MERCHANT IVORY: A UNIQUE LOOK BEHIND THE SCENES
I screened this documentary out of a misplaced sense of duty. After all, the filmmaking team of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory made a number of exceptional films over many years’ time, and Ivory is still going strong at…
MY PENGUIN FRIEND
This utterly likable, disarming film tells a true story about a Magellanic penguin who gets lost—and badly injured—off the coast of Brazil. He is rescued by a simple fisherman (Jean Reno) who is still shaken by the drowning of…
MODERNISM, INC.—A GOOD DOCUMENTARY BY DESIGN
I must confess that I wasn’t familiar with Eliot Noyes although, like other baby boomers, I was affected by his work. Noyes, the subject of this first-rate documentary, was an esteemed graphic designer who spearheaded the philosophy and practice…
TWISTERS DELIVERS THE GOODS
Shortly after seeing, and enjoying, the 1996 movie Twister, I noticed something on a colleague’s desk that made me laugh out loud: a copy of the published screenplay. If there were ever a film that made me want to read its…
MADE IN ENGLAND: THE FILMS OF POWELL AND PRESSBURGER
If you are already a Powell and Pressburger aficionado, this highly personal documentary, hosted and produced by Martin Scorsese, will be catnip. I found it positively thrilling. If you are unfamiliar with their notable work from the 1940s—The Red…
THE CONQUEROR: HOLLYWOOD FALLOUT
The backstory of the notorious turkey The Conqueror, starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan, has all the ingredients for a stimulating documentary, but Hollywood Fallout puts that story into a larger and more troubling context. Spoiler alert: the U.S. government lied to…
DADDIO: AN INTRIGUING CURIO
If you’re going to make a two-character film you’d better have two really interesting people in your script and damned good actors to play them. Daddio has exactly that, and the result is an intriguing curio that serves as a showcase…
