"Making these films is a sport," says veteran documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, who at 83 years old remains at the top of his game. "You have to be on your feet, running around, carrying equipment, for 16 to 17 hours a day. It's never easy." Since the 1960s, Wiseman, a......
Two weeks ago, in a major policy speech about America's foreign entanglements, President Obama declared, "This war, like all wars, must end." But veteran journalist Jeremy Scahill isn't buying it. In his new documentary and nonfiction book, Dirty Wars, Scahill chronicles the insidious side of America's covert military operations, which......
What’s remarkable about Still Walking, Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s seventh feature film and one every bit as sensitive as his previous triumphs After Life (1998) and Nobody Knows (2004), is that the familiar comes across as fresh. Despite recycling potential clichés — the grouchy elderly father, the disenfranchised second son — Kore-eda imbues the story......
Sophie Barthes’ clever metaphysical comedy Cold Souls has been dubbed “Being Paul Giamatti” more than once since its Sundance 2009 debut. But if comparisons to the films of Charlie Kaufman are inevitable, the similarities only go so far. Sure, Paul Giamatti plays Paul Giamatti, another “real” actor unwittingly embroiled in......
Antonio Campos’s Afterschool takes place in that familiar cauldron of adolescent turmoil, the boarding school. But the 25-year-old filmmaker’s austere and ominous debut feature feels more like Michael Haneke than John Hughes. “I love high school movies,” says Campos, whose film makes its local debut this weekend with two screenings......
By most measures, the films of Azazel Jacobs are on the offbeat end of the cinema spectrum. From his award-winning short Kirk and Kerry and the melancholic cult feature The GoodTimesKid to his latest, Momma’s Man, Jacobs’ movies focus on dysfunctional people in a style that is as minimalist and......
