Category: Film review

Falsch

My last day in Toronto was exceptional. Not only was I able to see the two remaining documentaries in the Dardenne series, but James Quandt and his colleagues graciously screened me the Dardennes’ first two features prior to La Promesse (1996). (The Cinematheque will publicly screen the features later this month.) The Cinematheque’s staffers logged 35 hours creating the subtitles for the documentaries, which ultimately only sold a few dozen tickets. By contrast, the Cinematheque’s screening of L’Enfant today, which opens commercially in Toronto next week, sold out. Quandt mused, “The program that takes the greatest effort, money, and …

I’ve pretty much always been a blasÈ omnivore (blame it on my Midwestern roots), but in recent years I’ve developed more of an appreciation for underlying food concerns like nutrition, economics, and ethics. I’ve watched friends organize their lives around identifying food allergies or monitoring blood sugar or adopting new eating habits. As someone says in The Future of Food, one of the most informative and practical documentaries I saw last year (and again at UCLA last night), eating is one of the most intimate things we do.

Although the film is formally straightforward with interviews, illustrative graphics, and …

The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello

Major media outlets may be enthusiastically promoting Oscar dresses this week, but what they haven’t promoted much are the films in three of the event’s categories–short live action, short animation, and short documentaries. While the news of Wellspring’s folding last week can still register grief, the films in these categories represent genres so marginalized it has been decades since anyone has wondered why they can’t somehow be incorporated into the mainstream moviegoing experience.

So it’s nice that Magnolia Pictures is distributing the live action and animated shorts in commercial theatres (Apollo Cinema…

Jun Ichikawa’s Tony Takitani is an elegant little film, and one of the most emotionally resonant movies I’ve seen this year. Based on a story by the popular Japanese author Haruki Murakami that was published in the New Yorker in 2002, the characters and narrative are so lightly sketched, the film’s gravity sneaks up on the viewer, largely through the gradual force of its form and rhythm.

The film opens by evoking the carefree lifestyle of Tony Takitani’s father, Shozaburo, a jazz musician who lives in Shanghai during World War II, endures prison, returns to Japan and marries, but becomes …

In this age of global communication, we think of the world as getting smaller, but then a documentary like the BBC’s A State of Mind (distributed theatrically in the US by Kino International) comes along and offers a glimpse into one of the most industrialized but closed societies on earth, and it’s like discovering life on another planet. North Korea, whose war with South Korea has remained in a cease fire for the last half century, is a totalitarian state that bans international mail, travel, and cell phones, offers one official television and radio station, and only admits a trickle …