Children Underground is one of the more depressing documentaries that you’ll ever see. When dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu banned contraception in the mid-sixties (in order to raise some kind of work force that would bring Romania from the brink of economic disaster), hundreds of thousands of children were left homeless on the street, or stuffed into [...]
You either like Nick Broomfield or you don’t. Like Michael Moore, he puts himself front and center in the documentary, wandering into frame and asking questions with a painful naïveté. For fans of 60 Minutes, this completely unprepared approach makes you bristle a little. It’s both Biggie and Tupac’s greatest asset and greatest failure. Like [...]
You know every note of every song. There’s no way you can avoid it. Even if you consider yourself unskilled in the art of music appreciation, you know Motown - Heatwave, Heard It Through the Grapevine, My Girl. I could go on and on. You think to yourself: those are damn good songs with damn good singers (Marvin Gaye, [...]
Year: 2002 Directed by: Steve James Featuring: Steve James, Stephen Fielding, Tonya Gregory and Judy James Details: 140 mins / Lions Gate / Rated R Steve James directed Hoop Dreams, a documentary about up and coming basketball players, when he lived in Illinois. Wanting to do “something more” and “make a difference in someone’s life”, [...]
Directed by: Andrew Jarecki Featuring:The Friedman Family Details: 107 mins / Lions Gate / Unrated It’s all about the truth, about hiding the truth, about distortion of the truth. It’s about people manipulating the truth for their own means. That’s what Capturing the Friedmans is all about – the truth and all the permutations therein. [...]