USA

Bob Stewart, Allmovie, wrote:
This 1973 Frederick Wiseman documentary, filmed at the Juvenile Court in Memphis, Tennessee, won the Columbia University School of Journalism’s 1974 Dupont Award for “Excellence in Broadcast Journalism.” In 144 minutes, Wiseman shows a wide variety of cases before the Memphis Juvenile Court, from child abuse and sexual offenses to armed robbery and foster home placement, and it examines such issues as the range and limits of choices available to the court, psychology of offenders, constitutional points, procedural questions, and community protection vs. the desire for rehabilitation.Read More »

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A mentally unstable Vietnam war veteran works as a nighttime taxi driver in New York City where the perceived decadence and sleaze feeds his urge to violently lash out, attempting to save a teenage prostitute in the process.Read More »

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The film perfectly balances both gorgeous footage of the continent as well as fascinating interviews and anecdotes of the many researchers and workers of the McMurdo research station. It fits in well with Herzog’s already substantial canon. It is a beautiful look at a beautiful continent populated by a forklift driver with a PhD, a woman who once traveled to South America in a sewage pipe on the back of a truck, researchers who play electric guitars on top of research station to celebrate discovering three new species of aquatic life in one day, and many more. Their stories converge where all the lines on the map meet at the end of the world. Herzog shot the film with a crew of just himself and the camera operator, and the result is a film with some of the most beautiful footage I’ve ever seen.Read More »

The Brink’s Job tells the real-life story of a group of small-time, working-class robbers in Boston, who came together and pulled off the largest robbery in US history, taking the Brink’s security company for $2.8 million in 1950. Peter Falk plays the ringleader. He tells his wife (Gena Rowlands): “All that money is in there, and it’s being held prisoner, it’s just screaming to me through the walls… Well I’m going in there, and I’m gonna get it out.” The film follows the group’s task (and their environment, and their pursuers) with an eye to the pragmatic, but it’s not so procedural (in the sense of Friedkin’s earlier Sorcerer or French Connection) as to hamper the movie’s broad purpose: reanimating an old news headline, into a fun sort of ensemble heist folktale.Read More »

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A stark, perverse story of murder, kidnapping, and police corruption in a Mexican border town.Read More »

In Agnieszka Holland’s English-language film from 1999, Frank Shore (Ed Harris) is a Catholic priest who works as a postulator, a church official who investigates reports of holy miracles to determine their veracity. Some time back, one of Shore’s investigations had ugly repercussions, and now he devotes his time to running a soup kitchen. He’s called back into service when a number of Catholics ask for the canonisation of the late Helen O’Regan, who is claimed to have performed miracles and whose statue is supposed to weep tears of blood.Read More »

Fool for Love is a 1985 American drama film directed by Robert Altman. The film stars Sam Shepard, who also wrote both the original play and the adaptation’s screenplay, alongside Kim Basinger, Harry Dean Stanton, Randy Quaid and Martha Crawford. It was entered into the 1986 Cannes Film Festival. It was filmed in Eldorado and Las Vegas, New Mexico.Read More »

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Employing natural sound and contemplative proscenium shots, Benning skillfully composes a series of pure and majestic images that at once evoke a sense of nostalgic splendor as well as deliver a subtle, yet penetrating, political commentary. Benning tells the story of how water irrigates this valley and how the produce is carted away in boxcars for the nation’s consumption. He shows the lifestyle of a modest and growing rural community, whose concerns are often drowned out by the powerful railroads, oil companies and insurance conglomerates which own the farms and ranches and benefit from undocumented immigrant labor while insisting on imprisoning an American population of color.Read More »

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Disney animators set pictures to Western classical music as Leopold Stokowski conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra. “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” features Mickey Mouse as an aspiring magician who oversteps his limits. “The Rite of Spring” tells the story of evolution, from single-celled animals to the death of the dinosaurs. “Dance of the Hours” is a comic ballet performed by ostriches, hippos, elephants, and alligators. “Night on Bald Mountain” and “Ave Maria” set the forces of darkness and light against each other as a devilish revel is interrupted by the coming of a new day.Read More »