Doc Corner: On the Ice with 'The Russian Five'

By Glenn Dunks

Ice hockey is not a sport I tend to pay any attention to. As an Australian, it’s barely on my radar outside of the movies. And even then, my mind only goes to the fab Canadian film Goon and Michael Ontkean’s jockstrap in Slapshot as worth the time (despite being of the generation, I was never much of a Mighty Ducks devotee). Still, I know a good story when I see one and like other documentaries about pro sports I could not give any less of a hoot about – titles like Senna and When We Were Kings, for instance – this new passionately-realized debut feature from director Joshua Riehl got me involved in its sport, its personalities and its man-made mythos.

And how! As a noted non-cryer at the movies, I can say I shed several tears by the end of The Russian Five and Its story of stubborn devotion, emotional anguish, and underdog triumph.

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Doc Corner: Global Politics with AOC, Herzog, and Gorbachev

By Glenn Dunks

Two new documentaries cover politics in very different ways. One pounds the pavement on the trail of a brewing political movement from a relative newcomer, while the other examines the legacy of a presidential icon as directed by a man with nearly 40 documentary credits (and dozens more dramas) to his name.

Knock Down the House and Meeting Gorbachev are a fascinating pair; the scrappy underdog and the classic image of government. Although they have almost nothing in common beyond the surface, they offset one another, their strengths highlighting the others’ weaknesses in a particular way. One stands above the other in quality and in the sly way that they interrogate the long shadow of history...

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Bentonville: Fearless stuntwomen, retiring post-masters, and troubled schoolgirls

Part 2 of 3

Playing in traffic... (Captain America: Winter Soldier) one of the daily jobs of Hollywood stuntwomen

Aside from the very first opening night activities at Bentonville, the first film I attended was a work-in-progress doc called Stuntwomen: The Untold Hollywood Story. The director April Wright is still working on the final cut so there's still time to get more focused (it was easy to imagine this as an even fuller miniseries as it's trying to covering a lot!) but whatever it'll be in its final form will be entertaining...

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Tribeca 2019: "The Projectionist" and "Circus of Books"

Here is Jason Adams reporting again from the Tribeca Film Festival.

Sex is disappearing. Look at the Ken-like plains of our Marvel Superhero pant-fronts -- or even look how sexless our superstars made the concept of Camp look at the Met Gala this week, as if horn-dog horniness doesn't go hand in hand with that over-heated sensibility. Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls: the true end of an era. On this theme two documentaries that played Tribeca last week looked back at two nearly extinct modes of orgiastic delivery -- the porn theater and the porn shop...

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Doc Corner: The First Female Film Director in 'Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché'

By Glenn Dunks

For a film about a little-known name of early silent cinema, Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché sure does come out of the gates swinging. Swinging and sweeping and swooping and spinning and kicking and ecstatically careening through the streets of Paris. The opening passages of Pamela B. Green’s revelatory documentary are so frenetically paced that it’s almost exhausting. When I posited that none other than Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! was an inspiration, the film’s own Twitter feed confirmed it. Indeed.

And it’s not just the opening, too. The entirety of this film is surprisingly fast-paced, often editing its collage of film clips, archival video, contemporary exploration and talking heads into a dizzying soup of cinematic nostalgia...

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