Tribeca 2019: "Ask Dr. Ruth"

Team Experience reporting from Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason

A personality-based crowd-pleaser similar to what we saw last year with Won't You Be My Neighbor and RBG, only with heaps more clitoral commentary, director Ryan White's Ask Dr. Ruth doesn't break any documentary molds. It's content to merely bring us the life story and work of itty bitty sexologist Dr. Ruth Westheimer. And Dr. Ruth's too warm-hearted (not to mention itty bitty) to go about straight-forwardly smashing molds anyway. The iconic personality is more content to sneak in, make you comfy, offer you a cookie or two, and ease all of your deepest secrets out first...

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Tribeca 2019 "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project"

Team Experience reporting from the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason Adams...

I always think of Amy Poehler's funny line on SNL about "soggy board-games and cat skeletons" when I think on the concept of hoarders. Sad people beside blackened sinks. But what if the hoarder's instincts turn out to be less a mental illness -- something more, grander? Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project uncovers that exception in a woman who obsessively recorded 35 years of news programming, from the Iran Hostages through 9/11 and up to Sandy Hook. And in the process the film argues that, as with superstition being science we just haven't yet confirmed, perhaps some of Marion's documentarian's madness wasn't madness, but prophecy...

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Doc Corner: Beyonce's 'Homecoming'

By Glenn Dunks

Reviewing a concert film can be tricky. The lines between what is merely a good concert with good music can become blurred with what is a good film. A concert film can quite easily be one and not the other (I will save you the examples), but to decipher what is what is an equation that it is all too easy to flub the maths on.

In the case of Beyoncé’s Homecoming, the numbers are a bit easier to put together as the film is more up front about its craft – tricky use of editing (those yellow/pink switches!!), the use of retro cinematography filters (Coachella ain’t Woodstock), scripted narration and so on. However, even when trying to filter out the rhetoric that often comes along as baggage with her, it’s easy to see that Homecoming belongs among the list of great concert documentaries.

It’s a joyous and exciting collage of sound and image from a moment in cultural history, a captivating two hours and 17 minutes.

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Doc Corner: 'Hail Satan?'

By Glenn Dunks

How long do you think it took director Penny Lane to choose between putting a ? or an ! in the title of her latest delight of a documentary. Her follow-up to the equally wonderful Nuts! (another one where either punctuation mark would work), Hail Satan? left me wanting to convert from the cosy world of agnosticism to the Satanic Temple, which I suppose is as glowing a recommendation as one could get for a film directly about the Satanic Temple.

I was first introduced to Lane through Our Nixon, a relatively staid and standard assemblage of home movies that held little suggestion that Lane would quickly become one of the most interesting purveyors of absurd American life working today.

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Doc Corner: The Compelling 'Roll Red Roll'

By Glenn Dunks

“She is so raped right now… this is the funniest thing ever.”

That’s one of the callous lines that opens Nancy Schwarzman’s debut feature documentary, Roll Red Roll. Played against misty images of an otherwise seemingly peaceful hamlet, the opening minute is not the last time we will hear those words, spoken as they were by a male high schooler as a young girl lay drunken and unconscious on the floor of his friend’s rec room. The words return later, this time in video form, as the boy in question laughs and smiles, his face radiating with some sort of queasy pride for his friends, two fellow high schooler students who would eventually be found guilty of rape.

It’s important to not beat around the bush here – after all, Schwarzman’s film doesn’t...

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