It’s curious to watch a film like Prime Minister in the very immediate shadow of this week’s American elections. Particularly so those in New York City, where a socially and politically progressive thirtysomething candidate who isn’t a cis white male turned a relatively quick-launch campaign into a
Heidi Levitt is a familiar name in the credits of Hollywood productions, although you may not have noticed. She’s worked as a casting director on films by Oliver Stone, Wayne Wang, Adrian Lyne, Wim Wenders and Michael Bay, casting American presidents, groundbreaking ensembles, and big budget action spectacles as
With River of Grass, the elegiac mood piece about the Floridian Everglades, director Sasha Wortzel does something that I really love to see in documentaries. This is in essence a nature documentary, but it’s not just concerned with that one facet of the area or of non-fiction filmmaking. Alongside
I don’t ever really expect to watch too many films that have a direct relevance to what I do for a living five days a week. I mean, there’s certainly newsworthy elements to my day job, but in the grand scheme of things, at least here in Victoria,
“Heaven is… uh… hmmm.” It’s honestly kind of amusing that Diane Keaton, in her first directorial credit, chose not only to make a documentary about heaven, but also that she chose to open it with somebody who doesn’t have an answer. In a documentary that is often as
“There was, there was not” is an Armenian idiom that plays as the opening to a fairy tale in much the same way that “once upon a time” might elsewhere. It’s a poetic and appropriate way to begin a story of Artsakh, an eastern-European enclave that now, as we
I have seen far too few films of Robert Kramer. “He invents cinema with each new shot”, according to Cahiers du Cinéma. Those that I have seen have left an impression upon me. Take for instance, the lo-fi paranoia of The Edge from 1968 and Ice two years later with
Jesus behind every door. A gun in every home. No land for indigenous people and no reparations. These are just some of the promises made by Jair Bolsonaro in his campaign for President in Brazil. Coupled with the blatantly violent rhetoric and threats against left-wing opponents and the disregard for
What happens when Ai Weiwei, one of the most prominent artist-activists of our time, decides to direct an Italian production of a Puccini opera? Of Turandot, no less, with its orientalism and famously tacked-on happy ending. Surprisingly, it all goes swimmingly! Well, except for the upcoming pandemic that any audiences
One of the great things about documentaries can be the way filmmakers often find so many new people and subjects to devote an hour or more of our time to. Take Dennis Scholl and Kareem Tabsch’s Naked Ambition for example, an entertaining if modest documentary about Bunny Yeager. The
Several years ago, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin directed a movie about the efforts to save the soccer team that was trapped from deep inside that cave in Thailand. It was called The Rescue. One of the oddities of their career is that several of their feature documentaries could
It’s probably not coincidental that there are multiple documentaries releasing this year that deal with WWII propaganda. Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl premiered a year ago at last year’s Venice Film Festival and Luuk Bouwman’s The Propagandist premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, also last year. Both