documentary
With his biopic “Orchestra of Exiles,” director Josh Aronson has done an at times awkward, but important, cut and paste job of history and biography.
Musician Patty Schemel’s slow climb to sobriety and wellness serves as the gripping backbone of the documentary “Hit So Hard,” to the point that it is difficult to believe that someone thumped so severely lived to tell her story.
“Portrait of Wally” makes for a wonderfully engaging documentary about art and postwar intrigue with stakes on both a personal and global scale.
Between the foibles and hopes of middle-age and the vast perfection of nature, the documentary Low and Clear finds its compelling rhythms and its poetry.
The new documentary,
Claude Lanzmann is a great raconteur who’s honed his narrative skills as a veteran journalist. His memoir is exuberant and provocative at its best; bombastic and superficial at its worst.
Award-winning filmmaker Helen Whitney: “My films form a kind of spiritual autobiography. I’m always searching for subjects that allow me to ask the big questions: Why are we here? Why must we die? Is this all there is?”
Paul Goodman was a professed anarchist — not the bomb-throwing kind, who believe destruction is foreplay to solution, but the anti-violent kind, deriving from the nineteenth century Russian thinker, Kropotkin, who espoused cooperation among free individuals.
The documentary “The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground” is pleasing to watch, but there are a number of ways of respecting as well as loving great artists, the most important being coming up with the chutzpah necessary to ask the tough questions that generate illuminating, inspiring, or interesting answers.
Arts Commentary: What Historical Fiction Can Teach Us About America