Docs in Review/Archive
I’m taking a break from writing and publishing reviews. Past reviews of documentaries from my perspective as a filmmaker working outside the industry echo chamber, are included here.
1/poor 2/nothing remarkable 3/worth noting 4/memorable 5/excellent
Our Daily Bread
Director: Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Watched on: DVD, Rating: 4.5/5. I would time your viewing of Our Daily Bread thoughtfully. The film will most likely influence your upcoming trip to the grocery store. It may ruin your next meal. It will most certainly kill your appetite. A German-Austrian production directed and shot by Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Our Daily Bread contains no narration, talking heads, characters, music, special effects, or on-screen graphics, including location identifiers. The entire movie consists of magnificently composed, dynamically rendered scenes of food production. From farm fields to greenhouses to cattle cars to slaughterhouses, we watch–sometimes in disbelief, but [...]
Salt of the Earth
Directors: Wim Wenders, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, Watched in: Theaters, Rating: 3/5. The casualties of war, oppression, poverty and religious zealotry confront all of us in the photographs of Sebastião Salgado, whose remarkable career is the subject of the documentary The Salt of the Earth. Salgado has witnessed the horrific aftermaths of genocide, the terrible cruelty of famine, the awful exploitation of workers, and he has captured these distinctly human evils with a deep-focused, exquisite eye. His pictures are magnificent and monumental, and usually expensively printed in coffee table books or displayed in art museums. One can find compressed versions [...]
Marley
Director: Kevin Macdonald, Watched on: Cable On-Demand, Rating: 1.5/5. I knew going into Marley, the documentary about the life of the late reggae superstar, that there was no way this or any film would be able to match the transformative allure and muscular power of the man’s music. So there was already a benefit-of-the-doubt halo around the project that almost demands an uncritical embrace of its approach to the subject matter. But I was not prepared for how conventional and bland Marley is. Clocking in at 144 minutes, this overstuffed fatty of a documentary carries the heavy gloss of [...]
Man on Wire
Director: James Marsh, Watched in: Theater, Rating: 4/5. Man on Wire contains the suspense of a whodunit, the tension of a heist film, and the poetry of a ballet. It tells the story of Phillipe Petit, a Frenchman who could be the greatest high wire walker of all time. But this is no biography, or hagiography, and there is no built-in competition to provide us with a formulaic climax. Petit’s only competition is with his own notion of failure. As a young man he followed the construction of the Twin Towers in Manhattan, and decided that yes, in 1974, [...]
Life Itself
Director: Steve James, Watched on: DVD, Rating: 2/5. The late film critic Roger Ebert would have appreciated seeing the movie made from his memoir, Life Itself, available on both theater screens and television at the same time. He was enthusiastically democratic about movies. He loved exposing everybody to all kinds of films–the silly and the sublime, the blockbusters and the indies–and his enduring legacy was his ability to talk and write intelligently about movies without coming off as pompously intellectual. The popular movie review program he hosted with Gene Siskel, At The Movies, may have dumbed down the critical [...]
Inequality For All
Director: Jason Kornbluth, Watched in: Theater, Rating: 3/5. Working in the same mode as 2006’s An Inconvenient Truth, director Jason Kornbluth’s Inequality For All expands a series of lectures by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich into a full-length documentary. The subject is not global warming. It’s the widening income gap in America. But like Al Gore’s eye-opening assessment of climate change, Reich’s pronouncements are just as alarming. Both movies could be catalogued within a growing sub-genre of the documentary field labeled “the enlightenment of approaching doom.” Reich is a likeable, self-effacing, humorous and intelligent guide through the brambles of [...]
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Director: Werner Herzog, Watched in: Theater, Rating: 2.5/5. In 1994, three explorers stumbled upon a series of caves in Southern France that contained an amazing array of 30,000 year old drawings: charcoal renderings of lions, bears, rhinos, and horses, expertly etched on smooth, curved walls of stone. The pictures reveal a reverence for nature and motion and the creative spirit in the artists who drew them, the same qualities shared by the 21st century filmmaker, Werner Herzog, who was granted limited but exclusive access to the caves for Cave of Forgotten Dreams, shot in 3D. Working in tight spaces with a [...]
Montage of Heck
Director: Brett Morgen, Watched in: Theater, Rating: 2.5/5. Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck is named for a mix tape the musician made in his misfit years, when he was spending days on end in his apartment scrapbooking a vision of himself. He would draw, scribble in journals, paste cutouts from magazines, play guitar, listen to his favorite bands, and write lists of the things he loved, hated, needed to do, or looked forward to doing. These were private manifestos of rage and dreams and wishful thinking, cobbled together when he had no idea he would eventually become a rock star [...]
Circo
Director: Aaron Schock, Watched on: Netflix, Rating: 4.5/5. The little seen film Circo is a picaresque tale of a traveling Mexican circus made by a first-time feature filmmaker. I happened to read about the movie in a magazine before I realized it had been been kicking around Netflix for almost a year. Beautifully shot, simply told, and wonderfully immersive, this is the rare documentary that has no activist agenda, topical issue or political ax to grind. Director Aaron Schock made 8 trips to Mexico over a period of 21 months to document the itinerant lifestyle of the Ponce family circus, a [...]
Encounters at the End of the World
Director: Werner Herzog, Watched in: Theater, Rating: 2.5/5. Encounters at the End of the World is middle of the road Werner Herzog. It’s a for-hire job that allows him to rant about us lesser humans who don’t live in extreme temperatures and risk death every day, who have regular jobs, families, kids, mortgages, etc. That’s usually okay with me. I go to Herzog for his oblique portraits of absurd risk-takers, people who dwell in the last remaining hut on the nexus of civilization, obsession, and madness. My problem with Encounters at the End of the World is that Herzog’s gaze settles [...]