Doc Corner: Laura Poitras with 'All The Beauty and the Bloodshed'

By Glenn Dunks

There is a line early in All the Beauty and the Bloodshed where somebody describes the film’s subject, photographer and activist Nan Goldin, as somebody who “knew how to use her power.” I found it appropriate that the director of this movie is Laura Poitras, somebody to whom you could also say knows how to use their power. Poitras is, after all, the filmmaker who has been at the centre of multiple political stories—I mean, it’s rare for a documentarian to be a character in a dramatization of a major news story (she was portrayed by Melissa Leo in Oliver Stone’s Snowden). And to watch a Poitras film is often to be swept up in a swirl of chaos and pain.

Unlike Risk (about Julian Assange) or her Oscar-winning Citizenfour (about Edward Snowden), Poitras herself is not a part of the story here. Nevertheless, her latest is the thrilling and involving work of a filmmaker whose skills feel almost unparalleled. There’s a quiet, almost sneaking, grandeur to her work here as a filmmaker, directing the viewer down the many paths of Goldin’s story with grace, humility and intrigue, and with a technical finesse that is subtle yet entirely specific from one cut to the next.

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Doc Corner: 'Bad Axe'

By Glenn Dunks

With a name like Bad Axe, it was only a matter of time before somebody made a movie about this town in Michigan. Bad Axe isn’t necessarily about the entire microcosm of this small town, preferring to focus on a single family (the director’s own) and their experiences within it. This isn’t Our Town; I mean, come on. You can’t pass up that title!

In telling the story of the Siev family in the town of Bad Axe, first-time filmmaker David Siev lands upon potent ideas of the political divide across America (it’s not as blue state/red state, or even blue county/red county state as some may like to conceive it...

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Doc Corner: 'Retrograde'

By Glenn Dunks

Retrograde is the best movie that Matthew Heineman has made. At least from those I have seen. I’ve been critical of this American director in the past for taking the somewhat lazy non-fiction critical expression “it plays like a real-life thriller” too literally, making movies like Cartel Land and City of Ghosts that put themselves above the subject. I never saw his dramatic feature A Private War with Rosamund Pike, but it didn’t surprise me that Heineman had made that leap.

This film, his third in as many years, thankfully takes something of a step back from what appeared to be his natural directorial instincts. For the most part, Retrograde is in service of its subjects and not the filmmaker.

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Doc Corner: Dustin Lance Black and 'Mama's Boy'

By Glenn Dunks

Good intentions can take a movie a long way. Who doesn’t like good intentions?! The problem with good intentions is that they can too often mask deficiencies. And in the case of Mama’s Boy, those good intentions suffocate director Laurent Bouzereau’s ability to tell a story that might venture outside of the lines of the one its subject has a firm and unwavering interest in telling. It’s a lovely story of empathy, compassion, a mother’s love for her son (and vice versa) that nonetheless suffers from rudimentary structure, unadventurous editing, and is built around one talking head interview in particular that lacks spontaneity, as if reciting from a script. Considering it's adapted from a memoir, that probably makes sense.

The central figure here is Academy Award-winning screenwriter and social activist Dustin Lance Black and the film is about him more than the more interesting figure of his mother. Your mileage about that will vary...

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Review: "Holy Spider" weaves a web of provocations

by Cláudio Alves

"Holy Spider" | © UtopiaThe world's obsession with true crime is as old as crime itself. With every new format and possible presentation, another wave of such media arises, making us think, each time, that the collective obsession is a new phenomenon. Oh, how wrong we are, for as much as things change, they remain the same. One aspect constant with every iteration of the true-crime craze is the glorification of the killer. False equivalencies manifest, equating human monsters to criminal geniuses. Great purposes are projected unto them, ideas of grandeur and abstract magnetism. From popular podcasts to Netflix's Jeffrey Dahmer show, true-crime narratives make celebrities out of murderers and exploit truth into legend.

Ali Abbasi's latest film challenges this state of affairs. Reenacted violence and political commentary are at the center of Holy Spider's controversial reputation, but its demystification of the serial killer figure constitutes the picture's most radical provocation…

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