One of the best things about the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, which took place November 16th–27th, is how community-inclusive the fest is, with most activities, from interactive exhibitions to informal master classes, open to the public free of charge. (Indeed, it’s possible to get your cinephile fix on a daily basis without ever buying a movie ticket.) And one of this year’s truly informative events was a Meet the Makers discussion at the Escape Club on Rembrandtplein hosted by Canadian documentarian Peter Wintonick. IDFA guest Steve James, who was honored with a retrospective, was there that Saturday morning to […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 6, 2012As 2011 comes to a close it’s time to look back on the year in movies. It’s always tough for me to come up with a yearly best movie list because I never feel I’ve seen everything by Jan. 1. By this time of year I’m still trying to finish watching the award contenders (still on my list: Hugo, War Horse, Moneyball, Tinker Tailor Solider Spy, The Help). So here are 10 movie moments from 2011 (in no particular order) that have stayed with me. “I Want You To Help Me Find A Killer of Women” I know you’re probably […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Dec 31, 2011Discussing his feature Into the Abyss, Werner Herzog gives Vice Magazine a hug.
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 1, 2011In his films, Werner Herzog has traveled the Amazon, journeyed to Antarctica and, most recently, descended through time into the caves of France to uncover centuries-old cave paintings. So, his trip to a small town in Texas awaiting the capital punishment of a young murderer might have been less epic were it not for the moral dilemmas, lingering anguish and genuine strangeness he finds there. Eschewing the tropes of typical capital punishment documentaries, Herzog, with his German-accented voice jutting from behind the camera, lends an empathetic ear to the words of not only the killer but his accomplice, the victims’ […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 11, 2011Since I’ve never attended the Toronto International Film Festival, or the long-running doc series Stranger Than Fiction, I was shamefully late to discover the curatorial wizard behind-the-curtain by the name of Thom Powers. But ever since Powers’s programming became, for me, the highlight of this year’s Miami International Film Festival he’s been firmly on my cine-radar. So when I noticed he’d be returning as artistic director of DOC NYC (which runs Nov. 2-10) I thought, “Oh, no.” I didn’t have time to cover DOC NYC right before I flew to Amsterdam to tackle the mother of all nonfiction fests IDFA! […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 2, 2011Are you short a New Year’s resolution? Feel free to borrow one of the ones below. 1. Amplify your voice. You have a voice. Make it bigger in 2011. Spread it wider and connect it to more people. If you are working within your own little crew, spread out. If you’ve gotten into a pattern of relying on the same agents or producers or colleagues, enlarge the perimeter of that circle. If face-to-face is your preferred medium, get out more. Do you email or text too much? Call people more. (This one was suggested by Ira Deutchman via Twitter.) If […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 1, 2011I admit a certain obsession with cell phone Scrabble, the band Beach House, and of course, Errol Morris. While the first two are relatively recent acquisitions, that last one has been around for a while (since Cannes 2003 to be exact, and an interview on his film The Fog of War). Morris’ goofy sense of humor remains as addictive as his philosophical and cinematic wanderings. With his latest documentary, Tabloid, my obsession with Morris and his obsessions—in this case, an obsessive beauty queen and the reporters obsessed with her—has reached new heights. While you’re waiting with bated breath for Tabloid to […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Sep 16, 2010“It’s so strange we remain friends,” said Errol Morris at one point in his dialogue with fellow director Werner Herzog at the Toronto International Film Festival Monday. During their hour-long conversation at the new Bell Lightbox, the two men spoke of many things — filmmaking, of course, but also reading, music, the Warren Commission report, and actors vs. non-actors (Morris: “In my more spurious moments I’ve said that the main difference between SAG actors and real people is that real people can act”). But mostly they engaged in a kind of digressive contemplation inflected by occasional bouts of one-upmanship — […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 15, 2010Fassbinder and Herzog from Wim Wenders’ 1982 documentary on the future of cinema, Chambre 666.
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 10, 2010WERNER HERZOG AND D.P. PETER ZEITLINGER CAPTURE ANTARCTICA IN ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD. COURTESY THINKFILM. For more than 40 years, Werner Herzog has been redrawing the map, both cinematically and geographically. He started making short films in the mid-1960s, and made an impact internationally with Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972), the tale of a mad conquistador’s doomed jungle quest, the first of five collaborations with actor Klaus Kinski. Herzog and Kinski’s relationship was often turbulent and violent, but the ambitious, outlandish and usually unhinged films they made together over the course of the 70s and 80s […]
by Nick Dawson on Jun 11, 2008