Category: Film – Festivals

Screening Room: ‘Do Not Resist’

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do not resist1

Following the Ferguson riots of 2014, there was a brief moment where the county noticed that all of a sudden, its police departments—stuffed with billions of dollars worth of military surplus and bristling with body armor, assault rifles, and make-my-day attitude—were looking more like a domestic military.

Craig Atkinson’s sober, occasionally terrifying Do Not Resist keeps the spotlight on the militarization of American police forces. It’s screening tomorrow night at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York and should be showing up around the country in more festival dates.

My review is at Eyes Wide Open:

The film starts in the tear gas-fogged streets of Ferguson, Missouri during the riots of August 2014 that followed the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, a black teenager, by a white police officer. As the St. Louis County police department tries to clear the streets of protestors, their body armor and gas masks, plus their hulking dark-green armored transports, turn the scene into something out of a war zone, not a Midwestern suburb…

Screening Room: ‘Hooligan Sparrow’

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This year’s Human Rights Watch Festival opens with a strong indictment of the institutional and moral corruption of modern-day China, as laid bare by a tiny insurgent band of determined women activists.

My review of Hooligan Sparrow, whose footage had to be smuggled out of China and which opens the festival this Friday in New York, is at Little While Lies.

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘The Witness’

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thewitness2

When 28-year-old Kitty Genovese was raped and murdered while walking home in Kew Gardens, Queens one night in 1964, the story spread that many of her neighbors heard the assault take place but did nothing to stop it. 

Her case became a totemic story of the apparent moral lassitude spreading across the country. James Solomon’s documentary about Genovese opens the case back up, to see what really happened.

The Witness is opening this week in limited release. My review is at Film Journal International.

Screening Room: ‘How to Let Go of the World…’

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howtoletgooftheworld1

The new environmental documentary from Josh Fox (Gasland) starts off as a terrifying plunge into what climate change will be doing to the Earth, and the human race, over the next few decades. But then Fox does something unusual: He tries to find what there is to be happy about in all this terrifying prognostication.

How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change is playing now in limited release. My review is at Film Journal International:

Josh Fox’s first two films—Gasland and Gasland Part II—were micro-targeted issue documentaries about the environmental dangers of fracking for natural gas, particularly near his home in upstate New York. So it makes sense that his newest film, How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change, would start off in the same vein. He opens on a shot of him dancing with a charming lack of rhythm to the Beatles’ “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.” It’s a way of celebrating the rare victory: After years of activism, fracking was outlawed in the Delaware River watershed…

Here’s the trailer:

Rewind: The Real Anita Hill Story

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anita-poster1Tonight, HBO is premiering Confirmation, their fictional take on the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1991. It was the first of the decades televised scandal melodramas, not least for the spectacle of the Senate’s hostile grilling of Anita Hill about her accusations of sexual harassment by Thomas.

Freida Lee Mock’s documentary Anita (2014) is an instructive take on Hill’s experience under the spotlight and how the resulting controversy changed the country.

My review is at Film Racket.

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Vaxxed,’ Film Fests, and Truth

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The Tribeca Film Festival, which has long been one of the country’s premier venues for new documentaries, ran into controversy recently when they pulled one of their films from the schedule. Vaxxed: From Coverup to Catastrophe is a documentary by Andrew Wakefield, one of the top pushers of the vaccines-cause-autism conspiracy theory. Not surprisingly, some people had a problem with this.

My article “Why the Tribeca Film Festival was Right to Pull Vaxxed‘ ran in the online edition of Little White Lies:

The argument to screen Vaxxed regardless of its relationship to the truth feels similar to that pushed by creationists who cloak their school agendas under the cloak of “teaching the controversy,” when in fact no actual controversy exists…

Screening Room: ‘The Witch’

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thewitch-posterA period creep-fest, The Witch dives into the surprisingly rarely-tilled soil of Puritan-era New England for its tale of possession, madness, and magic afflicting one isolated family.

