(Ed. Note: This was originally published in Image Facts.) In the production notes for To Be and To Have, Philibert writes: “I don’t know what you think but when it comes to summing up a documentary, all one can do is refer back to the subject. This invariably leads to such sentences as: it’s a film on […]
(Ed. Note: This was originally published in Image Facts.) “[Films are]…polemical statements against the American ‘barrel down’ cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption […]
(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Image Facts.) All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened. – Hemingway Mark Moskowitz tossed a copy of a book named The Stones of Summer in a box when he was a teenager. A review he had read of the book […]
(Ed. Note: This was originally published at The Matthew’s House Project.) 2003 was a great year for documentaries. Winged Migration took us to soaring technological heights, and exposed the beautiful minutiae of a broad range of biomes and habitats. Capturing the Friedmans took us to the unexpected depths of a sad and egregious depravity. Spellbound turned what seemed to be an exceedingly […]
(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Image Facts.) 25th Hour is such a good film that it helps us ignore a few its crippling flaws. The film is a devastating glimpse of the new New York, the one that has lost a bit of its swagger. It is a city whose affluence is now a matter […]
(Ed. Note: This was originally published at The Matthew’s House Project.) There is silence all around. The Baptist appears, and cries: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” Soon after that comes Jesus, and in the knowledge that He is the coming Son of Man lays hold of the wheel of the world to […]
(Ed. Note: This was originally published at The Matthew’s House Project.) “We are all angels. It is what we do with our wings that separates us.” (Yes, that is actually a line from the film…) Northfork is a deceptively simple story as bare as its 1950’s Montana backdrop. In a mostly vacant town about to be […]
(Ed. Note: This was originally published at The Matthew’s House Project.) Nothing sounds more depressing than a Scottish film made by Danish filmmakers. But thankfully, Scherfig has cast aside her Dogme 95 convictions for this film while somehow maintaining the same serendipitous melancholy she captured in Italian For Beginners. In Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, Scherfig’s […]
(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Matthew’s House Project.) Bob: Can you keep a secret? I’m trying to organize a prison break. We have to first get out of this bar, then the city, and then the country. Are you in or you out? Charlotte: I’m in. One of the first shots in Sophia Coppola’s […]