Authors — Steve Dollar
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Unsparing and Risky Visions: The 2022 First Look Festival
Although its current edition overlaps the waning days of industry monolith SXSW, the Museum of the Moving Image’s annual international showcase First Look originally really was the first look. A scarce few days into the new year, New Yorkers had the opportunity to sample stateside premieres of often boundary-fuzzing selections from the global festival circuit, kicking off the next round of the same even ahead of Sundance, which it could hardly resemble less. The timing has shifted since the festival’s launch in 2011, under now-New York Film Festival artistic director Dennis Lim, but if anything the mission has become more […]
by Steve Dollar on Mar 18, 2022 -
NYFF Critic’s Notebook: The Velvet Underground and The Girl and the Spider
Peter Buck, the guitarist for R.E.M., is often quoted as saying, “The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought one formed a band.” Now it seems, all those bands are the subjects of documentaries. Finally, even the Velvet Underground. The eponymous film is one that Todd Haynes appeared destined to make. Popular music, rock’n’roll mythology and the vagaries of self-invented personas are a core of the director’s filmography, going back to the Super-8 transgression of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a melodramatic biopic of the ‘70s pop singer cast with Barbie dolls. Velvet Goldmine (1998) […]
by Steve Dollar on Oct 14, 2021 -
Critic’s Notebook: The 2021 Camden International Film Festival
Nothing quite conjures good storytelling like a campfire (and maybe a bottle of whiskey to pass around). This knowledge is not lost on the Camden International Film Festival. Among its many strengths, which have carried the autumnal non-fiction showcase into its 17th year, is its homegrown conviviality and collegial informality. The vibe of “just a bunch of doc people sittin’ around talkin’” survives even a second year of pandemic-necessitated precautions and mixed “real life” and virtual screenings. At the end of Penny Lane’s stimulating and slyly hilarious Listening to Kenny G., the online screening of the movie segues into just […]
by Steve Dollar on Oct 14, 2021 -
“We Set Out To Make a Documentary in Six Months, Get the Music Out There, Play at Sundance and It Ends Up Taking Us Six Years”: Directors Richard Peete and Robert Yapkowitz on Karen Dalton: In My Own Time
Filmmakers Richard Peete and Robert Yapkowitz were deep in Missouri, working in the prop department for Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, when they both became consumed with the legendary 1960s-era folk singer Karen Dalton. The artist, who died of AIDS in 1993, only 55 years old, was famously described by admirer and peer Bob Dylan as someone who “sang like Billie Holiday and played guitar like Jimmy Reed.” Her hallowed status on the Greenwich Village scene that launched Dylan and many others never elevated her to mainstream success. Drug addiction and emotional turmoil took a heavy toll, yet Dalton left behind […]
by Steve Dollar on Oct 4, 2021 -
“…The Parts That Were Left out of the Ken Burns Documentary”: Tom Surgal on the “Historical Corrective” That is His Free Jazz Documentary, Fire Music
Many years in the making, Fire Music tells the many-stranded story of free jazz, a chronically misunderstood and often maligned expansion of the improvisatory African-American art form that exploded as a movement in the 1960s through the innovations of path-breaking titans like John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler and Sun Ra. Although this avant-garde has been around long enough to become its own tradition – its oldest living exponents are in their 90s – the music still remains somehow outside the mainstream. Even this week, Twitter was abuzz over Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon’s mockery of the German […]
by Steve Dollar on Sep 10, 2021 -
Critic’s Notebook: The 2021 Fantasia International Film Festival
Long before “fantastic cinema” became a thing, Montreal’s Fantasia already was an institution. The grand-peré of North American genre film festivals marked its 25th edition this summer, its second in this nervous and conflicted new age of hybrid online/IRL presentations, and despite the obstacles and anxieties inherent in such, the event as ever stuck to its fundamental mission. Montreal was founded by Catholic missionaries 1642, but the festival’s lower-case catholic taste is its strong suit. Even while checking off all the boxes – Russian Screen Life freakouts (#Blue_Whale), Japanese stop-motion cyber-horror (Junk Head), revivals of obscure Swiss mid-60s spy thrillers […]
by Steve Dollar on Sep 8, 2021 -
Tribeca Critic’s Notebook: My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To, Roaring ’20s, Italian Studies
Blood’s thicker than the mud in the family affair that is My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To, a contemporary vampire tale utterly stripped of the genre’s romance. In place of mythic hoohah, writer-director Jonathan Cuartas focuses on the grim, quotidian details of day-to-day caregiving for an extremely pale invalid named Thomas (Owen Campbell), a frail wisp of a young man who is wholly dependent on older siblings Dwight (Patrick Fugit) and Jessie (Ingrid Sophie Schram) for survival, sheltered inside a drab house on the forgotten edge of an anonymous city, its every window blanketed from fatal sunlight. […]
by Steve Dollar on Jun 23, 2021 -
Critic’s Notebook: Tribeca 2021 Docs about Larry Flynt, Anthony Bourdain, A Child’s Death and China’s Industrial March
Real-life film festivals are back! Or so I hear. After its 2020 plans for public exhibition were scuttled by the pandemic, the Tribeca Film Festival – sorry, I mean “Tribeca Festival,” that increasingly problematic word “film” now scrubbed from the moniker for ease of branding – was back in New York City movie houses this week for its 2021 edition. Audiences could also take advantage of online screenings (Tribeca At Home) in a hybrid format that makes programming accessible across the country. The festival, consistent for years as a launchpad for strong nonfiction film, remained so. There were plenty of […]
by Steve Dollar on Jun 17, 2021 -
SXSW Critic’s Notebook: The Feast, Gaia, The Spine of Night, Swan Song
William Burroughs’ explained the title of his 1959 masterpiece Naked Lunch as “a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.” Director Lee Haven Jones appears to share the Beat novelist’s intention in his feature film debut (after a decade of UK television), The Feast. The Welsh-language shocker serves up a stomach-churning bounty of visceral delights and/or dread in its deliberate 90 minutes, as it builds to a jaw-dropping third act – steadily foreshadowed throughout the preceding course (er, courses) of events. Yet another entry in the resurgence of the folk horror genre, the film […]
by Steve Dollar on Mar 26, 2021 -
SXSW Critic’s Notebook: Poly Styrene: I am a Cliché, Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes, Disintegration Loops, J’ai Été Au Bal
I’ll never forget the first time I heard Poly Styrene. I was in college, hanging out at a buddy’s one evening. We were drinking beer, smoking pot and playing records. One of them was something new, a document of the current London punk-rock scene: Live at the Roxy London WC2, featuring now-legendary acts like Wire and the Buzzcocks. The songs were by turns arty or aggro, surging out of a mix that felt submerged in an ambient murk. And then this teenager’s voice cut through. Over the curdled notes of Lora Logic’s saxophone, drums clamor and the song explodes. “Bind […]
by Steve Dollar on Mar 23, 2021
