If there was one moving, indelible image that I took away from the film, it wasn't anything said by the participants proudly remembering when they finally stood up to the police but from the police officer who in the twilight of life looks back with regret on making them do it: "You knew you could ruin [the people you arrested] for life [...] you felt bad..."
One in four women over the age of eighteen has experienced some form of sexual abuse.
Boston Globe music journalist Geoff Edgers states in his brief and lovable documentary Do It Again, “Pieces of the Kinks are still floating around out there, but we need the real thing.”
Doug Pray’s documentary about the rise of the advertising age, replete with interviews from industry giants and snippets from the greatest television ads of all time, was a real festival crowd pleaser.
Director Stanley Nelson (perhaps best known for Jonestown: The Life and Death of People’s Temple ) delivers another great documentary. Equal parts history lesson and civics lesson, Wounded Knee skillfully… Continue reading "Wounded Knee (Nelson, 2009)"
Those accustomed to documentaries of place trying to capture a geographical location through a cross section of its people may be slightly saddened to find that Paolo Poloni’s meditation on… Continue reading "Salonica (Poloni, 2009)"
Phie Ambo’s Mechanical Love kicked off this year’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. The two main story lines follow a Kyoto engineer working on making a “geminoid” of himself (and… Continue reading "Mechanical Love"
