Mariska Hargitay has built her career and (by this stage) her legacy on a character whose troubled childhood and relationship to motherhood endows her with wells of empathy towards victims of sexual and emotional abuse. Turns out she knows a thing or two about generational trauma beyond the role of
There is a bit in Zackary Drucker’s Enigma where the director off-camera exclaims “Amanda…!” to one of Amanda Lear’s answers in such an incredulous tone and it honestly made me laugh. Partly because it surprised me on account of it being rare to hear a filmmaker so brazenly
America is a deeply weird place when it comes to sport. I mean, it’s deeply weird about a lot of things. But in this instance, we’re talking sport. The extreme pomp and circumstance like those seen in the opening moments of Surviving Ohio State is so intensely unappealing;
Being confined to the couch is as good of a reason as any to sit down (or lie down in this instance) and watch four hours of Ken Burns teaching us about buffalo. It is what any normal human being would do, I assume. For Burns, four-hours is proportionally quite
There is a line in The Body Politic that I can’t quite get out of my brain. Like a tick or a worm, burying its way in. It’s spoken by a disembodied voice—maybe it’s a television news reporter or a politician at the dais, and they
I’m Your Venus is a movie that does not go overtly into the complicated history of Paris is Burning. Neither as a cultural artefact, nor for its legacy as a story about queer and trans people directed a cis filmmaker. Just as we have long since gone beyond needing
For such a small and very independent documentary, it’s kind of a brag to be able to include the words “I Know” in your title. So much of what we watch movies about are unknowable even from a place of deep study and being a part of any given
One of the more disappointing elements of any movie-watching experience, but especially so in documentary, is when a fascinating story is given such a stale interpretation. Take Drop Dead City, for instance. Co-directors Peter Yost and Michael Rohatyn have at their disposal one of the most fascinating eras of 20th
A visual essay about video stores playing at a film festival. What a concept! You’ve got to be careful with a film like Videoheaven. Alex Ross Perry’s near-three-hour movie starts with Ethan Hawke in Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (aka Hamlet 2000!) reciting the famous "to be
We don’t necessarily need another documentary about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Between features and home entertainment productions, general horror docs plus cast and crew biographies, Tobe Hooper’s horror masterpiece has been well and truly covered over its 50 years. Or at least that’s what it feels
I had only just been commenting in regards to this film that India was experiencing a “golden age of documentary” and then during the Sydney Film Festival’s introduction, those very words were spoken. Payal Kapadia’s Night of Knowing Nothing, Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes (an Oscar nominee)
There was a moment around midway through Iván Castiñeiras’ Gods of Stone (Deuses de pedra) film where I thought to myself, ‘You can really tell this was shot over 15 years’. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, although I think in the case of this 80-minute film, it does