Tribeca 2022: David Lynch is The Man Behind the Curtain in "Lynch / Oz"

by Jason Adams

Like many of you I have deeply embedded childhood memories of watching The Wizard of Oz on television as a child. And probably also like many of you the film was presented to me as a generational hand-off, a passing of the cinematic baton. My mom was a lifelong fan, and now twas my turn to become the latest Friend of Dorothy (if she only knew). That yellow brick road stretches in one ear and out the other across eighty entire years of movie-lovers, mother to son to son to daughter and on to every Auntie Em adjacent, with something in there for everybody. I can trace my love of Horror Movies right to it – how many nightmares have those short-jacketed cater-waiter flying monkeys stormed through? Others, probably you, can trace your love of the Movie Musical from sepia-toned Kansas where Judy first regaled us of rainbows...

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Tribeca 2022: "The Lost Weekend: A Love Story"

by Jason Adams

Time is a funny thing, slippery. An elastic band behind our eyes that can stretch as far back as we can remember before snapping us back to here and now -- sometimes gentle, sometimes with centrifugal violence like a start. There's no logic to what lingers longer than it lasted, and to what whooshes by -- the best moments a single glance etched in stone, while the worst nightly nestled beside us. To John Lennon his eighteen month romance with his personal assistant May Pang circa a 1973 split with Yoko Ono he called it "a lost weekend" -- meanwhile for Peng here she is fifty years later recounting the experience for the documentary called The Lost Weekend: A Love Story, premiering this weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival.

That slippery sense of time weaves its way through directors Eve Brandstein, Richard Kaufman, and Stuart Samuels' fascinating ninety-seven-minute doc...

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Doc Corner: 'The Janes' on HBO Max

By Glenn Dunks

If you were paying close enough attention to the ways the American political winds were blowing, you likely could have foreseen how relevant The Janes would ecome. Well, even more so than it already was. Still, even as recently as its Sundance premiere in January, it’s unlikely that filmmakers Tia Lessin (her first since 2013’s Citizen Koch) and Emma Pildes could have envisioned its release a mere few months late would coincide so frighteningly with the systematic dissolving of the rights their subjects were fighting for. Right in front of everybody’s eyes.

That The Janes is a film for this very moment isn’t what makes it so good. Although it helps...

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Doc Corner: Karim Ainouz's 'Mariner of the Mountains'

By Glenn Dunks

The journey from Africa to Europe has been seen many times on screen in both documentary and fiction. Mariner of the Mountains, now available on streaming after screening at last year's Cannes Film Festival, begins with a journey in the opposite direction. Far less common and shown here being committed in relative luxury compared to the dangerous refugee boats often equated with cross-continental Mediterranean journeys.

Director Karim Aïnouz is familiar to some audiences for his films like Invisible Life and Futuro Beach that span continents and the way we often go looking for something somewhere else and don’t find it. Or struggle to. Or aren’t sure what it was they were looking for at all...

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Doc Corner: The Hollywood history of 'Cane Fire'

By Glenn Dunks

A history of exploitation unfurls in Anthony Banua-Simon’s Cane Fire like the plot of a Hollywood movie. A deeply empathetic documentary, Cane Fire takes its title from a Lois Weber film, White Heat. That film, Weber’s last from 1934, is considered lost and survives only in images and fragments. As Banua-Simon shows, that is a lot like the non-white population of the island of Kaua’i, where it was filmed, who have been worked until their backs were broken by a series of industries that have crushed and sapped the non-white population like you would strip bare sugar cane.

First it was sugar cane and pineapples, then Hollywood who used locals as extras in bright and colourful productions starring big names like Elvis Presley and John Wayne. Today it’s tourism—an industry that has caused Hawaii more broadly to become the most expensive state to live in, something that is inceasingly out of grasp to many of the population who predominantly work as service staff at hotels and resorts. If you saw The White Lotus, then maybe you could consider this its darker companion piece...

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