Tag: indie film

Screening Room: ‘Human Flow’

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Ai Weiwei’s new documentary expands from his earlier efforts—provocative artmaking in China under political persecution—to take in the massive subject of refugees, more of whom are now coursing over borders than at any time since the end of World War II.

Human Flow opens in limited release tomorrow. My review is at Film Journal International:

Human Flow is possibly the most visually resplendent piece of nonfiction cinema you will see this year. With this movie, multidisciplinary artist and occasional political enfant terrible Ai Weiwei has made a crucially important visual and philosophical document of the modern refugee crisis…

Here’s the trailer:


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Screening Room: New York Film Festival, Part One

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The 55th New York Film Festival started up last week and runs through October 15. It remains to be seen just how much of a bellwether it will be for showcasing the year’s most likely award contenders. But so far, it’s off to a strong start. Here’s some reviews of what’s been showing so far:

  • The Florida Project (pictured above; opens in theaters October 6) — Kids run rampant in a down-at-the-heel Florida motel in the shadow of Disneyworld in this Oscar-likely bittersweet comedy with Willem Dafoe from the director of Tangerine. Review here.
  • No Stone Unturned — Suspenseful true-crime documentary from the director of Going Clear and Zero Day about a long-unsolved politically motivated multiple murder in Northern Ireland. Review here.
  • The Rape of Recy Taylor — This bluesy, ghostly documentary uses a harrowing decades-old crime for a powerful look at racial and sexual exploitation in the Old South. Review here.

Screening Room: ‘Lucky’

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In Lucky, Harry Dean Stanton plays an aged loner coming to terms with mortality in a small desert town. He smokes, wanders, sings in a beautifully ragged way, and dispenses whacked-out Zen koans about life. In other words, a not-so-out-there version of Stanton himself. Also, David Lynch plays a man in a white suit who is upset over losing his best friend, a tortoise.

All in all, it’s a fitting sendoff for the great actor, who passed away earlier this month at the age of 91.

Lucky is opening this week in limited release. My review is at Film Journal International:

…there is something in [Stanton’s] wide, seeking eyes, hollow cheeks and storyteller’s presence that made him seem like some wasteland troubadour long before Wim Wenders had him amble out of the sandy flats at the start of Paris, Texas. It’s fitting, then, that he spends most of John Carroll Lynch’s directorial debut, Lucky, walking the streets of a small desert town and communicating as little as is absolutely necessary. Sure, Stanton might be from Kentucky originally, but he wears a cowboy’s hat, jeans and boots as though he were born in them…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘The Commune’

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In the 1970s, communal living was all the rage in parts of Scandinavia. That’s the backdrop for The Commune, a drama about the ensuing entanglements and confusions from Danish director and Dogme 95 co-founder Thomas Vinterberg (The Hunt).

The Commune opens this week in limited release. My review is at Film Journal International:

I’m bored,” Anna (the superb Trine Dyrholm) says to her husband Erik (Ulrich Thomsen). “I need to hear someone else speak.” There are subtler ways to communicate middle-aged ennui to one’s husband, but that’s how the characters tend to speak in The Commune; if they’re not repressing themselves, they’re erupting. The movie follows what happens after Anna’s spur-of-the-moment declaration. Things go sideways, of course, but not in the ways one might imagine…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Abacus: Small Enough to Jail’

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The newest documentary from Steve James (Hoop Dreams), Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, opens this week in limited release and should be running soon on PBS. My review is at Film Journal International:

For his first feature-length documentary since Life Itself, Steve James takes on one of the great unknown stories of the housing market crash. Following the detonation in 2007 and 2008 of the toxic subprime mortgages that had been inflating the profits of financial institutions and the subsequent government bailout, there was a hue and cry for at least some heads of those firms to face criminal charges … No matter how loud those calls were, though, ultimately no financial-industry institution was ever put on trial for anything relating to the greatest market collapse since the Great Depression. Except, that is, for the family-run Abacus Federal Savings Bank in New York’s Chinatown…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Elian’

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In 1999, a five-year-old Cuban boy was plucked from the waters off Florida. The story that followed was part international incident, part domestic political soap opera, and all spectacle.

CNN’s ‘Elian’ documentary is opening this week in limited release. My review is at Film Journal International:

[The 1990s] saw the 24/7 news cycle roar to life in spectacularly messy fashion through round-the-clock coverage of everything from the O.J. Simpson and JonBenet Ramsey cases to the siege in Waco, Texas. Like those other media tsunami, the Elián Gonzalez case stormed in from nowhere, tore everything to pieces, and was gone before anybody knew what had happened. It started with a five-year-old boy found clinging to an innertube off the coast of Florida and ended with federal agents storming into a Little Havana house, assault rifles at the ready. Tim Golden and Ross McDonnell’s Elián tells the stranger-than-fiction story of what happened not just in between but afterward…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: Tribeca Film Festival

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The 2017 edition of the Tribeca Film Festival wraps up this weekend. As ever, the programmers have culled a potent batch of nonfiction movies, some of which should eventually make their way to a theater near you. In some cases they’ll be showing on TV.

