The films in this program contain some of the most powerful images to be seen on the screen this year. Lucy Walker's The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom, a chronicle of the tidal wave that struck Japan last March, opens with rough footage from a cell phone of the water surging in, sweeping along with it houses, cars, burning buildings, and the people trying to rescue those climbing the hill from which the video is taken. Against this horror, the cherry trees blossom a month later. Not much mitigates the tragedy in James Spione's Incident in New Baghdad as an ex-soldier recovering from PTSD relives his nightmare when he sees on the news an image of himself carrying a wounded child. And Gail Dolgin and Robin Fryday's The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement honors James Armstrong, who marched for voting rights in Alabama in 1965, a struggle for justice that is far from over.
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- Review: Neil Young Trunk Show
If a Neil Young neophyte can find himself rocking in a cinema seat to the spirited, soulful music performed in this second of a rumored triptych of Demme-directed, Young-starring concert documentaries, long-time fans are bound to break their armrests.
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Festival favorite documents the "real America"
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This autopsy of an unfinished 1964 film by the great French director Henri-Georges Clouzot ( The Wages of Fear ) holds fascinations — and frustrations — for the avid franco-cinephile.
- Review: Last Train Home
Labor Day weekend at the Bourne Bridge has nothing on New Year's in China, when 130 million migrant workers leave the cities to visit their families in the sticks.
- As 'Superman' debuts, risks and rewards of school reform made plain
The documentary Waiting for "Superman" opens this week — an ambitious film that aims to bring the debate over education reform into every household.
- Review: Boxing Gym
Whatever his subject matter, documentarian Frederick Wiseman has always been concerned with blood and sweat.
- Review: And Everything Is Going Fine (2010)
"Maybe I should just tell you some of the facts as I remember them," the late, acclaimed monologist and actor Spalding Gray says early on in Steven Soderbergh's documentary collage, And Everything is Going Fine .
- Among the Oscar shorts, documentaries take the prize
The winter blahs are over. The first great cinema treat of 2011: the five surprisingly superb documentary shorts vying for an Academy Award, opening this Friday as "2011 Documentary Oscar Shorts" at the Coolidge Corner Theatre.
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Want to know more about Spaulding Gray? Don't start here.
- Photos: The RIIFF Oscar Night at Veteran's Memorial Auditorium
Rhode Island International Film Festival (RIIFF) hosts their own Oscar Night at the Veterans Memorial Auditorium on Sunday, February 27, 2011.
- The Forgotten Oscars 2011
It's Oscar time again, and, as usual, the Academy is trotting out the same old bullshit.
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Reviews
, Lucy Walker, Civil Rights, Oscars, More
, Lucy Walker, Civil Rights, Oscars, documentary, film, Less
