For those who view the idea of making a movie as a daunting quest, the documentary Quest serves as yet another reminder that all one needs is camera equipment and life itself.
Category: Remember All the Movies, Terry, We’d Go See
ARTHUR MILLER: WRITER (Rebecca Miller)
Rebecca Miller is a consummate filmmaker, known as an independent darling for such films as The Ballad of Jack and Rose, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, and Maggie’s Plan.
JUST GETTING STARTED (Ron Shelton)
Morgan Freeman is to geriatric group comedies as Liam Neeson is to offspring-rescuing action movies. Which is to say, they’re the goddamn masters of each.
Off to the Races…
Even though the Academy Award’s history of choosing abominable Best Picture winners dates back to this venerable institution’s inception, my first memory of living through a truly confounding upset belongs to Crash beating Brokeback Mountain. A few years later, when The King‘s Speech somehow took the prize from The Social Network, I vowed never to care about the Oscars again.
Will and George, Alec and Donald, Jim and Andy…and Tony
Will Ferrell’s You’re Welcome America: A Final Night With George W. Bush is my favorite Broadway production that I never actually experienced in person.
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A Primer: LAST FLAG FLYING (Richard Linklater)
Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying is the type of film that I fear people will walk away from asking, “So what?”
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THELMA (Joachim Trier)
Thelma, Norway’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, falls prey to a common pitfall of the horror and sci-fi genres: it withholds basic information to drum up artificial suspense.
2017 Rewind: RISK (Laura Poitras)
Potentially my hottest take of 2017: Laura Poitras’ Academy Award-winning Citzenfour from 2014 is worse than Risk, her follow-up released earlier this year.
THE BREADWINNER (Nora Twomey)
The Breadwinner is the rare sort of animated movie whose story could feasibly translate to the realm of live action.
2017 Rewind: ABACUS: SMALL ENOUGH TO JAIL (Steve James)
Even the worst documentaries tend to be able to maintain an audience’s attention because most chronicle interesting stories; why would someone go through the trouble of making one about a boring subject (this generalization of course precludes navel-gazing personal autobiographies). As such, when evaluating them, I try to focus more on the strength of the storytelling instead of the strength of the story.
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Write All Nite 