The road from Walter Cronkite and his generation of stoic newsreaders to the wild-eyed, pro-wrestling-style rantings of Alex Jones is paved through Mike Wallace. That’s one of the takeaways, not all of them positive and certainly not all hagiographic, that viewers can glean from Mike Wallace Is Here, a complex portrait of the influential TV reporter famous for his … [Read more...]
Moore, Williams lift ‘After the Wedding’ out of its rote-ness
Like the proverbial after-school special, the Lifetime Original Movie is an institution that is summarily dismissed by us snoots in the film-critic intelligentsia. Never mind that most of us have never actually sat through one: to tarnish a major motion picture with a comparison to the network proffering weepies and you-go-girl triumphalism is to deem it unserious and … [Read more...]
‘The Art of Racing in the Rain’: A dog’s breakfast of clichés
The kindest words I can summon about The Art of Racing in the Rain, Disney’s long-awaited adaptation of Garth Stein’s best-selling 2008 airport novel, is that it’s essentially harmless. It’s not a painful experience, and millions will love it unconditionally, as one loves a dog. To pile on about its turgid writing, its artless direction and its hokey, retrograde messaging … [Read more...]
‘Marianne & Leonard’ a tender, complex portrait of a poet and his muse
Documentarian Nick Broomfield is the auteur of the dead musician. He’s the conspiracy-minded chronicler of the pop visionary taken too soon, whose title subjects may or may not be separated by ampersands. Though he has enjoyed a long and influential career in Direct Cinema dating back to the early ’70s, he first appeared on my radar with 1998’s Kurt & Courtney, a … [Read more...]
‘Reports on Sarah and Saleem’: The end of the affair is politics
In the movies, as sometimes in life, thinking with one’s loins instead of one’s brain is a recipe for fatalism, for broken families, for dead rabbits strung up in closets. Like a computer virus infecting our operating system, it overrides our better judgment. Sarah (Sivane Kretchner), the unhappily married, upper-middle-class Israeli café owner in Muayad Alayan’s grim … [Read more...]
‘Yesterday’: Fixing a memory hole, rom-com style
Back in April, I interviewed Daniel Hartwell, founder of the inaugural Beatles on the Beach Festival, which would soon descend on Delray Beach. I asked him to reflect on why the Beatles remain so perennially popular, with generation after generation. He answered, in part, “the music, if it were to come out today, would be a hit. It would be alternative rock.” Yesterday, a … [Read more...]
Woodstock doc: The friends we all need a little help from
Like the seasoned storyteller he is, documentarian Barak Goodman opens his new film Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation in media res, with the most alarming visuals and most calamitous sound bites he can muster. “Everything that could possibly go wrong was happening,” we’re informed, as rain clouds darken the teeming throng of 400,000 hippies on Woodstock’s … [Read more...]
‘The Dead Don’t Die’: A love letter to zombie movies
In Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die, the zombie apocalypse rustles yawningly but determinedly to fruition in Centerville, an anonymous American hamlet, population 738. The omens, initially disparate and disconnected, begin to cohere into an existential collapse: Wild animals flee, and pets attack their owners. The sun is still out at 9 at night, and the next evening it’s … [Read more...]
Herzog’s encounter with Gorbachev respectful, revelatory
When Michel Gondry directed Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?, his offbeat 2013 interview documentary of Noam Chomsky, he was clear about the project’s particular timing. Gondry wanted to fast-track the movie because, frankly, he wanted enough time with Noam while his subject was still alive. Though it’s never delineated as bluntly, a similar sense of temporal urgency permeates … [Read more...]
‘Non-Fiction’: What we talk (and talk and talk) about
When is there too much of a good thing? This question looms over Olivier Assayas’s exhaustively intelligent Non-Fiction, a zeitgeist-targeted ensemble comedy stuffed with so many statements about the Way We Live Now that we can hardly be expected to process them all. Assayas’ script is like a torrent of Snapchat missives that disappear into the nether, to be replaced by the … [Read more...]