Bill Cunningham can’t be bought. He is there to observe and to take pictures, not to consume the fancy meal or mingle with the celebrities; a line which most individuals in his position would most likely blur. Bill has a section of the Sunday New York Times Style section where he will point out a [...]

Magic Trip is a real-time documentary, cobbled together from 40-year-old film, about a cross-country trek just prior to the big hippie invasions of the mid-to-late 1960s. It’s a time capsule, and it’s a highly informative one for those of us who weren’t there. It’s a jumping-off point to explain the lovefests, the Be-Ins, the protests, [...]

Relaxing at night, after a hard day at work and a few hours online, tending to emails, website modifications, correspondence, and creative things, amongst the best things to do, if too tired to read a book, is to watch a film. But, not a fictive film, but a documentary where, even if the film is [...]

I may be going soft in my old age. A documentary about a man learning to be a Santa Claus, and I give it a perfect score? Yes, I gave it a one, and if zero were better I’d give it that. I’ve watched many a cruel movie this year; too many times I’ve watched [...]

Hidden inside a birthday cake and smuggled out of the country, the 75-minute “effort”, This is Not a Film, tells us all we need to know about the cruelty of the Iranian dictatorship and the courage of film director Jafar Panahi. Panahi, who has given the world such masterpieces as The White Balloon, The Circle, [...]

“Most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures.” — Rainer Maria Rilke Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a fascinating journey back in time. In this [...]

The only person who would have ever thought about making a film documentary of former CIA Director William Colby must be related to him. In fact, his son Carl Colby did just that. William Colby was a driven individual who lived during interesting times and ended up in a fascinating job; however, this does not [...]

When legendary frontman Jim Morrison joined The 27 Club in 1971, it is widely believed that he did so while reading one of the earliest unofficial scripts for what would become Platoon, sent to him by director Oliver Stone. Whether or not Jim would have been given the film’s lead role is uncertain. Regardless, Stone [...]

Growing up in New York City, in the 1970s, painter Alice Neel (who died in 1984, at age 84) was often in the news, with a show or retrospective at this or that gallery or museum. Such was the extent of her fame and renown, locally, that it’s hard to imagine she was anything other [...]

Glee has arrived in theaters and has been receiving sensational reviews, some stating it to be one of the best movies of the summer. Various reviews mentioned brilliant song and dance numbers, fun and witty dialog, and behind the scenes shots showing the cast getting ready for the concert. I’m here to give my insight [...]

Leaving the cinema after the screening of Senna, the cinephilic documentary of the Formula One driver tragically killed in the prime of his career, I knew I had seen something special. It just took a bit of time to justify, in an articulate manner, just why I had enjoyed it so much. I was impressed [...]

In the past few weeks, New York City and the United States experienced a grueling, sweltering heat wave that swept over the East Coast after parching the rest of the country. This writer spent most of it indoors, in close proximity to a rumbling air conditioner — when I did go out, it was to [...]

I like music documentaries, despite not being much of a virtuoso (though I’ve tried my hand at guitar — needless to say, it’s still sitting in the same corner it’s been in for the past three months). But what attracts me to the genre are the artists themselves; as a semi-struggling screenwriter who is still [...]

Ever go to the grocery store and, while standing at the checkout, glanced at the tabloid papers? With Rumor Patrol, People, and Life & Times all detailing the juicy details of Lindsey Lohan or Britney Spears’ latest mental breakdown (using a combination of badly Photoshopped pictures, corny puns and headlines reading, “Drugs, Booze, and Floral [...]

So we’re going with something a little different this week. In what is the first non-fiction film I’ve ever reviewed, Martin Scorsese gets behind the camera to present a part-concert, part-documentary film chronicling two night shows by iconic band The Rolling Stones at the historic Beacon Theatre in New York City. Although the original plan [...]

In Super Size Me, he risked his health to expose the fast food industry, then in Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden, Morgan Spurlock upped the ante, deciding to travel to the war-torn Middle East (armed with just a camera-crew and some defense training). Now the director takes a less harmful approach to [...]

The thing that kept coming into my mind as I watched African Cats is “Boy, I miss Meerkat Manor.” I know that Animal Planet show isn’t the first show/film to try and anthropomorphize animals or even the best one, but sitting through four seasons with those adorable rodents really embedded that formula into my brain. [...]

Marc Levin’s 2007 documentary film, Mr. Untouchable, which gives background on notorious 1970s Harlem drug kingpin LeRoy ‘Nicky’ Barnes is a flat out great documentary. It is insightful, points out things that are wrong with many people’s ideas on reality, and does very well in backgrounding Barnes’ life and times, as well as using the [...]

Why do so many documentary filmmakers decide to make films about relatives or people they know? The obvious answer is the ease of getting information. But that does not explain why they choose the subjects they choose. Andrew Neel’s portrait of his grandmother, Alice Neel, at least has the benefit of being a profile of [...]

