Author: Doug Cummings

Unlike Heaven (2002), which tapped into the double lives and blind chances of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s earlier work, the newly-released film The Big Animal (2000), based on another of his unproduced screenplays, taps into his dry wit and sense of the absurd. It’s directed by the great Polish actor Jerzy Stuhr, who appeared in such Kieslowski films as Camera Buff (1979), Decalogue: Ten (1988), and Three Colors: White (1994), and there are few obvious updates to the screenplay since the time in which it was written in the early ’70s. Stuhr films in academy ratio (4:3×1) in black-and-white, and while there’s …

Maria Full of Grace is a remarkable film for several reasons. It tells a harrowing story of a teenaged Columbian woman who finds herself at a crossroads in an unhappy romantic relationship. Her financially struggling and hard-working family, three generations under one roof, insists that Maria labor in a factory dethorning crates of roses, and her only chance to rise above a deepening hole of deterministic lack of opportunity seems to be the lucrative drug smuggling trade devised in the back rooms of Bogota. But the film displays an unusual intelligence in its treatment of this story–its embrace of ambiguity …

While Fahrenheit 9/11 has been passing the $100 million mark this week, reinforcing the resurgence of documentary filmmaking as a popular art form, it has also been deflecting criticisms that suggest documentaries should be free of opinion. Unlike the “actualities” by early filmmakers (trains arriving in stations, people sneezing or kissing)–or even newsreels or industrial films–documentaries have long been identified precisely by their creative spins on reality, their underlying human summary; the Scottish filmmaker John Grierson defined the documentary as the “creative treatment of actualities” and first applied the term to the 1926 film, Moana, by Robert Flaherty, a …