He populated the place with characters transposed from his life as he knew it—himself, friends and the men who attacked him. Unable to pay for intensive therapy, he slowly devised a world of his own to reconstruct in place of the one he’d lost: Marwencol, a World-War-II-era Belgian town made from 1/6th scale hobby sets and GI Joe/Barbie dolls. rep who has no idea how slimy he sounds; the St. Louis County resident waiting in long lines—Story deftly makes the point that they’re all invisibly part of the same system, and the juxtaposing, sometimes counterintuitive correlations enliven each snapshot and make A spectacle of tedium; an opus of patience: Experimental filmmaker Jodie Mack seems to bring so many of her aesthetic and physical concerns to bear with the jaw-dropping Making sense of one’s past can be both a lifelong undertaking and a thorny proposition. Factual films used to be stigmatized as pointy-headed fare, not exactly big-screen must-sees. What is the burden of And so, the following documentaries chronicle the weight of these burdens.
This is Greene’s jam: He blends traditional documentary techniques, talking head interviews and appraisals of primary sources, with the artifice of feature narrative. And 2019 was another great year for documentary fans.
Not so with This two-part documentary should perhaps be watched over several shorter sittings for the sheer weight of the matter.
Director Reginald Hudlin interviewed more than 75 people over three years. A young one-eyed boy in Afghanistan is encouraged to speak in his native language instead of English, presumably for the sake of authenticity because he appears to know English perfectly well. The Best Documentaries of 2019 By Peter Debruge, Owen Gleiberman. Or sometimes it’s like putting them through the wringer. In order to find reason, and one assumes come to some sort of closure, Hogencamp—charmingly chain-smoking—acts out serialized plots in his little town, meticulously positioning tiny hands or dragging action figure vehicles down back country roads, all the while in thrall to every trivial detail within his control.When any advertising agency is commissioned to shoot a Jamaican tourism commercial, they’ll inevitably wend their way around to the same old hook: Bob Marley’s “One Love.” Come and visit Jamaica, the land of All Right!
; the event expressly features many titles that don’t necessarily fall into a “traditional” doc storytelling mode, sometimes putting the audience on its back foot about what is… well, true or false. With some male nudity.At the risk of sounding reductive in comparing this film to Betsy West and Julie Cohen’s super Junior Seau was statistically one of the greatest to ever play the game of football and beloved by fans and colleagues. They gave their dog the freedom to confront death, then back away, then confront death again. It all breathes with the nerve-shaking relief of finally having these burdens exposed, though Liu is careful to ground these moments with the harsh reality of Rockford and those towns like it: Billboards beg men not to leave, not to hit their family members, not to take out their deep-seated emotional anxiety on their loved ones.
We’ve transcended finding the difference; we now conceive of truth in terms of whether or not we have to take responsibility for it.The best documentaries of the past 10 years, then, aren’t about the gray area between truth and fiction, but about the responsibility of witnessing: When truth is in the eye of the beholder, what burden must that beholder carry?
They would work toward nirvana together.Instead, Lolabelle moved faster, sprinting down the beach ahead of her owner into oblivion—arriving at the end of her life long before Anderson ever could.
When she died she was at home; Anderson and Reed elected to, at the behest of their Buddhist teacher, allow Lolabelle to approach death on her own terms, and not, as their vet had advised, through the intercession of euthanasia.
This vision is This is the parallel Anthony most wants to explore, how systems of power treat minority and impoverished communities as lab rats, expendable and experimental. Justin Kirkland is a writer for Esquire, where he focuses on entertainment, television, and pop culture.Gabrielle Bruney is a writer and editor for Esquire, where she focuses on politics and culture. What are the risks and threats? But Ultimately, though, the heart of Morrison’s film lies in that unearthed nitrate footage, and what he shows of it is often astonishing. It’s a measure of Johnson’s overall humility that she is willing to be as brutally honest about herself with the viewers in this way—and it’s that humility that ultimately makes The documentary holds firmly to their perspectives rather than try to explore all sides of what was — and continues to be — a public and legal debate.