Review: Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things
Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things is the latest in a slew of solid if not particularly groundbreaking music documentaries celebrating the life and legacy of a pioneering artist.…
Review: Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness
Wait, how did Tiger King get on here? It’s a documentary series, not a film! Too bad. I’m giving myself permission to write up (or not write up) whatever the…
Mini-reviews: 2020 Oscar-Nominated Short Films
If you're planning to watch the Academy Awards this weekend, chances are you haven't had a chance to catch the shorts. I mean, who does? Unless you're lucky enough to…
Review: Citizen K
In his latest documentary award winning director Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Taxi to the Dark Side) takes his audience into the world of the Russian…
Review: What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael
My first experience with reading film criticism was with my mother's New Yorker magazines. Most of what was in the magazine was too highbrow for me as an adolescent, but…
Review: GIFT
When I was in grad school, the first book we had to read was Lewis Hyde's "The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World." It's a beautiful meditation on…
Arty Chick’s Middleburg Film Festival Download 2019
Another super tiring weekend in the bucolic Virginia hamlet of Middleburg watching more films than I should! I predicted early on that this festival would outgrow itself and I think…
Review: Where’s My Roy Cohn?
There’s something inherently distressing and depressing – and more than a little scary - about the documentary Where’s My Roy Cohn? The title is taken from a 2018 quote attributed…
Review: Midnight Traveler
Stories of refugees and immigrants are all over the news these days. But mostly they're about numbers and policy while the people are faceless and nameless. What this gritty documentary…
Review: Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins
If you don't know who Molly Ivins was, you'll be a fan by the end of this doc. If you do remember her, you'll fall back in love. And after…
Review: Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché
She was there at the very beginning of the film industry. She directed hundreds of popular films and built her own studio that rivaled all the others of the day.…
Review: Cold Case Hammarskjold
In this thoroughly odd documentary, Danish filmmaker Mads Brügger heads to Zambia after hearing conspiracy theories and tall tales about how UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold was murdered in 1961. In…
Review: For Sama
For Sama is a thoroughly engrossing and heart-wrenching documentary made by the mother of a baby born in Aleppo, Syria during the rebel uprising and daily bombings. Sama's mother Waad…
Review: One Child Nation
Nanfu Wang has made a couple of my favorite documentaries of the past few years. Hooligan Sparrow followed a Chinese women's rights activist's journey and put both the subject and…
Review: Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love
Oh, to be a great man's muse! To have him write poetry and songs about you, to you, for you. And all you need do is sit at his feet…