Every once in a while, a film comes along that invites the audience to transcend their theater seats and join a cast of characters on a strange journey, where initially the final destination remains a mystery to all. Over the course of 80 lean minutes, Tchoupitoulas, now playing in New York City at IFC Center, asks us to follow three brothers who, after missing the last ferry home, traverse the streets of New Orleans by night with little more on hand than their wits and a dog named Buttercup. The film weaves together the various nightlife scenes, ranging from striptease […]
by Martha Early on Dec 8, 2012After years of shooting in extreme conditions, National Geographic photographer James Balog finally realized he could no longer ignore the slow disappearance of frozen landscapes he’d come to know and love. In Chasing Ice, director and cinematographer Jeff Orlowski documents Balog’s ambitious plan to install 25 separate time-lapse cameras across the globe in order to record receding glaciers and shifting ice, dire omens of a changing climate with no audience to bear witness. All the while Orlowski follows directly behind, shooting in dog sleds and ice crevasses, capturing the troubles that beset the most impassioned plans and what one man is […]
by Martha Early on Nov 16, 2012When the maternal grandmother of Arnon Goldfinger dies, the documentary filmmaker is confronted with the lifetime of furniture, gloves and books she left behind in the Tel Aviv apartment she shared with his grandfather. After he begins to document the long process of cleaning out and distributing the items among family members, an unexpected possession rises to the top: a newspaper article which hints at family ties to the Nazis. The Flat (which opens on Friday through Sundance Selects) follows Goldfinger’s initial question of how the article came to be in the apartment, and how it connects to his grandparents […]
by Martha Early on Oct 17, 2012