Doc Corner: Alex Gibney's 'The Crime of the Century'

By Glenn Dunks

Hey look, Alex Gibney is back! It was only last October that the prolific American filmmaker was releasing his rush-produced COVID-19 documentary, Totally Under Control, in time for the U.S. elections. Now he has a two-part HBO documentary about America’s opioid epidemic and its origins in crime. It's boldly titled The Crime of the Century. Given what we see unfold, and with 500,000 dead since 2000, that title is somewhat apt.

Naturally, it all comes down to capitalistic greed. You probably didn’t need me—or Gibney for that matter—to tell you that. But it does bear repeating. And over its four-hour runtime there are certainly plenty of opportunities to do so...

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King McQueen On Every Screen

by Jason Adams

Steve McQueen, the man who directed five, count 'em, five of last year's best films with his Small Axe series, is about to confound everybody fixated on old-fashioned definitions of Art all over again with a new three-part thingamajig for the BBC called Uprising.  THR is calling it a "docuseries" and this one, on paper, does admittedly sound more like a proper old-fashioned series than the Small Axe anthology ended up seeming (to me). We'll  wait and see how McQueen confounds our expectations, since he does always love to do that, and to stunning effect. And hey if awards voting bodies can't keep up with where and how the art is happening that's their fault, not the artists.

Uprising will focus in closer on the 1981 events that formed the backdrop of Axe's fourth chapter "Alex Wheatle" -- namely the New Cross Fire which killed 13 young people, and the Black People's Day of Action and then the Brixton Riots which followed right on its heels. It's not entirely clear if this will be entirely a documentary -- McQueen's quoted as saying it will be drawn from "testimonials" of the people involved -- or if there will be a hybrid project with a fictionalized mix of recreations. Not that McQueen needs help but I'm hoping he draws some inspiration from Raoul Peck's recent HBO series Exterminate All the Brutes, which threw absolutely everything at us all at once and blew my socks straight off in the process.

Doc Corner: The art of restoration at TCM Classic Film Festival

By Glenn Dunks

Do you ever think about what career path you may have chosen in retrospect? You know, the one you would have selected had you been able to make such a life-changing decision after having actually experienced life? Maybe you already have your dream job, but even then—there’s often a niggling part of us that imagines something else. If I could turn back time, I think I would love to have gotten into film restoration and archiving. They are each fascinating professions that play to my niche interests including preservation and exhibition of celluloid, not to mention pretty, curated shelves. (I was the guy who would visit the video store and ensure the cases were in alphabetical order.) What's this go to do with anything though?

I bring this up because playing at this month’s TCM Classic Film Festival (May 6–9) is a new documentary called The Méliès’ Mystery about the efforts to conserve and restore the 520 films by the French pioneer, Georges Méliès. Yes, he of A Trip to the Moon had burned the original print negatives of all his movies as his career faltered at the start of the 1910s. His fairy tale excursions of light and magic were out of vogue and his production house of Star Films, with French and American studios, shut up shop.

Méliès’ story is not new to audiences, of course...

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Back to the Movie Theaters: Lynn Sees "Gunda"

By Lynn Lee

a sad strip mall interior for happy experiences

Until yesterday, the last movie I saw in a theater was Emma – on March 7, 2020, just before the reality of COVID-19 descended on me and most people I knew.  If you’d told me that the next time I’d be in a movie theater would be nearly 14 months later, in a tiny, crappy arthouse joint in a suburban Virginia strip mall, and that the movie would be an idiosyncratic black-and-white documentary about a brood sow, I probably wouldn’t have believed you.  And yet that is exactly where I found myself Sunday afternoon.  

It wasn’t the return to moviegoing I’d envisioned since my husband and I got our second Pfizer dose in early April...

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Doc Corner: Raoul Peck's brilliant 'Exterminate All the Brutes'

By Glenn Dunks

I suppose I could beat around the bush. I could skirt around the issue and try to temper my praise, worrying that people could accuse me of mere hyperbole. But what’s the point? Instead, I will just say it: Raoul Peck’s new four-part HBO documentary miniseries, Exterminate All the Brutes, is one of the finest works of art I have ever had the privilege to watch. A soaring epic that takes viewers on a journey over thousands of years—at one point to even the dawn of man—through humanity’s worst impulses for racial supremacy and colonial barbarism.

Peck pilfers from cinema (classic and otherwise), paintings, photography, music, archival footage, and adds dioramas, animation, graphic aids, anachronistic diversions, and dramatic interpretations. He rips a fierce and violent tear through history, yet with the precision and delicacy of a surgeon with a scalpel...

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