10 Criterion Documentaries You Should Buy This Month
My latest post for Sound on Sight (and first in a while) went up over the weekend. It’s a plea to cinephiles everywhere to consider some non-fiction when they make their half-off Criterion purchases this month at Barnes and Noble. A new Blu-grade of Hearts and Minds, the infinitely interesting Qatsi trilogy, the 3-D Pina, […]
5 Essential 30 for 30 Documentaries
Over at Sound on Sight, I wrote a piece on the best of ESPN’s incredible 30 for 30 series of sports documentaries in honor of March Madness and the debut of its latest film, Requiem for the Big East. I still have caught up with Requiem, but I did watch a lot of films in […]
The Fearlessness of Pixar’s Ratatouille
I recently contributed to Sound on Sight’s 28 Days of Disney Animation series by discussing the theme of fearlessness in Pixar’s Ratatouille. It’s one of my very favorite Pixar films alongside WALL-E and Toy Story 3, and I talked about how the ballsiness inherent in the film’s premise opened the floodgates for a half decade […]
10 Documentaries to Watch From Sundance 2014
Over at Sound on Sight, I wrote about the 2014 Sundance Film Festival and ten of the many promising documentaries that debuted there. Among them are Steve James’ Life Itself (about the late Roger Ebert), The Case Against 8 (about the legal fight against California’s infamous anti-gay-marragie initiative), and Mitt (about Romney’s six-year-long fight for […]
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse
In my latest Essential Docs piece for Sound on Sight, I took a look at the making-of-Apocalypse-Now documentary Hearts of Darkness and the trouble with chasing absolute truth through one’s art. It’s a pretty fascinating film, made up almost exclusively of archival footage from Francis Ford Coppola’s wife Eleanor’s on-set video and audio diaries. Give […]
Man with a Movie Camera
I’ve begun writing a column for Sound on Sight called “Essential Docs.” It’s exactly what you think it is—a discussion of non-fiction movies, specifically the films that have endured as cultural and cinematic milestones years and decades later. My first piece discusses Dziga Vertov’s 1929 silent documentary Man with a Movie Camera, which is magical […]
