A decent, but unexceptional primer on the life and works of one of the most exalted American authors of the 20th century, Flannery follows a boilerplate documentary template of talking heads and narrated selections from the CV of its subject to offer up the kind of film that’s best viewed as a basic educational lesson.
The powerful and timely feature documentary film Don’t Be Nice from Radio Drama Network is now available on DVD and will be available on Apple TV, On Demand, and EST/TVOD everywhere on July 21st. The acclaimed film follows a New York City team of young African American, Afro-Hispanic, and queer slam poets as they fight to find the words to speak their truths to a nation awakening in Black Lives Matter protest and on the brink of a general election.
Photographer and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield has spent most of her professional career documenting people living affluent or outlandishly wealthy lifestyles, and with her latest feature film, Generation Wealth (opening in Toronto and Vancouver this Friday), she’s finally asking herself why that is.
For the documentary Sacred, director Thomas Lennon has cobbled together the footage of forty filmmaking teams from around the world to create a look at how religious beliefs impact daily life. It’s a great idea for a long-form series, or possibly a trilogy of movies based around the subjects and themes at hand, but it strains to find any sort of footing as a feature, despite a refreshing lack of posturing and a wealth of good intentions.
Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent is a vibrant, tense, moving, sometimes sad, often striking, and most of all, enlightening look at one of America’s most legendary, infamous, and influential chefs. The film peers back to a time when American cuisine was first taking shape, but the power of the story is in Tower’s own life story, and the forces that shaped his career.
Sloths, birds, Komodo dragons, lizards, and penguins, oh my! BBC Earth has arrived in Canada, and to mark its debut, the channel hosted a special premiere screening of Planet Earth II last night in Toronto at the Royal Ontario Museum with a few special guests, including series producer Elizabeth White, AsapSCIENCE hosts Mitchell Moffit and Greg Brown, and the ROM’s managing director, Centre of Discovery of Biodiversity, Dave Ireland.
Unlocking the Cage, the latest documentary from acclaimed veteran filmmaking duo Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker, takes a look at one man’s quest to grant certain animals the same rights as human beings.
The Iron Sheik is a legend of the WWF wrestling ring, and over two decades he played the part of the villain opposite Hulk Hogan’s shining good-guy routine. Khosrow Vaziri, the man behind the Iron Sheik persona, has a much larger story than playing the heel though, and it all comes out in the documentary, The Sheik.
Right now I’m finally watching Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story. I like his movies for what they are, but it is hard to call one of them a “documentary”. Compared to a film like Food, Inc. Moore’s films aren’t exactly “balanced”.
Looking back on 2009, I’ve been making notes on all of my favorite films of the year, and while I can’t really count Food, Inc. as one of the best DVD or Blu-ray releases, since it had little in the way of tremendous extra features, it was definitely one of the best documentaries.
