Film
The Pink Cloud is a fascinating watch by sheer virtue of its accidental prescience.
Mel Brooks called Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club “a little nest of happiness. All our recent wounds are healed there.”
If this film accomplishes anything, it’s to remind us of how much we lost when Jimi Hendrix died.
A relaxing family vacation story morphs into a quietly riveting character study.
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.
The Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll at Mid-Year: Warming Up a Riff — How It Happened, and Why It Matters