Vishniac (video review)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nsusdz2zi8
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Documentary
Maestra (2023)
This review is part of my coverage of the 25th Annual Sidewalk Film Festival Maggie Contreras’ Maestra came to me as a happy accident. At Birmingham Alabama’s Sidewalk Film Festival, I marked on my schedule in the 1pm slot to see Celine Song’s Past Lives, but I got in the wrong line. I didn’t realize that […]
Chasing Chasing Amy (2023)
This review was part of my coverage of the 25th Annual Sidewalk Film Festival When Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy came out in 1996, I remember priding myself on loving it as a movie and for my own self-important progressiveness. A proudly converted homophobic, I embraced the film’s openness about gays and lesbians even though I came […]
Hello, Dankness (2023)
The value of experimental filmmaking is in challenging you to consider what they are trying to say, to challenge your cinematic comfort zones. What is great about the work of the filmmaking duo known as “Soda Jerk” is that they not only challenge you but also play off of the contemporary notions of pirating images […]
Art for Everybody (2023)
This review is part of my coverage of the 25th Annual Sidewalk Film Festival. I never really gave much credence to the work of the late artist Thomas Kinkade. Perhaps because of the volume of his work, I’ve always thought of him more as a brand name than an individual artist. This, in spite of […]
A Compassionate Spy (2023)
Released at virtually any other time on the calendar, Hoop Dreams director Steve James’ new documentary A Compassionate Spy might have flown through the critical circuits and gone unnoticed. But here, just two weeks after the release of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film that effectively be paired along with his three-hour brobdingnagian epic. Both […]
After the Bite (2023)
At the same moment when Discovery is blowing its over-inflated horn about Shark Week (bolstered slightly out of familiarity by the presents of Jason Mamoa) it is nice that HBO offers an alternative that the channel’s decades-long theme week wouldn’t touch. After the Bite is a little more thoughtful, a little more meaningful then almost […]
Kokomo City (2023)
Smith’s Kokomo City is the kind of film that makes you grateful for the documentary form. At a moment when new voices are crying out to be heard, it is often found that certain voices are silenced for fear of the backlash from the larger portion of the population. At this juncture, it is difficult […]
The YouTube Effect (2023)
Alright, so in March I got Susan Hillinger’s documentary Money Shot about the rise and social disintegration of Pornhub and now Alex Winter gives the same treatment to YouTube with The YouTube Effect. What is a little frightening is that both films do almost the same job. They want to illustrate how supply and demand […]
