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, 2021Celebrating its fifth edition, the SCAD Savannah Film Festival’s Docs to Watch Roundtable is the number one reason I’ve been making the late October pilgrimage to Georgia’s charming city of (Spanish moss-draped) squares for the past few years. (That and the festival’s abundance of southern hospitality, of course. In addition to being the only fest I’ve ever been to that provides buffet-style breakfasts, lunches and dinners, guests are treated to some truly top-notch lodging. In my case, it was the lovely, Savannah River-adjacent Kimpton Brice Hotel, a mere five-minute walk from the fest’s Marshall House headquarters and the majority of […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 5, 2018Keith Richards swept into Toronto late this week to inject fresh excitement into TIFF just as the parties were waning, filmgoers were yawning and industry heavvies were flying back to the States. Sporting a snakeskin jacket, a Jamaican-coloured headband and impenetrable mirrored glasses, the 71-year-old rhythm guitarist for The Rolling Stones was here to promote Morgan Neville’s documentary, Keith Richards: Under The Influence. It enjoyed its world premiere here last night before playing today on Netflix. The consensus in Toronto holds that Under The Influence is really a commercial for Richards’ latest album, Crosseyed Heart, also released today. No surprise that […]
by Allan Tong on Sep 19, 2015Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon’s documentary Best of Enemies, premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, details the particulars of the eight televised debates between William Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal held on ABC in 1968 — four during the Republican convention in Miami, another four during the infamous Democratic one in Chicago. A very prototypically Sundance-y doc (destined for TV and classrooms, “audience-friendly”), this is a consideration of an Important Topic fleshed out with contextual talking heads and zipped up into a brief, digestible package. Given sufficient interest in the subject, it’s the kind of thing I’d generally watch on […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 24, 2015What fear — whether it’s personal, or one related to the development, financing, production or distribution of your film — did you have to confront and conquer in the making of your movie? It’s heady air in the worlds of William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal, two esteemed public intellectuals of, mostly, the latter 20th century. Buckley died before we began this film but Gore was alive, if in his declining years. Cantankerous and mean in his prime, he’d commented on his own persona saying, “Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.” Gore not only didn’t […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 23, 2015Backup singers, the ones who provide delicate harmony, who fill out so many of American popular music’s most famous songs, rarely if ever get their due. With Twenty Feet From Stardom, director Morgan Neville sought to change that. A big-hearted, engrossing, pleasurably watchable tribute to the underheralded work of dozens of key performers from the golden age of Blues, Rock, Soul and RnB, the film is a delightful recognition of artists who have long toiled in the shadows of some of American music’s most legendary performers. Emmy award winner Neville, whose past films have included well-received profiles of a gallery […]
by Brandon Harris on Jun 13, 2013