Documentary

Shot on 42 St. in New York, mostly in slow motion and sometimes in negative slow motion, accompanied by original and haunting music, the film captures the depravity, loneliness, poverty, and insanity of New York. While Woody Allen’s upbeat New York exists, Goldman’s New York also exists. With beggars and drunks lying on the streets and bodies passing film Marquees in a rhythmic slow motion the film reminded me of Geroge Grosz’s paintings of Berlin in the 1920’s. All of Goldman’s films are known for their powerful imagery and Pestilent City is no exception. This is one reason the film was shown twice at the New York Film Festival. Goldman was one of the innovators of the film art, but his films have all but been forgotten.Read More »

This film shows the day to day activities of multi-handicapped and sensory impaired students and their teachers, dormitory parents, and counselors at the Helen Keller School. The primary mission of the school is to meet the total and living needs of deaf and/or blind children, some of whom also have other disabilities. The film presents situations involving personal hygiene, mobility training, concepts of time and money, self help and independent living, dormitory life, recreation, sports, vocational training, and psychological counseling.Read More »

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10 years after the release of his epic film MAIDAN, Sergei Loznitsa resumes his Ukrainian chronicles by documenting the country’s struggle against the Russian invasion. Shot over a 2-year period, the film portrays the life of the civilian population all over Ukraine. THE INVASION presents a unique and ultimate statement of Ukrainian resilience in the face of barbaric invasion. In the second part of his Ukrainian diptych, Loznitsa paints a monumental canvas of a nation determined to defend its right to exist.Read More »

The film, based on the personal memories of Scola, specifically focuses on the early years of Fellini’s career: his arrival in Rome, the beginnings as a cartoonist in the editorial staff of the satirical magazine Marc’Aurelio (where he met among others precisely Scola), up to his first landfall in the cinema as a screenwriter.Read More »

imdb wrote:
Fifteen years ago, a handful of African Penguins, normally found only on remote islands off the Southern African coast, stumbled across on of the Cape’s most beautiful and popular tourist beaches. They swam, they saw, they conquered. And today, Boulders beach is home to more than 4,000 of these delightful, resourceful and entertaining seabirds. For the two feathered stars, Henry and Margot, it’s a tale of romance, the challenges of parenthood, separation and a penguin’s worst nightmare, oil.Read More »

From topdocumentaryfilms:
Unreported and almost unseen approach that capital and capital markets have taken since 1945 to gradually take control of the political systems of the USA and the United Kingdom. Adam Curtis outlines several key points and analyses at great length various events and personalities.

These so called market movers were all members of the Clermont Club in Mayfair, London. What at first seemed to be an audacious and unrealistic strategy to take control of the market economy turned into something almost unstoppable, destructive, cruel and completely bereft of feeling or scruple.Read More »

The first part of this film takes place at the E.H. Gentry Technical Facility which provides evaluation and personal adjustment services to sensory impaired adults and also functions as a vocational training center offering technical instruction in 15 career areas such as business, printing, home economics, food services, and computer sciences. Sequences show the adjustment services for adults in personal and work situations as they learn to adjust to their impairments. The film goes on to show work at the Alabama Industries for the Blind, the second largest employer of blind people in the U.S. which provides employment and training to more than 300 blind, deaf and other handicapped persons. Sequences include routine work and manufacturing of a variety of household and military products.Read More »

During the 2020 lockdown, Lucrecia Martel returns to her home in Salta, Argentina’s most conservative region. Here she follows Julieta Laso who, like a muse, introduces her to a group of female artists and defiant people who exchange glances and opinions around a fire. Perfectly attuned to a body of work that constructs stories from an amalgam of people and places and, four years after the beautiful Zama, Terminal norte marks the return to the screen of Argentina’s greatest filmmaker. Once again, there is a sense of being on the periphery of the world in a way that is simultaneously real, symbolic and political. Now working in a documentary format, Martel immerses herself and gets lost in Julieta Laso’s hoarse, seductive voice. And then, in a progression that has now become familiar to us, the “I” of the protagonist opens up to encounter a plethora of voices and bodies which the camera never tires of following. The result is a gripping tribute to a community that, temporary though it may be, serves as a magnificent antidote to the pandemic.Read More »

Alexander Calder’s fascination with the circus began in his mid-twenties, when he published illustrations in a New York journal of Barnum and Bailey’s Circus, for which he held a year’s pass. It was in Paris in 1927 that he created the miniature circus celebrated in this film – tiny wire performers, ingeniously articulated to walk tightropes, dance, lift weights, and engage in acrobatics in the ring. The Parisian avant-garde would gather in Calder’s studio to see the circus in operation. It was, as critic James Johnson Sweeney noted, `a laboratory in which some of the most original features of his later work were to be developed.’ This film exudes the great personal charm of Calder himself, moving and working the tiny players like a ringmaster, while his wife winds up the gramophone in the background. The Circus is now housed at the Whitney Museum in New York.Read More »