In American Pastoral, Parisian filmmaker Auberi Edler turns her lens to the rural central Pennsylvanian town of Elizabethtown in 2023, where a vitriolic school board race between a group of moderate incumbent Democrats and their far-right Christian Nationalist challengers rivets and divides the community. One could be excused for thinking there are few things more […]
There’s a great many incredibly striking ways to try and open one’s movie—and playing Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” over your opening credits might just take the cake. Not only is it a phenomenal song from a band and artist with deep ties to film, but it’s also lyrically ominous in ways that are both charming […]
Born in Flames is a film no one should miss, though too many have. An early-’80s salvo of guerrilla-style feminist filmmaking, it took its director Lizzie Borden (yes, she took her professional name from that Lizzie Borden) some five years of DIY work with a band of upstarts to complete, and then just barely earned […]
Two thousand twenty-three was a year of great food films and documentaries. Anh Hung Tran’s heart-warming and simple, yet supremely elegant and beautiful The Taste of Things and Frederick Wiseman’s fascinating documentary Menus-Plaisirs: Les Troisgros are just a couple of films that captured the audience’s imagination with their mouth-watering dishes and dedication shown to culinary art, reminding […]
“School sucks,” according to just about anyone who went through it, including Ethan Eng. At the time, Eng was a 17-year-old Cawthra Park Class of 2019 senior with some friends and a couple of cameras. His primary means of dealing with adolescent angst was to turn the lens on himself, his friends, and nearly every […]
Di—the 12-year-old girl at the center of Hà Lệ Diễm’s extraordinary documentary Children of the Mist—is in many ways a normal adolescent girl. Her village life rotates between chores and school, with her free time largely preoccupied by girl talk with her friends and what seem like innocuous flirtations with local boys. But in the […]
The opening scene in any documentary is crucial. Within minutes the filmmakers must establish, even for the most unfamiliar of viewers, the key subjects and setting, a set of traits, necessary exposition and background, and, ideally, one or more the film’s key themes. Bing Liu’s 2018 Minding the Gap is one example of a contemporary […]
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J Paul Johnson
James Y. Lee
Diana Tuova