7 years ago
documentary 10
NYFF Review: “De Palma”
My Roger Ebert website questionnaire asked for a movie I loved but everyone else hated. I chose Wise Guys, a movie that even hardcore Brian De Palma fans won’t endorse. Released in 1986, the Danny DeVito-Joe Piscopo movie marked its director’s return to comedy...
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“The Walk” and The Role of the Critic
I don't usually ask questions at press conferences. I'm too often crippled with self-doubt and assume that my question is not worth asking. But following the New York Film Festival press screening of The Walk, I couldn't resist. I raised my hand and spoke into...
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“Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon” Is A Flavorless, Unintelligent Trek
Reason #275839 why Aaron Sorkin’s mercifully short-lived series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip didn’t work out was its unduly inflated sense of importance. Everyone within the show spoke of the titular comedy institution with a hushed reverence usually reserved...
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“Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine” Is Unsettling, But Only At Times
Alex Gibney’s Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine captures the titular Silicon Valley titan as a genius with questionable morals at best. During Jobs’ lifetime, his virtuosic output was front and center and the public overlooked, say, the fact that Apple put a ...
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“Call Me Lucky” Is A Deeply Affecting Tribute To A Comic’s Comic
A hulking bear of a man with a handlebar moustache takes the stage, puffing on a cigarette and swigging from a bottle of beer, announcing: “So I’ve been on kind of a health kick lately.” The man is Barry Crimmins, the “comedian’s comic” who helped launch Bosto...
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“Best of Enemies” Is A Shallow Look At A Political Pair
There was a time I fervently believed that there were no bad documentary subjects -- only bad documentaries. That anything could make for a good narrative, that any person could make for an interesting protagonist. A lot has changed since that time of my life ...
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“I Am Chris Farley” Avoids Exploring The Man’s Dark Side
Toward the end of I Am Chris Farley, Brent Hodge’s biography of the late, great comic force of nature, Bob Odenkirk measures the tragic circumference of Farley’s death in one quote: "It's just rare that a person has that much joy, and brings that much happines...
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Brando vs. Brando: Dueling Visions Of The Icon
Was latter-day Marlon Brando the corpulent madman of myth, or a visionary genius who’d already moved on to the next level of movie acting? While the perception of the 20th century’s most famous actor as a paycheck-cashing recluse in his later years endures in ...
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The Act of Silence: LBJ and the Indonesian Genocide of 1965
Between The Act of Killing and now The Look of Silence, filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer has now given audiences a well-rounded look at a tragic event that had somehow been lost to history’s abyss: the killing of up to a million innocent civilians by the Indonesia...
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“A Happy Post-Modernist Now”: An Interview with Guy Maddin
On July 19, as part of its summer series, TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto feted experimental Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin by hosting a free screening of his 2007 phantasmagorical quasi-memoir My Winnipeg, followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker himself. Movie ...
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