Dir. Alex Gibney Alex Gibney is one of the clubhouse leaders in documentaries that make you shake your head and/or your fist at the screen as you watch. His skill is in clarifying potentially difficult storylines, making the corporate or technical or financial jargon of his stories into simply understood narratives. In a different time,… Read More Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005)
Dir. Godfrey Reggio. If there is one thing that I didn’t expect Koyaanisqatsi to make me do, it’s laugh. But it did. There’s that sequence in which we see how they make the hot dogs, or at least how the hot dogs come out of the machinery. They come down little ramps, cased together. Two men… Read More Koyaanisqatsi (1982)
Dir. Ari Folman The movie which is probably the clearest companion to Waltz with Bashir is Tower, the Keith Maitland documentary about the University of Texas shootings in 1966. Like Waltz with Bashir, Tower is primarily animated despite its status as documentary, and like Waltz with Bashir relies on interviews with witnesses to tell the story. They even end similarly: after… Read More Waltz with Bashir (2008)
Directed by Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker The War Room is a movie which I’m sure must have been just incredibly interesting when it came out in 1993, the year Bill Clinton became the forty-second president. How fun to see the behind-the-scenes work of the Clinton campaign as it scuffles through New Hampshire, walks away… Read More The War Room (1993)
Dir. Alex Garland. Starring Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac, Alicia Vikander Dir. Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin There are two things which really stand out about Free Solo. The first is that El Capitan is really tall, and the second is that Alex Honnold is not a likable person. I don’t want to pile on the guy, because… Read More Ex Machina (2015) and Free Solo (2018)
Dir. Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin. In 1949, Death of a Salesman premiered on Broadway, which on its most basic level is about a salesman who is too old and tired to go on the road any longer. The beginning of the play hints at Willy Loman’s exhaustion through that benighted car: Willy: I got… Read More Salesman (1969)
Dir. Ron Mann There’s nothing remotely Altmanesque about Altman, which, given the practically fetishistic load the movie hangs on the word, seems disappointing. (One wants to like the presence of past Altman collaborators giving definitions to the word, as I know I did when Michael Murphy went first. It was when I realized Michael Murphy wasn’t… Read More Altman (2014)
Dir. Ray Müller By the early ’90s, Riefenstahl had had a long time to think about the answers to questions like those posed by Müller throughout the movie. She “regrets” making Triumph of the Will, was never a member of the Nazi Party, never infused her work with anti-Semitic language or “race theory,” was out of… Read More The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993)
Dir. Bill Morrison. Before anything else, this movie is a ghost story. There are a thousand and one facts to be learned in Dawson City: Frozen Time, a documentary which is rich with knowledge but never didactic. Many of them are part sad and part funny: take, for example, that in the first nine years of… Read More Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016)
Dir. Tony Maylam. Starring James Coburn. Maylam pares down the Olympics to what makes them thrilling, the reason why every couple of years we stop doing what we do for two weeks and become curling strategists or figure skating nitpickers or speed skating enthusiasts. In the Winter Olympics in particular, speed is the answer. The… Read More White Rock (1977)
Seeing Things Secondhand 