7 years ago
documentary 10
“Happy Valley”
Don’t expect to learn anything new about the Penn State scandal from Happy Valley, a deeply unsettling documentary from director Amir Bar-Lev. The facts are here, pretty much as we followed them on the news a few years back, when assistant football coach Jerry...
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“Showrunners: The Art of Running a TV Show”
If a documentary about how hard successful television writers have it in Hollywood seems the very definition of “champagne problems,” Des Doyle’s Showrunners: The Art of Running a TV Show benefits from the fact that, well, it’s interviewing those writers. Trus...
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“National Gallery”
Aside from Jean-Luc Godard, it’s hard to think of an octogenarian auteur who remains as vital and intellectually playful as 84-year-old documentary master Frederick Wiseman. Both are having banner years: first Godard with his astonishing, form-bending Goodbye ...
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“The Great Invisible”
"We were in the dark. It was quiet. Nothing. I only had enough time to tell my guys that we're in trouble. 'Something's wrong, guys, and we're in trouble.' And then the first explosion hit us. It picked me up and flung me, it flipped me through the air like a ...
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“Citizenfour”
One of 2014’s more compelling documentaries, Laura Poitras’ Citizenfour channels the measured cool of its subject—former National Security Agency analyst-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden—and eschews the sensationalism of so many docs for a chilling, informa...
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“Algorithms”
As the old saying goes, if you've seen one black-and-white documentary about young, blind Indian chess players, you've seen them all In truth, the new film Algorithms starts with this singular conceptual hook, but is unable to expand upon it appropriately. Par...
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“Waiting for August”
Snow swirls across a highway, lit up by headlights in the dark. It's winter in Bacau, Romania, and for the Halmac family, stuffed into cramped social housing, money is very tight. The mother, Liliana, has taken a job as a domestic worker in Italy and sends mon...
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“Nas: Time Is Illmatic”
Jay-Z may have laid claim to the title The Blueprint, but Illmatic remains the truest Rosetta stone of hip-hop, dictating the shape and methods that the genre would take in the coming decades. A twenty-year-old Nas wrote the Great American Rap Album in 1994 by...
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“Keep On Keepin’ On” Review
Keep On Keepin’ On is one of those documentaries with a story that would cause most viewers to roll their eyes if it were put into a fiction film. A legendary jazz musician mentors a young musical prodigy, all while he suffers from failing health and the stude...
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“Pump” Review
Environmentally and socially conscious documentaries often remind us, with a healthy dose of urgency and even anger, that there's no time to waste when encouraging the responsible consumption of natural resources and exploring new alleys of achieving environme...
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