Shot and produced by photographer Tim Hetherington and journalist Sebastian Junger, Restrepo is one of the most powerful filmic examinations of modern warfare. While embedded in Afghanistan for 15 months throughout 2007 and 2008 (on and off) for a Vanity Fair assignment, Hetherington and Junger shot approximately 150 hours of video footage which was ultimately [...]

This is my first review of a film that I first saw on Netflix, rather than in a theater or on a DVD, and I have to say the service is something of a revolution in how one watches film; or, to be more accurate, in WHAT one watches, for had it not been for [...]

Ten years ago a group of skateboarders, bmxers and stoners, already getting paid for doing crazy stunts on the circuit (and in their backyards), armed themselves with a video camera and captured themselves doing painfully insane pranks and tricks on one another. It was a MTV hit and it was good. Capitalizing on the success [...]

There is a tactic that shock jocks, the writers of publications like the Enquirer and others in the media use to generate a buzz. They will say something outrageous, “Did you know that the left kidney of dolphins, when mixed with elephant tusk powder, will reverse the aging process? In fact that’s what Avon uses [...]

Religion and disease — two of the most destructive aspects of modern society. Both have the tendency to spread like wildfire and both can alter a person’s physical and mental well-being. However, disease can be cured or prevented — religion cannot; because before human beings learned how to think both rationally and peacefully, we learned [...]

I don’t cry at movies. I mean, I’m not some unemotional or unattached person — many movies have touched me profoundly. But I have trained myself not to cry at movies. Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father made it real tough. For anyone who has read or heard anything about this [...]

It was never really that cool to like Rush. I heard them first when my older brother, whose musical tastes had only previously included Yes, Medicine Head and Genesis (the Peter Gabriel, flower-head version), brought home a copy of 2112 back in 1978 or so, a couple of years after its release. I saw the [...]

Banksy is a British graffiti street artist. His art is known throughout the world, however his identity is, even now, a complete mystery. The art he creates is often satirical; often taking jabs at government and popular culture. One of his pictures, “Naked Man” is a painting of a naked man hanging outside a window [...]

Atomic apocalypse may still be upon us. That is what the filmmakers behind Countdown to Zero want us to remember. As President Kennedy says, “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by [...]

Sometimes a work of art is not even that artistic, it’s just merely interesting. Interesting enough, however, to be recommended, if not because it has depth but because it simply offers a bit more insight into other works of art by an artist. Such is the case with the 90 minute long 2003 documentary by [...]

Michael Ruppert is a jaded, frightened, lonely man. He didn’t choose to be this way; the path he believes was chosen for him has forced him into a life of exile. You see Michael Ruppert is, for lack of a better term, a conspiracy theorist, an alarmist who connects dots of greed, power and outright [...]

No doubt about it, when I saw the announcement that Columbia and Sony Pictures were going to release a movie based on out-takes and rehearsals of Michael Jackson’s much anticipated London tour, I figured it was nothing more than a money grab to profit on the singer’s untimely death. Since seeing it, I am positive [...]

Twenty years after its original release, Al Reinert’s awe inspiring film For All Mankind was released once again on 16th November 2009; this time with a Dolby 5.1 soundtrack and a new, restored, high definition picture. This mesmerizing DVD is special because it is not science fiction, but science fact. This is real footage shot [...]

If memory serves me right, I cried the night Buster Douglas knocked Mike Tyson out. I wept because the man, in the ring, was poetry in motion and to watch it all come to an end that fateful night in 1990 was a difficult pill to swallow. Of course, I didn’t realize quite how hard [...]

French tight rope walker Philippe Petit is a renegade. In acts of defiance, he’s walked across culturally important structures all over the world. His rogue behavior captured the admiration of those who witnessed it, while damaging the relationships with those people he involved in his schemes. In 1974, he set his eyes on the ultimate [...]

In all walks of life there are standout groups or individuals that deserve a telling of their story. Julien Temple in 2000 directed The Filth and the Fury, a documentary of the often times misunderstood punk pioneers Sex Pistols. Sensing punk-rock deserved another telling story, he’s returned with Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, a [...]

I hate documentaries. Let me qualify that a bit further — I hate Michael Moore documentaries. On a whole, my biggest gripe is that, although they do chronicle an event or a situation, they tend to present only one side of the story. And since I am on the other side of the political affiliation [...]

I’ve been fired from a few jobs in my 36 years of life. There was this time I got canned from Tile City for ‘purposely’ breaking ceramic tiles. There was another time I was escorted off of a construction site for cursing off the foreman. It was so bad I was removed from the IBEW! [...]

There are many individuals in this great big world of ours that I just don’t get. Those tree-hugging, liberal faggots; those war-mongering right-wing douchebags; folk singers; those fuckwad animal conservatory guys on the Discovery Channel, et al. People I really don’t understand are those fucking insane thrill seekers who will literally do anything for a [...]