Conversations With a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes (2022)
I never really thought much about John Wayne Gacy. That’s largely because I don’t spend a lot of time delving into the lives of serial killers – when you’ve seen one serial killer documentary, it...
View ArticleNavalny (2022)
It is clear from the very beginning that we know that Alexi Navalny is a marked man. He is certain that his time upon this mortal coil is short and so he uses the best defense that is available to...
View ArticleThe Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes (2022)
Netflix’s newest “tapes” documentary The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes is a disgusting bag of tabloid trash, a movie that purports to take us behind the Hollywood façade to the...
View ArticleGeorge Carlin’s American Dream (2022)
I have a feeling that if George Carlin had espoused his views in any medium other than comedy, then he might have been assassinated. Yet, because his views were couched in the comforts of the format...
View ArticleCitizen Ashe (2021)
When I was a kid in the late 70s and early 80s, I was never tennis-oriented, or for that matter sport-oriented. Tennis was an interesting part of the television tapestry – the people programming the...
View ArticleFree Chol Soo Lee (2022)
Ten years ago, when news hit that Rodney King had died of an accidental drowning in Rialto California, I remember one of the local talk show hosts in my home of Birmingham, Alabama questioning why...
View ArticleBitterbrush (2022)
I am, what you might call, the indoorsy type. I am a land lover, a city-dweller, a home-body. When I am outside too long, I start to get anxious to be back inside with my creature comforts: my...
View ArticleAll That Breathes (2022)
Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes is a deeply moving and deeply introspective documentary that uses the poetry of observation to convey the information that the natural world is being strangled by the...
View ArticleBrainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power (2022)
Nobody two people ever really see the same movie, despite looking at exactly the same images. It is the fascinating mystery of the cinema’s effect on the human brain. Our noggins are so wired into...
View ArticleMoney Shot: The PornHub Story (2022)
Let’s face it, PornHub redefines the idea that sex sells, just ask any of its content creators who are earning enough money through the site to buy houses and cars. PornHub, in spite of it’s...
View ArticleStan Lee (2023)
Stan Lee, for me, has always been like the world’s coolest uncle – that uncle who drives up to your mom’s house on a chopper. As the founder and eternal figurehead of Marvel Comics, he had a public...
View ArticleThe YouTube Effect (2023)
Alright, so in March I got Susan Hillinger’s documentary Money Shot about the rise and social disintegration of Pornhub and now Alex Winter gives the same treatment to YouTube with The YouTube Effect....
View ArticleKokomo City (2023)
Smith’s Kokomo City is the kind of film that makes you grateful for the documentary form. At a moment when new voices are crying out to be heard, it is often found that certain voices are silenced for...
View ArticleAfter the Bite (2023)
At the same moment when Discovery is blowing its over-inflated horn about Shark Week (bolstered slightly out of familiarity by the presents of Jason Mamoa) it is nice that HBO offers an alternative...
View ArticleA Compassionate Spy (2023)
Released at virtually any other time on the calendar, Hoop Dreams director Steve James’ new documentary A Compassionate Spy might have flown through the critical circuits and gone unnoticed. But...
View ArticleArt for Everybody (2023)
This review is part of my coverage of the 25th Annual Sidewalk Film Festival.I never really gave much credence to the work of the late artist Thomas Kinkade. Perhaps because of the volume of his...
View ArticleHello, Dankness (2023)
The value of experimental filmmaking is in challenging you to consider what they are trying to say, to challenge your cinematic comfort zones. What is great about the work of the filmmaking duo known...
View ArticleChasing Chasing Amy (2023)
This review was part of my coverage of the 25th Annual Sidewalk Film Festival When Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy came out in 1996, I remember priding myself on loving it as a movie and for my own...
View ArticleMaestra (2023)
This review is part of my coverage of the 25th Annual Sidewalk Film Festival Maggie Contreras’ Maestra came to me as a happy accident. At Birmingham Alabama’s Sidewalk Film Festival, I marked on my...
View ArticleNathan-ism (2023)
Nathan Hilu is an artist in his early 90s who sits hunched over his drawing pad switching between markers and crayons like a child with busy mind. He talks incessantly, but what he has to say is...
View Article