Red Army
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Five Questions for Red Army Director Gabe Polsky
Gabe Polsky’s first documentary Red Army briskly reconstructs the story of the fiercely dominant Soviet hockey team of the late ’70s and ’80s. Out of the team, five players coalesced as an unbeatable combination, and their interviews form the backbone of Polsky’s story, fleshed out with a smart selection of archival footage from both sides of the Cold War. Teasing out hockey’s role as a not-so-subtle worldwide representation of the USSR’s success and masculine pride (per a song sung in archival footage by a boy’s choir, “cowards don’t play hockey”), Red Army is also propelled by the light director-subject sparring […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 9, 2014 -
Cannes 2014: Girlhood, It Follows, Red Army, Foxcatcher and Stray Duds
If it weren’t for the inflexible, charmingly antiquated press hierarchies of the Cannes Film Festival, where journalists queue up and get let into screenings by priority of their rainbow badge color (yellow, blue, pink, pink with a yellow dot, and the all-powerful white), it would only be a matter of time before influential Twitter users were accredited. The social media juggernaut of mass brevity — like college, marriage, or colonic irrigation — is not for everyone, but during Cannes, it’s the handiest tool for aggregating kneejerk reactions to what typically shakes down as half of the year’s Most Important Films. […]
by Aaron Hillis on May 20, 2014
