Once Within a Time is on the one hand, a film that I feel compelled to praise for being unsafe and experimental, especially since it had every reason not to be: director Godfrey Reggio is an octogenarian these days, after all, and in the year of our Lord 2023, when the primary mode of so […]
It’s surely easy to overstate how groundbreaking the film Koyaanisqatsi was at the time of its enthusiastically-received 1982 premiere and its massive-hit-by-cult-film-standards commercial release in 1983, but I would be much more wary of diminishing it than puffing it up. Ever since it was young, an honest reckoning with the techniques and aesthetics of this […]
Woe betide anybody who sits down in front of Moonage Daydream expecting to learn something concrete about David Bowie. That’s not a criticism, let me hasten to clarify—expository documentaries generally leave me wishing that I’d read a book or lengthy article on the subject instead, and I was drawn to this film less as a […]
Few things are more frustrating for the ardent cinephile than watching a potentially exciting new filmmaker gradually downshift into mediocrity. Twenty years ago, Peter Sollett’s debut feature, Raising Victor Vargas (then called Long Way Home), made a small splash at Cannes, where it premiered as part of the festival’s Un Certain Regard sidebar; shot on […]
There is a moment in Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) , about 57 minutes into the 118-minute film, where we see something that is not at all meaningful in and of itself: in the middle of a performance of “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” by Gladys Knight & […]
To the ordinary list of problems with the conventional biopic – they are boring, they are shallow, they are pandering, they are formulaic – Bohemian Rhapsody reminds us that they can be even worse still than the none-too-high standard. For on top of all its other shortcomings, Bohemian Rhapsody is something of an official, authorised […]
There are two words that rush to the forefront of my mind as I think upon 20 Feet from Stardom. The first of these is “pleasant”, the second is “safe”, and the combination of those two gives, I think, a pretty clear impression of what kind of territory the film looks to occupy. It is […]
Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: the problem with concert documentaries, like One Direction: This Is Us, is that they’re hardly worthy of that name […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/14 & 10/15 & 10/16World premiere: 4 September, 2010, Telluride Film Festival The reason that animated love story and 20th Century period piece Chico & Rita exists is, basically, because a documentarian, Fernando Trueba, and one of his subjects, the world-renowned designer Javier Mariscal, wanted to make a movie together. I admire […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/15 & 10/16 World premiere: 1 October, 2011, New York Film Festival I have seen Chicago-based indie artist Andrew Bird perform live four times, which might not sound like a lot to the music junkies out there, but it ties him for my personal record. The second of those four times is […]
Thankfully, with the new year beginning on a Friday, there’s basically a one-week vacation from new releases, so over the next several days I’m going to take the opportunity to review some films from 2009 that I either didn’t have a chance to see during their release, or couldn’t find the time to review, in […]
Agile, Mobile, Hostile: A Year with Andre Williams is one of those documentaries where it seems that the filmmakers approached their subject and started filming with one idea in mind, until real life intervened, and forced them into something much stranger and more uncomfortable and better than they’d originally planned. This is a double good […]
