Friday, September 2, 2022 at 10:49PM by Elisa Giudici
Two men focusing on their own identities. Two women speaking to their relationship with their husbands. For day two of the Venice film festival it was a quartet of movies featuring personal intimate stories...
Sunday, February 7, 2021 at 12:42PM By Glenn Dunks
Before this column takes a few weeks break, it’s that time of the year to make lists! I have spent the last few weeks churning through screeners trying to ensure I saw enough of 2020’s documentary output to justify a list of the year’s best, although I do not have the time nor the inclination to watch 238 of the damn things! Nevertheless, below are 30 non-fiction titles (or non-fiction adjacent, but we’ll get to that later) that I believe are among the year’s best movies. I stuck to the 2020 calendar as much as possible because, like Nathaniel, I want to keep some order to it all.
If you were to sit down and watch every film below, you would be taken from rural towns in the heart of the Florida peninsula to rural towns in the heart of the Ukraine via the protests of Hong Kong and a nursing home in Chile. There are serious themes, important subjects, powerful ideas... and hand sanitizer.
There’s also a stripper named Nomi. Something for everything, I reckon...
Friday, September 25, 2020 at 12:00PM By Glenn Dunks
The idea of ‘seeing ourselves’ on screen relates most often to race and sexuality, which is fair enough. Rarely is it spoken about in terms of occupation. But one of the my most unexpected experiences this past week was watching Frederick Wiseman’s latest institutional observatory documentary City Hall and seeing my other non-film life as a public servant on screen for four and a half hours.
The world of stakeholder meetings and budget discussions, community functions and office dynamics is more often than not the world of comedy (Working Dog’s Utopia being the best, if you ask me). But here Wiseman captures the daily grind and ticking realities of what goes into making a city—in this case Boston—keep moving with steely realism and refinement...
Wednesday, March 18, 2020 at 11:00AM By Glenn Dunks
For those paying attention—and no offence if you haven’t—I have been counting down my top 100 documentaries of the decade. Okay, so it’s technically 110. Shut up, I couldn’t help myself. Check out the list with snap comments for each title on Twitter, or the list is also on Letterboxd. But if you don’t want to make a single click then after the jump you'll get the whole list with chosen highlights and links to full reviews. And just in case you were wondering... number 101? Exit Through the Gift Shop.
Friday, November 2, 2018 at 10:00PM By Glenn Dunks
Depending on your point of few, Frederick Wiseman films exist in a realm of apoliticicm or are stealth political missiles. I believe it’s a little bit somewhere in between. It is easy of course to see the markings of a political filmmaker in his works if you know where to look, and can be done so in essentially all of his works from his debut with Titicut Follies in 1967 right up to his most recent works In Jackson Heights and Ex Libris: The New York Public Library.
And yet he’s obviously no Michael Moore or Alex Gibney, and the way his camera silent observes with little regard for constructed narrative (at least in any traditional sense, although his films all tell a story) means that it is easy for his films to feel as if any political ideology that rises to the form of text is purely accidental.
With a film such as Wiseman’s latest – his 42nd and his seventh this decade – it is once again a little from column a and a little from column b. How much you’re willing to indulge, however, may vary considering the topic of his patiently attentive eye is the town of Monrovia, Indiana, a god-fearing, gun-loving town in America’s rust belt that it’s all too easy to assign the moniker of “T***p Country”.
