Zero Days
Feeling paranoid? Worried that you may wake up one morning, log into your computer and realize you’ve been hacked? Not just hacked but your life has been gutted. Every secret ever put on your computer has been simultaneously destroyed and made public?
The Music of Strangers
Yo-Yo Ma’s brume of calm, carefully contained humor and self-effacing humility is the perfect sidecar to the brilliant and celebrated composer’s oeuvre. He is meditative, funny, and full of humanity and wisdom – and yet he is never pretentious.
The First Monday in May
The lavish lionization of wealth, exclusivity, and celebrity, particularly in the second half of the documentary, is enough to make Robespierre reanimate and start a second French Revolution
Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict
SurrealiZzzZzm Review by Robert D. Patrick Long-lost tapes are the documentary theme of 2015. Interviews, unearthed in some Indiana Jones-like warehouse after years of dormancy, is the hottest type of runway dress for directors this year. Someone is sending Sam Neil – complete with his Jurassic Park hat – down to dust for these fossils. First, Listen to me Marlon, comprised almost exclusively of the previously unheard...
Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead
Sex, Drugs, & Blah, Blah, Droll Review written by Robert D. Patrick Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead is a slack-jawed hagiography that is content to bay at the moon with self-reverence. Director Douglas Tirola examines the crude craftsmanship behind the bedraggled throng of comedians, artists, and tittering hyenas known, affectionately, as National Lampoon. The documentary follows the wily troupe of booze soaked satirists with a...
Listen To Me Marlon
Re-branding a Legend Review written by Robert D. Patrick As of late, documentaries seem to be tiring of the Ken Burns batting stance. Panning over pictures, ad nauseam, will not suffice. Audiences are younger and less adept to the vibrating string scores and mousy historians of old. With Kurt Cobain: About a Son, Montage of Heck, and now, with director Stevan Riley’s Listen To Me Marlon, directors are beginning to use the...
Dark Star: H.R. Giger’s World
Skull and Cross Tomes Review written by Robert D. Patrick Dark Star, the title of director Belinda Sallin’s charcoal-colored hagiography, lets you know precisely enough about its subject. Sharing the name with a Grateful Dead song, and, more modernly, a terrifically catchy Polica track, Dark Star knows where to clamp its fangs. Swiss artist Hans Rudolph Giger inspired everything from the storied Alien franchise to countless, uh,...
Deli Man
Love in the Time of Challah, Bruh Review by Robert D. Patrick A salvo of empirically pleasing images wash over the screen. Suddenly there is buttery meat, fine mustard, top shelf rye, and an honest serving of choleric wit. The Jewish deli, an institution for food lovers. You need an affable level of hubris and a set of working taste buds to hunker down behind the fingerprinted glass counter. Director Erik Greenberg Anjou’s...
Rich Hill
Hymns and Road Signs Review written by Robert D. Patrick A coral reef of dirty dishes. Later, a flippant exchange between siblings. The drum roll delivery of an auctioneer bruising the night sky. A parent, sheathed in a comforter, siphons soda out of a Doctor Pepper cup while cavalierly telling the cameraman that her thirteen-year-old son is old enough to make his own decisions. Shouts. Screams. Ire and bellyaching. Rich Hill, filmed...
Finding Fela
A Low Fog Hums Review written by Robert D. Patrick Alex Gibney’s documentary about the enigmatic spiritual warrior, Fela Kuti, finds itself bolstered by primary colors and pulsing enthusiasm. The counterculture musician, lacquered in sweat and crosshatched with warpaint, remains, at the end of Gibney’s expressive exploration, a rattling shadow in the distance. An opponent of political hubris, Fela glistened with...