The Witch opens this week in limited release. My review is at PopMatters:

A shiver machine that runs cool and low with spiritual trepidation and darkly sexual undercurrents, The Witch makes a daring choice. Set in 17th century New England, it wraps primary-sourced dialogue and folklore into a horror story. Writer-director Robert Eggers’ audacious debut imagines that the period’s harum-scarum fright tales about witches are all true. That is, the movie is true to how its subjects perceived their world, assuming that witches and their animal familiars worked as Satan’s agents on Earth, bringing ruination and uncertainty to the faithful…

You can see the trailer here:

Shameless Self-Promotion: ‘Eyes Wide Open: 2015’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Film - Awards, Film - Festivals, Film - Upcoming, Film-Documentary, Film-Foreign, OmniculturalLeave a comment

Since there just isn’t enough opinionating about film out there, yours truly reviews them on occasion for the odd website and magazine. Come each January for the past several years, with awards buzz percolating and everybody catching up on seeing the films they missed last fall, I have been publishing the Eyes Wide Open guide.

 

It’s most one of those thumbs-up (the 25 best) and thumbs-down (the 5 most mediocre) collections, with the odd DVD review and other miscellany tossed in for good measure, as well a look at why every other film out there seems to be a sequel.

Anecdotal evidence suggests the book is a handy thing to keep around when you’re looking at what’s playing in the local theater or browsing the new selections on Netflix, iTunes, or VOD.

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What made the cut? Films you’ve all heard of, like The Revenant, Spotlight, and The Big Short, plus a few not everyone has, like Experimenter and Mustang.

What didn’t make the cut? Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Bridge of Spies, to name a couple.

You can get Eyes Wide Open in ebook (Kindle, Nook, or other) or paperback.

Also, if you’re feeling Powerball lucky, you can enter here for the chance to win a free copy of the book.

Screening Room: ‘In Jackson Heights’

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Manhattan is just a half-hour away. (Zipporah Films)
Manhattan is just a half-hour away. (Zipporah Films)

The latest nonfiction opus from Frederick Wiseman is a portrait of the mind-bogglingly diverse Jackson Heights neighborhood in Queens (167 languages at last count). It’s a rich and endlessly fascinating study of what multicultural America really looks like.

In Jackson Heights is playing now in limited release and should make its way to PBS within the next year or so. My review is at PopMatters:

Frederick Wiseman’s In Jackson Heights doesn’t just celebrate a neighborhood; it immerses you in it. A working-class neighborhood in Queens, about a half-hour’s subway ride from Manhattan, Jackson Heights features a patchwork of ethnicities and an ever-transitioning gateway for immigrants looking to get a toehold in America. Home to so many thousands of the documented and undocumented immigrants living alongside a stewpot of native-borns, Jackson Heights is a living civics laboratory for the ever-evolving American experiment…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Room’

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Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay in 'Room' (A24)
Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay in ‘Room’ (A24)

Based on Emma Donoghue’s award-winning 2010 novel, Room is the story of a young woman being held captive in a small room with her five-year-old son, who has never seen anything of the world outside the room.

Room opened this week and is looking like an early favorite Oscar favorite, at least for Brie Larson as the mother. My review is at PopMatters.

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘The Walk’

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Philippe Petite (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) defies gravity in 'The Walk' (TriStar Pictures)
Philippe Petite (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) defies gravity in ‘The Walk’ (Sony Pictures)

In 1974, a lithe, clownish French tightrope artist named Philippe Petit strung a rope between the two towers of the World Trade Center and did a death-defying 45-minute act up there in the clouds, almost too high for people on the ground to see what he was doing. In The Walk, Robert Zemeckis translates that legendary bit of aerobatics into a 3D spectacle.

The Walk is opening this week in a limited 3D IMAX run, which is truly the way to take in its vertiginous heights, and then opens wider on October 9.

