film festival review
The Librarians is one of those documentaries that’s kind of hard to assess. In a way, it’s like arguing with a baby. Sure, your points might be totally accurate and compelling and maybe you made those points with veracious integrity. But ultimately, you’re still arguing with a
documentary review
The request at the centre of Deaf President Now! is hardly a radical one. Even for 1988, long before “DEI” and “woke” were corporate bugaboos. That a school, Gallaudet University in Washington DC, for the deaf and hard-of-hearing should have a president who is deaf or hard-of-hearing and that at
music documentary
Nobody needs me to sit here and talk about John Williams. We all know who he is and what he has achieved. He is that rare sort of below-the-line film technician that even casual filmgoers recognise not just the work of but his name, too. A symbol of an era
documentary review
Iraq. Syria. Hong Kong. Ukraine. Palestine. All parts of the world that have experienced war or large-scale protest in the last two decades and which have had a significant number of documentaries (and narrative features, too!) made about them. Too numerous to count, really. Some won Oscars. Others were made
documentary review
As these things go, Meredith Monk is probably one of the more notable faces of the avant-garde art movement. A composer, choreographer, dancer, filmmaker and singer (whatever your thoughts on all of those descriptors may actually be, she does them), Monk somehow broke through into a broader public consciousness as
songs from documentaries
Kevin Macdonald divides his time between dramatic features and documentaries. Sometimes, as in the case of Touching the Void, he does both at the same time. I have admired films he has done in both mediums, but his Oscar-winning One Day in September will forever keep be hankering for more
Australian Histories
When I think of my childhood, a lot of my memories are overcast. And I don’t mean that in a sad way. Rather, I just seem to remember the grey and wintery over the golden summers that Australia is more famous for. Maybe it was the memory bleed of
documentary review
Life After is the sophomore feature from Reid Davenport. He is a filmmaker whose first feature, I Didn’t See You There, took a novel approach to observing how somebody who is not able bodied navigates the world. Told largely through a rather simply first-person device of attaching a camera
restoration reviews
A couple of years ago, my manager at the time got her team together to do some year-ahead planning and team bonding. She also asked where we’d like to be in six months, one year and five years. Among the standard answers of wanting to complete this project or
documentary review
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
documentary review
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
documentary review
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;