Here’s a few highlighted documentaries that I reviewed for The Playlist:

Screening Room: ‘After the Storm’

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The newest movie from Hirokazu Kore-eda, After the Storm, opened this week in limited release. My review is at PopMatters:

When is success or hunting for it a trap? Is it better to have dreamed of great things and fallen short or to have never had ambitions at all? Those are a couple of the questions that Hirokazu Kore-eda’s TV-like melodrama about wayward fathers and disappointed women After the Storm tangles with. Fortunately for the viewer, Kore-eda leaves those questions mostly hanging in the air and not verbalized, leaving the screen to a group of characters who are less like a family than a house of cards just waiting to be blown down by the typhoon everybody is waiting for to strike…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘I Am Jane Doe’

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iamjanedoe-poster

The documentary I Am Jane Doe opens this week in limited release.

My review is at Film Journal International:

Nobody would argue that Mary Mazzio’s I Am Jane Doe is not squarely situated in the advocacy documentary genre. It doesn’t pretend not to have a little interest in debating the issue at hand. Normally, that would be a negative. But when the issue is a website that appears to be making millions off prostitution, including the trafficking of underage girls, it can be difficult to find people willing to defend such practices on camera…

Here is the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘I Am Michael’

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James Franco and Zachary Quinto in 'I Am Michael'
James Franco and Zachary Quinto in ‘I Am Michael’

Based on a true story, I Am Michael stars James Franco as a gay activist who turns to Christianity and rejects everything about his past. It’s playing now in limited release. My review is at Film Journal International:

When we first see Michael Glatze (James Franco), trying to counsel a fellow young Christian terrified of his same-sex attractions, he initially seems supportive and gentle. The kind of preacher who reaches out, rather than condemns. Even when he says that “gay doesn’t exist,” it scans as nonjudgmental. But when he gets to the leading question, “You want to go to heaven, right?” it’s obvious that Glatze is not going to be that kind of Christian…

Here is the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Paterson’

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paterson1

One of the most surprising and rewarding movie treats of 2016 is Jim Jarmusch’s quirky yet heartfelt Paterson, about a poetry-writing bus driver in New Jersey. It reminds you not just how great Jarmusch can be but renews your faith in a particular brand of American independent filmmaking.

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

Proudly reinforcing the at-times under-siege notion that there is great, grasping life yet in American filmmaking, Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson is a simple story told with power, complexity and vision. Like many of the Frank O’Hara or William Carlos Williams poems that the film’s namesake protagonist (Adam Driver) reads and re-reads, the film is a poignant portrait of the mundane, a singing symphony of the everyday. It’s also a comedy, a romance, a paean to American post-industrial resilience, and a sublimely enjoyable work of art about a bus driver who writes poems that he doesn’t seem to care if anybody ever reads. There’s a lot here, folded like tightly coiled wires under the seemingly placid surface…

Here’s the trailer.

Screening Room: ‘I, Daniel Blake’

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i-daniel-blake1

In Ken Loach’s searing new drama, an out-of-work carpenter fights to keep his humanity and a shred of dignity after being thrown into the Kafkaesque world of the UK’s social services bureaucracy.

I, Daniel Blake is playing now in limited release and is worth seeking out. My review is at PopMatters:

In many ways, I, Daniel Blake is as shamelessly manipulative as the most reductive romantic comedy or melodrama. Daniel might be the single most decent and loveable human being to grace a movie screen during the whole of 2016. At his side is a similarly decent single mother whose tearful travails are the stuff of a 19th-century immigrant’s saga. Together they contend with petty bureaucrats who never miss an opportunity to let their rulebooks and prickly egos keep them from doing their jobs. It’s David versus Goliath, only David doesn’t use a slingshot because he’s just too nice a bloke…

Here is the trailer.

Screening Room: ‘Bobby Sands: 66 Days’

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bobby_sands_66_days

Bobby Sands: 66 Days is a sharp new documentary about the IRA hero’s world-gripping 1981 hunger strike and how it encapsulated the feverish passions of the Protestant-Catholic “Troubles.”

It’s playing now in limited release. My review is at Film Journal International:

Northern Ireland was still convulsing after years of strife. As Byrne’s dense weave of televisual archive footage shows, the form of battle ranged from peaceful marches to assassinations and running street skirmishes pitting gangs of rock- and Molotov cocktail-armed Catholic youth against British soldiers and a primarily Protestant police force. But for a few details, the footage of a city in free-fall could have been shot anywhere from Berlin circa 1945 to Aleppo today: children playing in burnt-out cars and rubble-strewn fields, the few standing walls covered in political graffiti…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘All Governments Lie’

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Yallgovernmentslie1ou would imagine from the title of the new documentary All Governments Lie, that it’s an investigation of, well, government corruption. But that’s only a sideline in this barn-burner about corporate media’s apparent inability to hold those lying politicians to account.

All Governments Lie is playing now in limited release. My review is at Film Journal International:

If you take everything in Fred Peabody’s screed All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception, and the Spirit of I.F. Stone at face value, then you might as well cancel your New York Times subscription. Don’t read the Washington Post either. PBS’ “Frontline” and CBS’ “60 Minutes”? Garbage, the lot of them! That’s the takeaway from this narrowcast documentary, which takes a valid critique of the deadening effect corporate-government synergy can have on mainstream media’s ability to truly afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted and undercuts it with poor logic and simplistic argument…