Tag: documentaries

Screening Room: Docs to Watch Out For

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Festivals, Film - New, Film-DocumentaryLeave a comment

Last week’s online edition of the AFI DOCS film festival featured premieres of several documentaries that will be worth keeping your eyes peeled for later in the year when they hit broader release. I reviewed two of them for The Playlist.

  • 9to5: The Story of a Movement (pictured above): “Even in our supposedly more enlightened times, when people hear the word ‘labor,’ they are likely to conjure up a predictable set of mental images: Burly white guys in hard hats…”
  • White Noise: “A queasily riveting documentary that puts the audience far closer than comfort to some of the worst people in the world…”

Screening Room: Human Rights Watch Film Festival

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Festivals, Film - New, Film-DocumentaryLeave a comment

The 2020 edition of the always worthwhile Human Rights Watch Film Festival is going virtual this year, like everything else. It’s a shorter than normal list of documentaries, but still contains some sharp and unforgettable work.

The movies range from Coded Bias (pictured above), which studies the ways white male coders can embed prejudice in seemingly impartial algorithms, to Welcome to Chechnya, a harrowing nonfiction thriller about the activists fighting to get LGBTQ people out of Chechnya before they are tortured and killed, to Radio Silence, a taut story about a Mexico City journalist being hounded by a government that cares more about investigating her than actual criminals.

My coverage of the festival is at PopMatters:

In a time when specialty movie events have been ever more narrowly targeted (festivals devoted to food, puppetry, and so on down the rabbit hole of monomania), the HRWFF went large. It served as a global snapshot of how humanity was faring in the fight to uphold basic standards of freedom and decency for its people. The unsurprising answer tends to be a variant on: Not well…

Screening Room: Still a Big World Out There

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New, Film-DocumentaryLeave a comment

I reviewed two great new documentaries for Eyes Wide Open:

Good documentaries tell you a story; the great ones open your eyes. But even the most mediocre nonfiction movies serve a purpose: They provide a snapshot in time for what people in a particular place were doing, thinking, and planning. Or, to use another metaphor, they open a window into lives different than our own…

Screening Room: Oscar-Nominated Documentary Shorts

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Awards, Film-DocumentaryLeave a comment

stlouissuperman1
‘St. Louis Superman’

The 2020 edition of the Oscar-Nominated shorts program is hitting theaters next week.

My review of the five-part documentary program, nearly all of which are fantastic if sometimes hard to watch, was published at PopMatters:

When assessing a short-film anthology, sometimes a theme presents itself and other times you have to go looking for one. The movies in The 2020 Oscar-Nominated Short Films: Documentary come from places far and wide, presenting an array of tones and personalities. But the thread that seems to link all of them together is worry that the future will not be an improvement on the problematic present…

Screening Room: ‘Do You Trust This Computer?’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New, Film-Documentary, UncategorizedLeave a comment
doyoutrust1 ‘Do You Trust This Computer?’ (Papercut Films)

The new documentary from Chris Paine (Who Killed the Electric Car?) takes on a far more mistrusting topic of technology, namely: What’s artificial intelligence going to do to us as a species?

Do You Trust This Computer? is playing now. My review is at Film Journal International:

The delicious danger of malevolent machines has been an attractive science-fiction standby ever since R.U.R., Karel Capel’s 1920 play about a robot rebellion. There are a couple of problems with that statement, both of which are obliquely referenced in Chris Paine’s stylistically monotonous but occasionally thought-provoking documentary Do You Trust This Computer?…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘RBG’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New, Film-DocumentaryLeave a comment

(Courtesy of CNN Films)

For anybody who hasn’t read The Notorious RBG or hasn’t been keeping up on their social media updates for the past couple years, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the most buzzy octogenarian Supreme Court justice in the land. The new documentary RBG helps explains why. It opens this week.

My review is at PopMatters:

Here’s a fun fact to be gleaned from Betsy West and Julie Cohen’s breathlessly laudatory documentary RBG: According to her children, Ginsburg doesn’t know how to turn on her TV. This is a lifelong overachiever, a woman who made Law Review at Harvard in the ’50s when the number of the school’s female law students could be counted on two hands. Ginsburg is busy working out, attending the opera, and staying up until four in the morning working on cases and writing opinions. This is not a woman given to flipping channels looking for a Friends rerun…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: Outrages and Miracles at DOC NYC

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Festivals, Film - New, Film-DocumentaryLeave a comment

The eighth DOC NYC film festival continues through this Thursday, with more movies than you would ever have time to see. My coverage of the festival continues over at Film Journal International‘s Screener blog:

Picking your way among the choices at DOC NYC 2017 is a rewarding but sometimes daunting task. There are documentaries about strife in the Middle East, the cats of Istanbul, a science-fiction utopia in Minnesota, a Golden Age of Hollywood hustler, and how an animated store clerk has driven a standup comedian insane for years. Opening the schedule to a random page works too…

 

Screening Room: ’13th’ and Trump

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film-Documentary, politicsLeave a comment

 

13th-poster

Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th lays out in stark terms the history of black oppression in America after emancipation, from Klan terrorism to the modern carceral state. It also places this history in very current terms, tying the reactionary racism of Donald Trump’s movement to the segregationist battle against the civil rights movement.

13th is playing in some theaters and is also available on Netflix. My review is at Eyes Wide Open:

Slavery was outlawed by the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. Even though America spent its early centuries underpinning its economy with slavery in the South (captive labor) and the North (trading in both those slaves and the goods they produced), after the nations bloodiest conflict, it finally listened to Lincolns better angels and made forced labor a thing of the past. That remains true except, as Ava Duvernay’s spring-coiled and crucial documentary 13th makes painfully clear, for one exception…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Welcome to Leith’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Festivals, Film - New, Film-DocumentaryLeave a comment

'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:

Department of Shameless Self-Promotion: ‘Eyes Wide Open 2013’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Film - Awards, Omnium GatherumLeave a comment

'Upstream Color': One of the year's best movies that didn't make it onto the Oscar shortlist
‘Upstream Color’: One of the year’s great movies that didn’t make it onto the Oscar shortlist

Just in time for the upcoming Academy Awards but way too late for the SAG Awards, Golden Globes, and just about every movie awards ceremony that means anything, here comes the newest iteration of my now-annual Best-Of and Worst-Of compilation: Eyes Wide Open 2013: The Year’s 25 Greatest Movies (and 5 Worst).

Eyes_Wide_Open_2013-_Cover_for_KindleThe title should be basically self-explanatory, but here’s the gist of it: I pulled together what I thought were the 25 best films from 2013—trying best as I could to cover the gamut from the awards magnets that actually deserved the accolades like 12 Years a Slave to lesser-seen fare like Stories We Tell, Upstream Color, and A Touch of Sin. I also threw in some other odds and ends like notable DVD reviews, shorter appreciations of great movies that didn’t get into the top 25, great quotes, and of course, the year’s 5 worst films.

2013 was a good year all in all, so the 25 best was much harder to compile than the 5 worst. A nice surprise, for once.

You can buy the book now either in handy-dandy ebook formats here and here. There’s also a paperback edition available here.