If further proof were needed that revolutionary terrorists are basically narcissists, it can be found in Carlos, a monumental, and absolutely mesmerizing, film about Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the notorious Venezuelan bomber and radical known as Carlos the Jackal. Director Olivier Assayas' five-and-a-half-hour epic, which will be shown in three parts on the Sundance Channel beginning Oct. 11, followed by a simultaneous theatrical and video-on-demand release starting Oct. 15, is a powerful and complex look into the mind of a terrorist and the entities — governmental and non — that supported ... Read More
‘Howl’: Sex, Poetry and America in the ’50s
September 21, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
October 7, 1955. A 29-year old poet named Allen Ginsberg takes to the stage at San Francisco’s Six Gallery and begins to read: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix…” The poem was “Howl,” now universally regarded as one of the great American literary works of the 20th century and a touchstone of the Beat movement. But Ginsberg’s creation was important for another reason — it spawned The People v. Ferlinghetti, one of the seminal obscenity cases in ... Read More
You Can’t Paper Over the Plastic
August 27, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
When we throw something away, where exactly is “away”? The new documentary Bag It notes that “just because something is disposable doesn’t mean it goes away. After all, where is away? There is no away.” Plastic bags and their one-use disposable plastic kin will, like death and taxes, be with us always. And like taxes, there always seems to be more and more plastic debris. In the United States, for example, Americans use an average of 500 plastic bags per person a year — or 60,000 every five minutes. Bags not your bag? How about the 2 million plastic bottles consumed every ... Read More
‘A Film Unfinished’ Focuses on Nazi Documentary
August 15, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
No matter what crime, perversity or act of madness the Nazis committed, there's always a new one to be uncovered. Case in point is A Film Unfinished, a documentary currently opening around the country in which filmmaker Yael Hersonski deconstructs 60 minutes of unedited propaganda footage shot by the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942. On the surface, the scenes in the unfinished film, snippets of which were used for years as generic footage in Holocaust-related documentaries, look like the real deal: mass street sequences, people unconcernedly passing by the bodies of those who have ... Read More
It’s the End of the World as We Blow It
July 19, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The film Countdown to Zero might be one of the most frightening movies ever made, and it doesn’t feature a single vampire, zombie, biological mutant or alien slime thing. Just a bunch of talking heads discussing the possibility of nuclear terrorism, war or accident. Scary. Very, very scary. The film, which opens July 23 in New York and Washington, followed by a national rollout, is both a condensed history of nuclear weaponry and a sober analysis of contemporary nuclear issues. Produced by Lawrence Bender, the same man behind Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary’s ... Read More
Sebastian Junger Brings AfPak to Big Screen
June 24, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Journalist Sebastian Junger says he's "not going to spend another year with a unit at a remote outpost getting shot at," and after seeing Restrepo, which opens June 25 in New York and Los Angeles, you can understand why. The film, which Junger co-directed with Tim Hetherington, won the Documentary Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival and is a companion piece to War, Junger's best-selling book about being embedded for more than a year with the soldiers of Second Platoon, Battle Company in Afghanistan's distant and incredibly dangerous Korengal Valley. Shot on ... Read More
‘Harlan’ Documentary Examines Nazi-Era Film Director
March 6, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
If Jud Suss — Rise and Fall, recently shown at the Berlin Film Festival, takes the story of the most notorious anti-Semitic film ever made and paints it in melodramatic terms, then Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Suss, a documentary currently opening around the country, is its historical antidote. Directed by Felix Moeller, the film is the mesmerizing story of Veit Harlan, the most famous director of the Nazi era, whose rabidly anti-Jewish 1940 film Jew Suss was not only a huge European hit, but was required viewing for all S.S. soldiers and has left a legacy that his children and ... Read More
Cloaking a No-No As a Win-Win
February 21, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
If The Art of the Steal sounds like the title of a caper flick, in a sense, that’s what Don Argott’s documentary is. The film, which opens around the country in late February, is definitely about a theft. But it is really about the way in which a city, state and billion-dollar charitable trust managed to legally steal the world’s most important private art collection and move it from the place where it had been housed for more than 80 years, so it could serve as a tourist attraction. “This story is a small example of what happens when we put money above everything else,” says ... Read More
Review: The Importance of Being Not So Earnest
November 17, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
As far as Philippe Diaz is concerned, the issue of world poverty is a simple mathematical problem. "If we consume 30 percent more than the planet can regenerate, it means for us in the Northern Hemisphere to maintain our lifestyle, we have to plunge more people in the Southern Hemisphere into poverty. We have [an economic] system that is digging a bigger hole every year." Diaz is the writer-director of The End of Poverty? a documentary that opens throughout the country over the next several months. His film spends 104 minutes attempting to explain how this all happened. In this case, that ... Read More