My review is at PopMatters:

Once upon a time, everything was not fenced off. Those who remember life in New York City before 9/11 will experience moments of cognitive dissonance while watching Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk. It’s jarring to see the Twin Towers again standing like steel sentinels over Manhattan. It’s stranger still to see people rushing through one of the lobbies while it’s still under construction… with nobody stopping them. The scene recalls a time when we didn’t think anyone would want to break in to the site or worse, want to destroy it…

You can also see my review of the 2008 documentary about Petit’s walk, Man on Wire, at Medium.

The trailer for The Walk is here:

Screening Room: ‘Welcome to Leith’

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'Welcome to Leith': The day the Nazis came to town. (First Run Features)
‘Welcome to Leith’: The day the Nazis came to town. (First Run Features)

In 2012, a white supremacist named Craig Cobb decided to buy up land in the small town of Leith, North Dakota. His plan was to create his own Aryan enclave. However, the neo-Nazis failed to heed Cobb’s call and ultimately he went to jail for terrorizing his neighbors. However, as this stunning new documentary shows, that’s not the whole story.

Welcome to Leith is playing now in limited release and will be expanding around the country throughout the fall. My review is at PopMatters:

Early in Welcome to Leith, Ryan Lenz, a researcher on hate groups for the Southern Poverty Law Center, describes his first visit to the Leith, North Dakota (pop: 24): “It was like B-roll for the Walking Dead.” That’s a description the townspeople probably wouldn’t care for, understandably. But one glance at the straggly trees, dirt roads, and abandoned houses set against the broad and intimidating expanse of the sweeping northern plains, and the average viewer might be tempted to agree…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution’

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"Power to the people" (PBS)
“Power to the people” (PBS)

After a series of documentaries that dug into the 20th century African American experience with uncommon power, Stanley Nelson (Jonestown, Freedom Riders) turns his gaze to the story of the country’s last great radical movement, and how it was destroyed just before falling apart.

My review of The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, which opens this week in limited release and will likely come to PBS sometime soon, is at PopMatters:

At some point, revolutionaries have to decide what else they want to be. Too often, they can’t. That’s why so many successful insurrections end up emulating the very same oppressive regimes they overthrow: fighters are often miserably bad peacemakers. That’s why Che Guevara ran off to die stupidly in Bolivia rather than figure out sugar cane production back in Cuba…

Here is the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Gueros’ – French New Wave in Mexico City

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'Gueros' (Kino Lorber)
‘Gueros’ (Kino Lorber)
Style doesn’t go out of style. That’s why directors around the world are still aping the French New Wave, in good and bad ways.

Güeros is a grab-bag of the right and wrong ways to appropriate the Nouvelle Vague’s stream-of-conscious plotting and jazzy rhythms. It did the festival circuit last year and is now getting a limited release. My review from the Tribeca Film Festival is at PopMatters:

[Güeros] gets a lot of traction from its mainly directionless young protagonists. They wander through Mexico City through a couple formless days backgrounded by worries about the future and uncertainty about their place and purpose in the present. It’s a film riddled and with questions and switchbacks, circling in on itself time and again…

Here’s the trailer.

Now Playing: ‘Slow West’

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Michael Fassbender and Kodi Smit-McPhee in 'Slow West' (A24)
Michael Fassbender and Kodi Smit-McPhee get acquainted in ‘Slow West’ (A24)

Slow West Final PosterA teenaged boy embarks on an epic journey to track down the woman he loves … and bad guys intervene.

Slow West is playing now in limited release. My review is at Film Journal International:

Indie westerns have blazed and snuck across screens for the past few years in a variety of flavors, from the lo-fi musings of Meek’s Cutoff to the bloody-minded vengeance of The Salvation. But none has been quite as surreptitiously odd and original as John Maclean’s Slow West. There are times when it plays as such a straightforward oater you wouldn’t be surprised to see a craggy Robert Duvall come riding up, Winchester rifle perched casually but authoritatively on his hip. At other moments the story slants sideways to resemble a loonier frontier-mad dream piece like Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja. It never quite stays in reach…

Here’s the trailer: