Two months before Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, four African-American girls were killed in a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. Spike Lee’s documentary 4 Little Girls elevates the tragedy to Act of God status.
Stone Reader is a bibliophile’s wet dream, a love letter to reading as well as the texture and heft of the physical book. It’s also an open, expansive, cleverly made film that’s accessible to intelligent people everywhere. I don’t think I’ve read a single book among the dozens mentioned in Stone Reader, and I still loved it.
As filmmaking goes, Nick Broomfield’s Monster in a Box doesn’t have much to offer. It’s basically Spalding Gray sitting at a desk talking, with some lighting effects and unobtrusive but effective mood music by Laurie Anderson. So, naturally, it’s one of my favorite movies.
Jeffrey Blitz’s 2002 documentary Spellbound is such a completely charming movie that I feel a little bad for wanting more from it.
Did they do it? Capturing the Friedmans is wonderfully rich, and of all the things in it, this is among the least rewarding lines of inquiry for me. The most obvious point of the film is that we cannot know the truth of the accusations, so why argue about it?
Michael Moore’s divisive Bowling for Columbine is ingeniously critic-proof. If one complains about the politics of the movie, one if branded a right-winger. If one complains about fact-fudging or fairness, one is accused of missing the point.
Four years in the making, the documentary Winged Migration is beautiful to watch yet empty. For all the time, money, and effort spent filming migrating birds, would it have been too much to ask to bring an editor on-board to turn the result into something a bit more compelling?