Doc Corner: The Cinematic Surprise of 'The Royal Road'

Glenn here. Each Tuesday bringing you reviews of documentaries from theatres, festivals and on demand.

One of the many benefits of doing this weekly column is not just talking about the sort of documentaries that we may be discussing throughout award season, but also being able to highlight those that deserve haven’t a hope that nonetheless deserve the attention. Such is the case with Jenni Olsen’s The Royal Road, an essay film that trades in experimental and avant-garde traditions as a means to explore deeply personal topics.

Using dry yet curiously hypnotic narration, Olsen swerves between discussing Californian history, a long-distance relationship with a woman named Juliet, classic Hollywood movies, and the effects of nostalgia (the latter of which even features a voice cameo by Tony Kuschner). Her film a progression of beautifully captured California vistas of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and everywhere in between, filmed on 16mm by cinematographer Sophia Constantinou whose perfectly composed 4:3 ratio images recall the works of James Benning and offer a striking visual component that elevates the film to the status of true art. By using real film and embracing all of the dots and speckles that come with it, Constantinou’s work adopts the history of the worlds she is filming while also embracing Olson’s edict that nostalgia can be good.

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Review: Hell or High Water

by Eric Blume

With their new film, director David Mackenzie (Young Adam, Starred Up) and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan (Sicario) make one thing abundantly clear: they really, really hate banks.  Hell or High Water is a sort of southwest answer to The Big Short, a tale of rural Texas poor on a Robin Hood mission. 

Sheridan’s script was the winner of the 2012 Black List prize for best unproduced screenplay, a fact which feels surprising during the cliché friendly first half hour.  Brothers Toby and Tanner Howard are characters we’ve seen many times before, with a sibling dynamic that’s not new either.  Tanner (Ben Foster) is the wild bro released from prison, complete with a violent streak and true-blue redneck energy.  Toby (Chris Pine) is the tender brother, a taciturn and emotionally bruised man trying to make things right.  Together, they start robbing small Texas banks to secure money to save the family farm.  As Counterpoint we have two Texas rangers on their case:  Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges), for whom this is the last big one before retirement(!), and partner Alberto (Gil Birmingham), the sage Native American sidekick. 

For about the first thirty minutes, you sit in fear that this is all the film will be, a simple chase to the inevitable populated with stock characters. The only hope it has is to somehow deepen.  Fortunately, it does...

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Doc Corner: Reality Bites in 'Kate Plays Christine'

Glenn here. Each Tuesday bringing you reviews of documentaries from theatres, festivals and on demand.

There is so much to unpack within Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine, not least of which is whether the film ought to be considered a documentary in the first place. Greene pushes the concept of documentary as a malleable construct that audiences should question the authenticity of much further than his previous 'non-fiction' work, Actress. This time by altogether abandoning reality, he calls into question everything we see in a documentary. By making the audience ask what is and is not real in Kate Plays Christine, Greene is essentially making us question what is real in any documentary and consider the motivations and mechanics behind them.

Audiences have no doubt asked these questions before in famously are-they-or-aren’t-they works of documentary like Catfish, Exit Through the Gift Shop, and even this year’s Tickled. 

But those films, traditional narratives regardless of their factuality, are nothing on Kate Plays Christine. An altogether hypnotic film in which actress Kate Lyn Sheil sets about studying the life of Christine Chubbuck for a strange, absurdly amateur feature film about the seemingly forgotten Floridian newscaster who shot herself live on air in 1974 seemingly in an act of desperation and contempt for how far television news had succumbed to the mantra of “if it bleeds it leads”...

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Review: Spa Night

by Sean Donovan

In Andrew Ahn’s feature length debut Spa Night, our main character David is introduced hunched over in a dimly lit sauna, a towel draped over his head. The sound mix emphases his heavy, sighing breath, which is audible but blocked by the weight of the towel. In this 2016 Sundance competition film, towels become a provocative motif, suffocating expression and concealing desire.. At the intersection of his existence as a second generation Korean American and a fledgling queer man exploring his sexual desires, pressure hits at David from multiple angles. The admiring but unenthusiastic praise which has greeted Spa Night’s release is a recognition of Ahn’s exciting early command of framing and craft, but fails to truly meet this remarkable film on its own level, that of a profoundly emotional, and refreshingly serious point of view. Jump on in! The water’s fine...

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Doc Corner: Werner Herzog's 'Lo and Behold'

Glenn here. Each Tuesday bringing you reviews of documentaries from theatres, festivals and on demand.

The indefatigable German director Werner Herzog is an unlikely superstar of the modern age – a man responsible for some of the most singular cinematic visions of our time who has remodelled himself over the last two decades primarily as a documentarian. A filmmaker with a unique verbosity who can devour a metaphor and roll it across his tongue like he was twisting a cherry stem. His accent frequently inciting giggles when paired with subject matter that many feel is outside of the wheelhouse of a 73-year-old man like albino crocodiles, Kanye West, Pokemon, or as in the case of his latest film, Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, the internet at large.

I confess that sometimes I struggle with Herzog’s need to narrate all of his documentaries himself. No doubt spurred on by producers and financiers who see the inherent value if having Herzog, a walking meme among content producers. I was not a fan of Cave of Forgotten Dreams, for instance, for many of the same reasons people adored it. His often long-winded and meandering habits don’t always connect with me as a viewer the way they no doubt do for so many others. And while I was thankful to see Herzog return to the world of non-fiction after the flat and dusty Queen of the Desert (still unreleased in America, unsurprisingly), his latest felt like it was more the product of an over-excited team rather than something organically Herzog. [more...]

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