Tag: documentary
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NYC’s indie bands survive Napster, 9/11, gentrification, and their own demons, in Meet Me in the Bathroom
Weathering turn of the century New York City with The Strokes, TV on the Radio, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, and The Moldy Peaches.
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It’s a hard world for little things, in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter
The Night of the Hunter is a perennial source of fascination for cinéaste, both as a singular oddity in Hollywood history but also as a masterpiece in the truest sense: not only is it the best of what it is, it’s the only. “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing but […]
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The documentary Together and Apart tells the genesis of Genesis
The venerable band Genesis reconvenes to tell their own story, from progressive rock outsiders to mainstream pop success story.
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Mr. Rogers consoles the country in Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
It’s a sad state of affairs when a documentary about one of the most simply good people to have ever lived must dedicate screentime to Trump, Brexit, and Fox News, but such is the world that conservatives have made. Even if no mention had been made of current affairs, Won’t You Be My Neighbor would […]
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The Notorious Ruth Bader Ginsberg champions intelligence and equality in the documentary ‘RBG’
One of the greatest living Americans. If anyone deserves to be lionized in a feature-length hagiography, it’s The Notorious Ruth Bader Ginsberg. In these dark times, it’s heartening to see this unapologetic celebration of one woman’s lifelong championship of American values like fairness, justice, and equality. Glimpses of her personal life prove she also lived […]
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Brian De Palma looks back over his career in the documentary ‘De Palma’
Brian De Palma is an under-celebrated director, responsible for some of the most stunning sequences in American cinema. Just to name four personal favorites of mine: the split-screen prom massacre in Carrie, the Langley heist sequence in Mission: Impossible, the Grand Central Station steadycam chase in Carlito’s Way, and even the failed spacewalk rescue in […]
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A Clique of Cranks: Room 237
Room 237 is not about The Shining. It is about those lost in its labyrinth. For better or for worse, Stanley Kubrick is one of the most potent gateway drugs for young cinephiles, and for many the early obsession proves lifelong. The addictive nature of his films is partly due to their own air of […]
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Radiohead: Meeting People is Easy…
…but being invited to your own party is hard. I remember liking Grant Gee’s Radiohead documentary Meeting People is Easy when I first saw it in the late nineties, but now it just looks like a simplistic feature-length exposé of how music journos are twits that ruin everything.
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Businessman, artiste, or madman? We Live in Public
If you dig the deeply cynical TV series Black Mirror, you’ll love this documentary profile of businessman/artiste/madman Josh Harris. Love, hate, or pity him, Harris is undoubtedly a fascinating individual who succumbed to information-age and surveillance state delusion back during a time when we still used terms like “cyber-surfing the information superhighway” to describe the […]
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Hey Man, It’s Your Trip: Michael Wedleigh’s Woodstock Documentary
The classic feature documentary Woodstock captures the full experience of the near-mythical 1969 festival of the same name, from septic tanks to traffic jams to brown acid. It remains an important record of one of the most peaceful spontaneous gatherings in human history, not to mention the brief-lived spirit of the hippie movement as a […]