Sicko documentary review: calling the peasants to revolt
Make no mistake: *Sicko* is an explicit call for revolution, and it is a profound and horrifying one.
documentary
Tribeca ’07: The Gates (review)
You will hear, Let them eat gates. I can’t imagine a better choice for the closing-night film of the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival: The Gates — a stunning, beautiful, deeply moving documentary about the art project by installation artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude — will have its world premiere on Saturday night with a gala screening. … more…
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (review)
Sacha Baron Cohen is a genius. A crazy genius, maybe, a man who takes dedication to his art to a level courting criminal prosecution and bodily harm, but a genius nevertheless.
Thin (review)
I thought I had issues with food — I just like it too much. But to see the four women portrayed in Lauren Greenfield’s startling documentary Thin is to see people at war not only with food but with their own minds and bodies.
Rize (review)
You’ve heard of the great war between the Los Angeles gangs the Crips and the Bloods, right? But have you heard of the longstanding rivalry between the Clowns and the Krumpers? Neither had I, and I felt a bit like slinking down in my seat in embarrassment while watching *Rize,* the powerfully moving new documentary about this Southern California dance craze.
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (review)
This is it right here, people: the ‘ownership society’ our so-called leaders think we ‘deserve,’ an unregulated, unpoliced Wild West of corporate hegemony. Fraud, greed, arrogance, powermongering? All part of the game, folks, all part of the game. It’s every man for himself, the way God intended, and God help you if you were so fucking stupid that you let yourself be born with anything less than a platinum spoon in your mouth and powerful connections out the wazoo. Cuz most of us are gonna end up serfs if this stuff continues.
The Corporation (review)
Corporations on the Couch Did you know there were water riots in Bolivia in early 2000? Poor urban Bolivians actually took to the streets over water… not because there wasn’t enough to go around but because the American construction and engineering firm Bechtel had taken over the country’s privatized water infrastructure, including — and here’s … more…
In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mysterious Life and Art of Henry Darger (review)
The term “outside artist” has never been so apropos, or so wistfully sad, as it is in the case of Henry Darger, who spent his childhood in a home for “feeble-minded children” and his adulthood in near seclusion, working as a janitor and, in secret, on a 15,000-page novel with accompanying — and epic — … more…
Bright Leaves (review)
Who’d have thunk that a freeform meditation on tobacco, family, and filmmaking would be so compelling? Documentarian Ross McElwee, whose great grandfather helped launch the tobacco industry, returns to his childhood home of North Carolina to meander through an exploration of his heritage, but “documentary” isn’t quite the word to describe the result — it’s … more…
The Fog of War documentary review
Or, as the subtitle explains it, Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. Oh, how I wish we could force the current administration to experience master documentarian Errol Morris’s latest miracle…
