Dir. Errol Morris. There are more famous and prolific director-composer pairs out there than Errol Morris and Philip Glass, but I’m not sure that there’s a pair which more perfectly suits each other. Glass favors repetition and small variations on a theme; in A Brief History of Time, the only instrument used is the piano.… Read More A Brief History of Time (1991)
Dir. Rob Epstein. The dirty little secret of The Times of Harvey Milk is that its subject, who was killed in cold blood in 1978 at age forty-eight, probably would not have seen fifty-eight anyway. In 1984, when this film was released, people had learned the word “AIDS” and scientists in France and the United States… Read More The Times of Harvey Milk (1984)
Dir. John Huston. Dir. Franklin J. Schaffner. Starring George C. Scott, Karl Malden, Paul Stevens Patton does not ever get quite to “gentle” in Patton, but he comes uncharacteristically close in a tent for wounded soldiers in Italy. He pats shoulders and the feet of beds comfortingly, thanks men for their service, and for one man… Read More Let There Be Light (1946) and Patton (1970)
Dir. Laurent Bouzereau. I’ve spent some time thinking about what made Five Came Back so effective as a lens to view World War II, and at first I thought it was the subject matter. Entering this documentary and having little more prior knowledge than some vague understanding of John Ford and Frank Capra’s World War II service, I assumed that… Read More Five Came Back (2017)
Dir. Morgan Spurlock Documentaries by lefty performance propagandists – like Morgan Spurlock or, better yet, Michael Moore – rely heavily on spectacle to make larger points about the social order and for that reason, the one sentence synopses of those documentaries tend to be misleading. Bowling for Columbine isn’t really about guns, but a culture of fear… Read More Super Size Me (2004)
Dir. Steve James Like any good 20th Century icon, Roger Ebert sits on a throne of contradictions. He was half of the pair who made “Two Thumbs Up!” and a partner in reductivism, in his own way part of dumbing down the movies as much as Spielberg, Lucas, Eisner, or Katzenberg. It is also true that Ebert will… Read More Life Itself (2014)
Seeing Things Secondhand 