Review
Our critic watched a half-dozen films in this year’s GlobeDocs Film Festival and shares his thoughts.
Director Hal Hartley is an old-school romantic, one who sees human frailty and longing not as invitations to despair but as reasons to take part in the joy of living.
This is a terrific compendium of new music of the best sort: the kind that’s brilliantly written, expressively direct, played with assurance, and engineered with clarity and warmth.
In “Nouvelle Vague,” director Richard Linklater thrillingly captures the sense of Jean-Luc Godard as an artist feeling his way in real time, as if in a dark room, toward a new vision.
Three powerful films at NYFF about violence, survival, and revenge.
“House of Diggs” is an engaging biography of a historically important Black Congressman, an effective advocate for racial equality who fell prey to the temptation of ‘living large.’
“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You: is a powerful addition to the recent female-created examinations of the ways women, and particularly mothers, can be unsupported or outright dismissed by contemporary society.
“Against Morality” is the cri de coeur of a cultural critic who realizes that the presentation of art and its adjacent pursuits, including much art itself, have become the subsidiaries of progressive politics.
With its visual and emotional impact, “Leonardo! A Wonderful Show about a Terrible Monster” provides an expansive, more inclusive view of what theater can do for children.

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