8 years ago
All posts by Dan Schindel
‘A.C.O.D.’ Wastes Good Premise and Better Cast
As many a concerned editorial from the past few decades or so has pointed out, around half of all marriages in America now end in divorce. There are a good deal of films about divorce, and a good deal besides that which focus specifically on the effects that d...
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Weightless Documentary ‘Linsanity’ Will Delight Fans of the Basketball Phenomenon
This might be the shortest time yet between the rise of a prominent public figure and a biographical documentary about them getting made. The makers of Linsanity lucked out, since they'd been filming basketball player Jeremy Lin since his days playing for Harv...
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Objectivity in Documentary Film
We are living in the documentary age. Among the many changes in the cinema world brought on by the proliferation of digital technology, it's now easier than ever for filmmakers both aspiring and established to set their sights on a real-life person, issue, or ...
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‘Wadjda’ To Shape The Future of Saudi Film
Wadjda comes with the burden of expectations that would be tough for any film to live up to. Reports conflict on whether it's the first "real" Saudi Arabian feature film, or just the first one fully shot inside the country. Certainly, the Saudi film industry i...
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Dull Documentary ‘Salinger’ Misses the Catcher, Goes Over the Crazy Cliff
Everything about Salinger is a build-up to its final minutes. Over the course of years of ultra-secret filming, director Shane Salerno supposedly uncovered some major revelations about the infamously reclusive author of The Catcher in the Rye. The Weinstein Co...
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‘A Teacher’: A Queasy Kind of Love, Handled With Grace
This review was originally part of our Sundance NEXT Weekend coverage.
Female high school teachers having affairs with male students has long been the object of lurid tabloid attention and melodramatic movies of the week. But A Teacher takes a reserved, co...
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Childhood is Hell in ‘I Declare War’
Movies about childhood are a crapshoot. They can easily fall into cloying nostalgia or cutesiness. It's easy for adult filmmakers to forget how almost alien the prepubescent ways of thinking are. To a kid, time passes more slowly, and the small things in life ...
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‘Cutie and the Boxer’: Art, Love, and Everything in Between
An 80-something-year-old man puts on boxing gloves with paint-soaked sponges strapped on them. With furious energy that belies his age, he assaults a large canvas, punching with his eyes closed, leaving a spatter with each blow. After a minute, most of the can...
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Sundance NEXT Weekend Review: The Quiet and Wonderful ‘This is Martin Bonner’
The world of independent film is mainly populated by the young. This makes sense, since twenty-somethings and early thirty-somethings are the ones who are just getting their foot in the door of the industry. One consequence of this demographic is that a good d...
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