Errol Morris brings the full force of his filmmaking to a pair of PSAs he’s made as part of AT&T’s “It Can Wait” campaign, which raises awareness about distracted driving. Those who’ve seen his recent work, especially his Netflix six-part film, Wormwood, will recognize a number of stylistic devices here, including multi-angle talking heads material, unusual photo crops, and, of course, Morris’s pertinently shouted off-screen questions. But the films, particularly the devastating “Forrest’s Story,” go further than the usual PSA, exploring, in addition to Morris’s usual epistemological inquiry, the different forms of grief and the enduring mysteries of loss. The […]

Recounting a recent conversation, Errol Morris says that he’s happy his friend understood Wormwood, the documentary filmmaker’s epic new work, as “an essay on ‘doing history.’” “I think it’s a lot of things, too,” Morris goes on to say, “but I like to hear that it’s about my obsessions with epistemology.” Obsession and epistemology—doesn’t the latter usually require the former? It certainly does in these reality-challenged times, when the act of landing on some honest reckoning with the social and political record requires a scrupulous method, unrelenting tenacity and, indeed, some small degree of obsession. All these qualities have been […]

Sonia Kennebeck’s National Bird is a humanistic look at those responsible for and affected by America’s divisive drone war program. Those working in drone warfare are thousands of miles removed from the destination of their attack, so National Bird is primarily placed in suburban America, away from the crimes at the film’s core. Through three former air force workers turned whistleblowers (and their victims), Kennebeck’s film is equally about an emotional and spatial disconnect. We do not interact with those we are affecting most – please feel free to draw your own parallels to current American politics here – and therefore the country can […]

Every film not only tells a story but is a story. Lumping several movies together to find commonality is a perilous pursuit. For example, we have to determine if shared traits operate at the level of content, plot or characters. Or might they be more in the vein of form — style, perhaps, or generic membership? Last week, zeroing in on what I consider the six finest features screening in the first third of the New York Film Festival led me to a marked thematic thread, which we can file under “loneliness and the attempt to escape it.” From the […]

Though smallpox has been eradicated, stocks of the virus remain for research purposes. Should these samples be destroyed in order to prevent them from being used as a biological weapon? Demon in the Freezer, the compelling short documentary from Academy Award-winner Errol Morris (The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara), explores the issue as part of The New York Times Op-Docs series. The film is Morris’ eighth film published by Op-Docs and the 200th Op-Doc video since the series launched in 2011. “It all comes down to the question of how best to protect ourselves against ourselves. […]

“Detached, inhuman and unreal” — that’s how Sonia Kennebeck describes the act of killing via Predator drones. An emblem of American foreign policy in the Obama era, so-called unmanned aerial vehicles allow nations to monitor and assassinate their enemies from thousands of miles away. Kennebeck interviews the operators and survivors of drone warfare in National Bird, her whistle-blowing documentary executive produced by Errol Morris and Wim Wenders. Below, Kennebeck discusses the ethical dilemmas of drone warfare, drones as a cinematic tool and how she found her remarkable subjects. The film screens this week at the Tribeca Film Festival and has been picked up by FilmRise for distribution. Filmmaker: […]

In this interview clip from a shelved Errol Morris project, businessman and now presidential candidate Donald Trump muses on the meanings of Orson Welles’ classic film, Citizen Kane. Trump doesn’t diverge from critical orthodoxy about the film, but it’s still interesting to hear him take away the standard lesson that money isn’t everything. Still, as Jason Kottke notes, Trump can’t just help himself from throwing in conversation-ending misogynistic aside. From Morris’s site: The Movie Movie, an aborted project, is based on the idea of taking Donald Trump, Mikhail Gorbachev and others and putting them in the movies they most admire. […]

For his next semi-unlikely move, Errol Morris is making six shorts for ESPN Films. This first installment, The Subterranean Stadium, delves into the world of electric football. With guidance from “commissioner” John “Larue” DiCarlo, Morris uses his typically on-point interview skills (and offscreen, typically astonished-sounded questions) to guide us through a game whose players claim, plausibly, is as complex as chess.

“I don’t usually like my own work, but I’m rather proud of these,” tweeted the self-effacing Errol Morris, sharing a link to three new shorts about peace for the New York Times Op-Docs. His eclectic subjects include the Nobel Prize Winners Leymah Gwobee and Lech Walesa, and the nominee Bob Geldorf. Visa hired Morris to shoot the laureates as part of a commercial campaign for the World Cup, and he took the opportunity to conduct extended interviews on activism and widespread change. Head to the Times to view the short documentaries, alongside a long-form introduction by Morris.

Throughout season one of The Newsroom, viewers could play an idle game before each episode: which recent news item would be put through the Aaron Sorkin wringer, morphing from painful recent incident to an amusing babble of rapid-fire speech set in comfortably familiar rhythms? Sorkin’s been around so long his trademark back-and-forth/walk-and-talk exchanges smack of self-parody even when well-executed. His familiarity/inflexibility suggests a belief that any historical event or dramatic situation can be processed through the writer’s usual dialogue tricks and emerge with a sufficiently revelatory perspective. The same erroneous assumption underlies Errol Morris’ The Unknown Known, which has expanded […]