Perhaps no modern sports figure has gone from the heights of praise to the depths of public revulsion as spectacularly as Lance Armstrong, the disgraced former cycling champion who beat cancer, won several consecutive Tours de France, but then watched his legend implode after admitting to doping over the course of many years. Armstrong’s unlikely rise and even more drastic fall is being retold ... more >
ARCHIVES
REVIEW: “Spaceship Earth” is a timely documentary that trains the spotlight on the climate change crisis
RELEASE DATE: May 8th, 2020
Roy Walford, Linda Leigh, Tony Burgess and John Allen
Directed by Matt Wolf
2020 America is not the time or the place for the intellectual. We are living in a time that is aggressively pushing back against science and rational thinking. Extremely important environmental issues are being sidelined and/or dismissed by too many people in positions of power. But there was a time, a time when idealists would come together to collectively find ways to improve life and to ... more >
Covid-19 claims the life of Paris-based Iranian documentary filmmaker
Kioumars Derambakhsh, the Iranian director, documentary maker and still photographer, died in Paris of COVID 19, on March 31st. During his long career, his many interests and wide culture caused him to direct a number of documentaries on a range of subjects, (including a thirteen-episode series on the drawings of Eugène Flandin, famed French 19th-century traveler to Iran, or ancient Armenian ... more >
SUNDANCE | One day, two docs: “All that perishes at the Edge of Land” and “Church and the fourth estate”
These films were shown as part of the "Documentary Shorts Program 2"
PARK CITY, Ut. - Documentaries need not be lengthy to explore a fascinating subject, as I learned at the “Documentary Shorts Program 2” at Sundance. In “All That Perishes at the Edge of Land,” filmmaker Hira Nabi’s camera magnificently captures the “ship breaking” industry of Pakistan, which employs the poorest of the poor to disassemble obsolete carrier vessels for scrap. The ships grounded ... more >
MOVIE REVIEW: “CHURCH & STATE”
DOCUMENTARY
Directed by Holly Tuckett and Kendall Wilcox
“Church & State” examines the remarkable true story of an inexperienced gay activist who, in partnership with a Salt Lake City law firm and members of the local LGBTQ community, successfully ended Utah's ban on gay marriage. Mark Lawrence, a middle-aged gay man, led the charge for gay marriage equality in Utah. He’s a bit of an acquired taste (he’s so off-putting to some that it made him ... more >
Mark Landsman: “We have a tabloid president. That’s a very disturbing thing”
"Scandalous: the untold story of the National Inquirer"
Distributed by Magnolia Pictures
Directed by Mark Landsman
Current events overtook documentary filmmaker Mark Landsman even as he was working hard on his film about the National Enquirer and its controversial parent company, AMI. “We had already gotten our seed money together and were out filming when the Ronan Farrow stories broke in the New Yorker” about President Trump’s alleged connections to Enquirer publisher David Pecker’s attempts to “kill” ... more >
“Last men in Aleppo” coming to theaters soon
Coming out on May 3rd in New York
Syria's white helmets are the country's first responders. They're there when bombs go off, when buildings collapse, when bodies need to be recovered and the wounded hospitalized. "Last Men in Aleppo," a documentary directed by Syrian filmmaker Feras Fayyad in collaboration with the Aleppo Media Center, follows two men from the White Helmets who navigate the war-torn city of Aleppo in various ... more >