- DOC NYC: Now Through Tuesday, November 9
Ladies and gents, there’s a new festival in town. Last night the inaugural edition of DOC NYC kicked off in a big way, featuring Werner Herzog and his breathtaking 3-D documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Opening with such a mammoth (no prehistory-pun intended) piece of work is quite a statement about the goals and scope […]
- Doc Soup: Doc Highlights at the Toronto International Film Festival
What a great film festival. Maybe it’s how lovely Toronto is in September. Maybe it’s the enthusiastic audiences. Maybe it’s the great restaurants. Or maybe it’s how the festival treats otherwise art-house fare like big blockbusters. These are just a few of the reasons I have always loved the Toronto International Film Festival over the […]
- Doc Soup: Best Documentary Characters of All Time
As promised, it’s time for my “Best Documentary Characters of All Time” list. You may be wondering: How does one go about compiling a list of best characters from nonfiction films? These “characters” aren’t the products of imagination and craft, after all; they are real people. But, wait, don’t we have the expression, “He/she is […]
- Doc Soup: The 10 Greatest Moments in Documentary Film, Part 1
It’s been a while since I’ve done a list (see my 10 most lugubrious docs and the 10 sexiest) — and as an unabashed advocate of the genre, here’s another. What makes for a great moment in a documentary? That can sometimes be a complicated issue, because some of the “greatest” moments are also the […]
- Doc Soup: Crossing Over to the Lighter Side
Shame on you, Jessica Yu, documentary director of such serious and elegant and moving and… important documentaries such as Breathing Lessons, about a writer slowly living and dying in an iron long, In the Realms of the Unreal (POV 2005), about twisted shut-in outsider artist Henry Darger, and Protagonist, linking the lives of four men […]
- Doc Roundup: June 20, 2008
IN THEATERS Werner Herzog‘s Encounters at the End of the World opened in limited release on June 11. The film follows Herzog’s travels in Antarctica, from the 1,100-person community of McMurdo Station, to the Ross Sea, to the Erebus volcano, capturing as many of nature’s sights as possible. Encounters at the End of the World […]
- Doc Soup: Directors Who Doc
There’s something that irks me when I see these giant full-page ads in The New York Times like the recent ones that have been promoting the Rolling Stones, Martin Scorsese, and the recent rock doc, Shine a Light. When big-time feature directors make docs, the amount of attention they get is just a little bit […]