The global appetite for American stories is shrinking. The American political climate has an international impact which hardly any ordinary American person realises, but why should they, when they are too busy trying to survive it directly themselves. Bored kids with no money, nothing to do and no future to …
Gotham Chopra appropriates the classic language of IMAX documentaries in his free-flowing essay, Portrait of an Artist: Stephen Curry. What could’ve been a traditional piece of hagiography actually elevates its extreme glazing of Stephen Curry through a larger-than-life framing of a basketball giant as he accomplishes one of the greatest …
Director Marshall Curry is a veteran in the filmmaking industry. He is a four-time Academy Award nominee. Curry received two nominations for Best Documentary Feature with Street Fight and If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front. Another of his nominations was for Best Documentary Short Subject …
Tin Castle aka Irish Travellers is the very rare documentary worth seeing for its cinematography. Unfortunately the cinematography is the best thing about the film. Director Alexander Murphy also shot the film and some of its images are among the most surprisingly beautiful that have ever been captured in a …
Movie revisionism runs on a very simple premise: give a flop enough time, and somebody will eventually decide it was misunderstood. The bombs of yesteryear will be embraced as bold pieces that were ahead of their time. There are many avenues through which revisionism takes place: a key anniversary that …
When a documentary film is about a filmmaker and their own family, there is really no way to critique the work of art without critiquing the people in it. That caveat, or concern, is especially important for Remake, the new documentary by Ross McElwee, who single-handedly changed the world of …
You don’t realise how tough it is to make a good documentary until you see ones which fall short. For a documentary to succeed, it needs to back up its assertions in ways which will stand up in court, access to the people who will give you that backup, and …
The Brazilian experimental filmmaker Ana Vaz is probably best known for her 2022 project É Noite na América (It is Night in America). The project premiered at the Locarno Film Festival, and she has now returned to it with Fire Flower (Hanabi). Shot over the last ten years, her latest …
In the recent history of the Brazilian society, despite the majority in numbers, the Black population is a minority economically. This fact reflects the hundreds of years of slavery that exploited those coming from the African continent, and after their freedom, led them to the margins of the society. One …
While the Girl Scouts of America do plenty to build up young women, they are best known for their cookies. Which makes sense, given that they are an $800 million industry. In her documentary Cookie Queens, currently in theaters, Alysa Nahmias examines this business through the eyes of four young …
A female Korean superfan featured in Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger, speaking through tears, provides the best explanation possible for Oasis’ appeal: they are not a band that hectors you to get up when you fall down. They are a band that falls down beside you; they know themselves …
We all know China is an industrial superpower, but we (especially in the west) don’t devote much time wondering how China has become an industrial superpower. Well, part of the answer is that it buys a lot of its raw materials in from Mongolia. China’s upstairs neighbour is a nation …
The trouble with prison documentaries is the elephant in the room. Either you must find the reasons people are incarcerated beneath mentioning, or you must be right up front with the conviction that landed someone inside. This unfair but reasonable fact of life might go double if the documentary is …
The journalist and documentary filmmaker Daniel Lombroso has been consistently releasing shorts and features that reflect on two central themes: beauty and the American society. In the previous years, he released Denial, Hold the Line, American Scar, and White Noise, which all portray the history of the United States and …
When discussing pioneers in cinema, Barbara Hammer’s name is quintessential for any discussion. The avant-garde filmmaker is essential for the feminist cinema alongside names like Chantal Akerman, Lizzie Borden, Barbara Loden, and Sally Porter. In a sense, all of those directors provided different multitudes for the feminine representation on the …
To younger audiences, Martin Short is a name that’s synonymous with Oliver Putnam, the clumsy, struggling co-lead in Hulu’s hit show, Only Murders in the Building. To older generations, he represents a collection of hilarious characters that have graced both the big and small screens for over five decades. And …
The prolific filmmaker and theorist Mark Cousins returns to the festival circuit with his 16-part project, The Story of Documentary Film. Recently, he presented the segment 1970s at the Cannes Film Festival. The film is a two-halves project that narrates the production of non-fiction in the decade. Firstly, in the …
There are five reasons why Molly vs THE MACHINES should never have been made. It makes significant use of generative AI, from having AI voiceovers read the narration to AI images illustrating various points. This appears to have been done as a budget saving. Molly Russell, the 14-year-old named in …
Yo is short for Yolanda, and Yolanda was Yolanda Shea, a Swiss woman who spoke four languages fluently and spent most of her adult life in northern California. At a rummage sale in her seventies, Yo met a woman in her twenties named Anna Fitch, and their relationship became unusually …
The concept for WAX & GOLD is almost laughably deranged. It aims to examine the history of Ethiopia generally and Haile Selassie personally by filming only within Hilton Addis. Mr. Selassie was personally involved in bringing this Western hotel to the country, to the point of helping to design it, …