Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 54
November 22, 2020
Screening Room: ‘Collective’
One of the greatest movies of the year, and a true classic of cinematic shoe-leather journalism, Collective is a riveting documentary about a wide-ranging corruption investigation in Romania. My review is at The Playlist: A common political cliché says that it’s not the scandal that gets you; it’s the cover-up. Alexander Nanau’s coruscating documentary “Collective” supersizes …
Writer’s Desk: Don’t Hide Your Influences
In an interview published in Projections 11, director Jim Jarmusch talked about all the influences he put on screen in his 1999 genre mash-up Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai: I’m not going to play a game like all those ideas are original and they’re mine: I want to talk about where they came …
November 21, 2020
Screening Room: ‘Wojnarowicz’
In Chris Kim’s new documentary on David Wojnarowicz, he paints a vivid portrait of the artist in the tumult of the 1970s-80s New York art scene, where he was almost less making art than fighting for survival. My review of Wojnarowicz is at The Playlist: Like many artists who built the scaffolding of the underground …
November 15, 2020
Writer’s Desk: Say It Out Loud. Again.
The great and ever-acerbic Martin Amis has a new book out, Inside Story, which appears to be pretty juicy and part of that popular new sub-genre of quasi-nonfiction “novels”. (He also appears in the great new documentary The Meaning of Hitler which is showing in some festivals now and should be tracked down with all …
November 12, 2020
Screening Room: ‘Hillbilly Elegy’
Ron Howard’s adaptation of J.D. Vance’s bestselling memoir of dysfunction (societal and familial) is pretty much what you would expect. Hillbilly Elegy is playing now in limited release and hitting Netflix on November 24. Who knows? Glenn Close might get an Oscar. My review is at Slant: After the election of 2016, many shellshocked Americans …
November 10, 2020
Screening Room: DOC NYC 2020
Starting tomorrow and running for a week, this year’s all-virtual edition of the annual non-fiction film festival DOC NYC is showing over a hundred documentaries, including the ones very likely to be nominated for Oscars. There are movies about crooked cops, Timothy Leary (above), the FBI’s war on the civil rights movement, amoral but charismatic …
November 9, 2020
Screening Room: ‘The Life Ahead’
In this Italian-set adaptation of Romain Gary’s novel The Life Ahead, a Holocaust survivor (Sophia Loren) and a 12-year-old Senegalese orphan (Ibrahima Gueye) find common cause despite a rough first meeting when he steals her pursue. The Life Ahead will be available on Netflix this Friday. My review is at Slant: The Life Ahead transfers the …
November 8, 2020
Writer’s Desk: Don’t Tell Them Everything
In this interview with the New York Public Library, Pico Iyer explains why it is best for writers to retain some sense of mystery: Let this book hover somewhere between fiction and nonfiction. Let me give the reader no clue about how to categorize it before she begins or even after she’s finished. Let me …
November 2, 2020
TV Room: ‘City So Real’
The latest documentary project from the great Steve James (Hoop Dreams) is a five-part miniseries that tracks the tumult of a Chicago mayoral campaign. City So Real is streaming now on Hulu. My review is at The Playlist: It’s a noble, heartfelt, and eye-opening look at the American city, matching the scope of Frederick Wiseman’s recent …
November 1, 2020
Writer’s Desk: Getting Past the Fear
25 years ago, Bonnie Friedman sat down and let all the things that stymied her as a writer just flow out. Her guide, Writing Past Dark, is out now in an anniversary edition. LitHub talked to Friedman about what led to that book: There were a lot of things I did that made me suffer …
