Fire of Love Director/ Sara Dosa Watched on Hulu Rating 4/5   A tantalizing trove of archival footage anchors this ruminative love story of two French volcanologists, Katia and Maurice Krafft, who risked their lives to study and film the way volcanoes evolve from placid dormancy to fiery eruptions. They died in 1991 while recording a Japanese volcano–no spoiler there, since this information is available on the film’s home page–but in their twenty-year partnership and love affair they became that most unique of couples: two people who found each other through the thing they loved the most, and who shared an unspoken pact that they could and quite likely would die pursuing their obsession to the ends of the earth. A passion this singular requires a singular approach, and director Sara Dosa manages to craft a complete and sometimes thrilling film out of archival b-roll and outtakes and old television interviews, inserting a perfectly odd batch of narrative observations from narrator Miranda July to fill in a few blanks, and rounding it out with the rare documentary soundtrack (by Nicolas Godin) that compliments the story rather than irritates the viewer. It’s also the (increasingly) rare documentary that doesn’t attempt to make some world-changing statement nor manufacture a third act surprise. Katia and Maurice were in love, eschewing domesticity and children, and getting closer and closer to hot spewing lava as if the stuff were a third character that they needed to know intimately. That should be enough for any film. It’s perhaps a happy accident that [...]

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed Director/ Laura Poitras Watched on Amazon Rating 3/5   Two compelling story lines compete for the attention of both the audience and the director in Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. One narrative is a straightforward biography of photographer Nan Goldin’s career. The other narrative is a less straightforward, but still rather basic, depiction of the protests Goldin and fellow activists organized to force art institutions to stop taking philanthropic donations from the notorious Oxycontin-pushing Sackler family and to force the removal of the Sackler name from the rooms and galleries within those institutions. Before watching the film, a quick internet check will reveal the success of their activism, which renders any dramatic pay-off from these scenes moot. So, as an audience, we watch the mechanics of that activism in action: casual meetings in living rooms, street protests in front of museums, and flash mob-type ambushes within the museums, with people staging die-ins and throwing empty Oxycontin pill bottles from balconies. These scenes have the intended effect; they are bracing in their immediacy and boldness, and you applaud and identify with the righteous cause. But as cinema, the scenes have little to offer. The same is true of the biography part of the film. Since the film was co-produced and narrated by Goldin (and probably co-directed by her as well), Poitras’ role is one of serviceable collaboration. There is nothing remarkable in the filmmaking, since Goldin’s photographs are remarkable enough: stark documentary portraits of misfit New Yorkers struggling [...]