The Documentary

Dec 19, 2013 — Repertory PicksIt’s a tradition. Every year at Christmastime, the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago resurrects Hiroshi Teshigahara’s exquisite documentary cum visual poem Antonio Gaudí for a weeklong engagement. This largely wordless film, which shows us the beautiful and grand...

Nov 19, 2013 — There are few people in the world we would rather hear talk about the beauty of Yasujiro Ozu’s cinema than Donald Richie. One of the world’s foremost scholars on Japanese film and culture, Richie, who died earlier this year, appears...

Apr 3, 2013 — A new documentary profile of a great raconteur, titled André Gregory: Before and After Dinner and directed by Cindy Kleine, opens today at New York’s Film Forum. In it, Gregory delves into his past, including his fraught relationship with his...

Feb 28, 2013 — Chronicle of a Summer, a sui generis 1961 collaboration between sociologist Edgar Morin and documentary filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch, is considered a pioneering work of cinéma-vérité. That term—coined by Morin himself—gets thrown around a lot, but what does it really mean?...

Jul 17, 2012 — Down by Law, released in 1986, was Jim Jarmusch’s third movie. Unlike its predecessors, Permanent Vacation (1980) and Stranger Than Paradise (1984), it did not take off from a semi-documentary view of downtown Manhattan. It was shot entirely on location...

Aug 24, 2011 — NOTE: The following essay contains spoilers. Not long into Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine (2007), a melodrama about suffering, salvation, and the dangerously blurred line between belief and madness, the heroine encounters the first of several challenges to her way of...

May 19, 2011 — If you build it, they won’t necessarily come. This is the deflating conventional wisdom among art-house and repertory theater owners today. Which is why the success of Film Streams, at the Ruth Sokolof Theater in Omaha, Nebraska, is such a thrill...

Apr 18, 2011 — An Eagle for an Emperor, a Gyrfalcon for a King;   a Peregrine for a Prince, a Saker for a Knight, a Merlin for a Lady;   a Goshawk for a Yeoman, a Sparrowhawk for a Priest,   a Musket...

Aug 24, 2010 — I n a photograph of Josef von Sternberg from 1937, he looks like a character from one of his own films: a turbaned magus with elegantly trimmed beard and mustache, holding a cigarette as he gazes out obliquely, with the...

Aug 9, 2010 — Now that Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb is fifteen years old, it seems pretty safe to say that it has evolved from a potential classic to actually being one. But what kind? A documentary portrait of a comic-book artist, musician, and nerdy...