8 years ago
All posts by Mallory Andrews
“Manglehorn”
Specialness has always had a vaulted place in the movies. It’s a classic hero’s journey: the discovery that you are destined for greatness or, in the case of epic love stories, the quest for “the one.” It’s an alluringly romantic concept, but its real-world ap...
Read more →
“Madame Bovary”
Emma Bovary is famously recognized as one of literature’s least sympathetic heroines. Entitled and selfish, her only driving motivation is an unquenchable hunger for material wealth and passionate affairs with men upon whom she can project her naïve romantic f...
Read more →
“Shake the Dust”
We’ve come a long way from the b-boying, beatboxing, freestyle origins of hip hop in the South Bronx. Modern conceptions of hip hop favor 99 Problems over Fight(ing) the Power or Fuck(ing) tha Police. Not to say that there’s anything wrong with this evolution ...
Read more →
“Our Man in Tehran”
“It's not a movie, people's lives were really in danger!” With those words, Our Man in Tehran tips its hand at the outset, firmly positioning itself as a rebuttal to the most recent Hollywood adaptation of the Iran Hostage Crisis incident known as the Canadian...
Read more →
Hot Docs 2015: Roundtable, Part 2
It’s no secret that filmmakers love making movies about making movies. For some, that self-reflexivity is a sign of cultural and artistic myopia. For others, though, turning the camera back on the process of filmmaking illuminates the bonds between art and hum...
Read more →
Hot Docs 2015: Music Documentaries
Biographical films can be a tough nut to crack. On one hand, there’s the problem of trying to condense a topic of such scope into a feature-length format. More pressingly, there's the paradoxical notion that, while a day in the life can be the stuff of great l...
Read more →
Hot Docs 2015: Roundtable, Part 1
When we think about manifestations of evil in the world, we are most comfortable with those that are outside our realm of experience. Monsters in childrens’ stories, corrupt world leaders in faraway places, or flashy serial killers in our primetime TV shows. W...
Read more →
“In Country”
With the rousing success of the final episodes of a certain recent HBO true-crime series, it has become something of a topic du jour to debate the utility of documentary reenactments. Are they meant to be taken as a representation of reality, or of a shady net...
Read more →
“She’s Lost Control”
She’s Lost Control is a classic tale. Cis-gendered, able-bodied, conventionally attractive straight white boy meets cis-gendered, able-bodied, conventionally attractive straight white girl. He’s afraid of intimacy, she’s warm and open and determined to fix him...
Read more →
Being in This House: Albert Maysles and the Ghosts of “Grey Gardens”
On March 5, the film community reeled at the news of the death of Albert Maysles at the age of 88. Maysles, along with his brother David (who succumbed to a stroke in 1987), was responsible for some of the most indelible classics of American nonfiction cinema,...
Read more →
