Film
With Richard Davis, director Ramin Bahrani found an old-fashioned fraud, a paunchy American grifter worthy of a story by Mark Twain.
This effective advocacy documentary charts the 21st-century decline of a great American institution (one established in the U.S. Constitution). It’s also a wake-up call alerting us that things didn’t have to happen this way.
This dispatch reviews three documentaries that are very different from each other, but are all fascinating and engaging. This was an excellent year for documentaries at Sundance. I will review several more before this year’s dispatches are complete.
These three Sundance films supplied very intense viewing experiences.
We learn that Navalny — if we didn’t know it already from reporters who cling to Putin’s charismatic nemesis — is a persuasive man who has gotten a long way on his wits and courage.
An upstart young rider confronts an aging jockey. Yet there’s nary a cliché.
When given a choice, tend to choose films that are fairly harrowing to watch. The next three Sundance Fest films on my slate were often disturbing, but also powerful and inspiring on many levels.
I’ve seen a really interesting assortment of films so far. I can’t recite them all from memory, but they’re not blurring into each other, either. Not yet, anyway.
Think Ray Harryhausen by way of the Quay brothers or Jan Švankmajer and you’ll have a vague sense of the sort of magnificent black magic that animatesMad God.
With Tantura, brimming with evidence that will now be hard to suppress, director Alon Schwarz may have won an important battle in the war of conflicting narratives about Israel’s war of independence.
Music Commentary: Brian Wilson’s Legacy Thrives — 2026 Reissues Reviewed