documentary
Does every semi-famous person deserve a full-length documentary about them?
“The Iran Job” is an engrossing documentary that cannily integrates basketball and a look at Iranian street life in the months leading up to and including the Green Movement protests.
In the end, William Kamkwamba’s story in “William and the Windmill” is deeply inspirational. As the saying goes, talent is universal, opportunity is not.
The filmmaker is annoyingly passive and star-struck, as the documentary’s subject, Ricky Jay, speaks to his chosen agenda: a wish to tell stories about his mentors and favorite magicians.
What about Bert Stern, the artist? He deserves credit for bringing fashion photography into the modernist moment in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
This documentary plays like a didactic high school civics lesson. I agree totally with its politics while abhorring its unimaginative political correctness.
Israel has genuine enemies without, to be sure. But “The Gatekeepers” leaves the impression that it has no less mortal an enemy within.
A hedonist and humanist, admired filmmaker Ricky Leacock was curious about everyone, including the rich and famous, especially if he could show them sans their celebrity masks.
This unique and carefully constructed impressionistic narrative encourages viewers to free-associate, assess, and imagine the romantic relationship through the filter of their own memories and experiences.
In his book “Ferocious Reality,” Eric Ames offers an insightful, well organized, and readable study of Werner Herzog’s documentary work that explores the director’s earliest films as well as his most recent ones.
Arts Commentary: What Historical Fiction Can Teach Us About America