A Day

Sep 23, 2010 — I work closely on the Eclipse series, and one of the great privileges of that task is the chance to delve into the films and careers of artists I was previously only passingly acquainted with. Allan King is a supreme...

Sep 21, 2010 — Warrendale: Man of ActionAllan King was one of cinema’s most acute chroniclers of unadorned reality, but the term documentary seems too puny to describe the intense, passionate stories he contrived to fashion from that reality. King’s early nonfiction features are...

Dec 1, 2009 — This nonfiction masterwork by David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin is a terrifying snapshot of the sudden collapse of the sixties.

Aug 18, 2009 — Jacques Tati’s masterpiece converts work into play so pleasurably that it turns the very acts of seeing and hearing into a form of dancing.

Jan 14, 2008 — As Japan was coming out of World War II, Akira Kurosawa was coming into his own as a filmmaker.

Mar 19, 2007 — In 1945 Arthur Fellig, known as Weegee, a canny and gifted tabloid newspaper photographer, did something unprecedented: he assembled some of his best shots, of corpses and fires and arrests and crowds and spectacles, and made them into a book,...

Dec 4, 2006 — William Greaves’s masterpiece uses a single situation as the basis for a theme-and-variation structure that interrogates every aspect of the filmmaking process as well as the categories of fiction and documentary.

Dec 4, 2006 — A companion piece to Grey Gardens, this documentary stands on its own as a portrait of two women creatively passing the time as Rome burns.

Feb 14, 2005 — A touchstone of Jean-Luc Godard‘s political period, the film plays with the idea of recording working-class history as it is happening.

Sep 13, 2004 — About a year and a half ago, a friend and I found ourselves exiled to a cold Midwestern city, where we spent most of our time missing the lazy Texas college town that shaped our idea of the good life....