RECOMMENDED
Ian Palmer’s rough, ragged “Knuckle,” a Sundance 2011 entry, follows over a decade in the brawling, battering life of the warring Irish Traveler Quinn McDonagh and Joyce families, who specialize in bare-knuckle-boxing street fights. The blood and bruises will likely seem excessive in the mooted HBO fictionalization, but in its real-life endless grudge match, the “Knuckle” manages to make “Fight Club” look like a model of restraint. Read the rest of this entry »
RECOMMENDED
Tristan Patterson’s “Dragonslayer” is an award-winning, audience-pleasing vérité documentary-cum-punk romance that meshes moments high and low in the life of Josh “Skreech” Sandoval, a twenty-three-year-old professional skateboarder from the suburbs of Fullerton, California. There are kaleidoscopic delights in the urgent assembly, as well as omens of potential disaster at most turns. Read the rest of this entry »
RECOMMENDED 
A simple scrim, lightly dancing, a sheer of muslin, ripples across the screen at an acute angle, like a movie screen, but translucent, in the briefest instance of prestidigitation introducing the 3D element to Wim Wenders’ “Pina,” a film for his late friend, dance choreographer Pina Bausch. In its own fashion, it’s as revolutionary a way of introducing the rare, effective stereoscopic effect as James Cameron’s slow reveal of the far reaches of the highly active spaceship in the opening shot of “Avatar.” Wenders was extremely articulate about the low-budget experimentation that led to the form of “Pina” in a keynote address to June 2011′s Toronto International Stereoscopic 3D Conference, which is worth finding on his website. Read the rest of this entry »
RECOMMENDED
The great strength of Jennifer Fox’s documentaries is her directness, and considering that her best-known work, “Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman,” is longitudinal in the extreme, a six-hour survey of her romantic life and the lives of women she meets across three years, from the ages of forty-two to forty-five, and her “My Reincarnation” (2010) encompasses twenty years of experience, it’s certainly a virtue. Read the rest of this entry »
RECOMMENDED
When the dream to become an astronaut can be attained only by having already become a decamillionaire… That’s the world we live on, and some of us hope to rocket from. Videogame designer Richard Garriott’s father was an astronaut, but his own hopes were dashed when he developed nearsightedness in childhood. (Garriott was one of the founders of MMORPGs, or “Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games.”) But what if you had the money in advancing years to found a company—”Space Adventures”—and could scrawl your name onto a $30 million check to buy your way onto Russia’s Soyuz and the International Space Station? Read the rest of this entry »
RECOMMENDED
Dotty, unvarnished and unwashed, Jenner Furst and Daniel B. Levin’s “Dirty Old Town” (2010) is a fugue-cum-fantasia set in Billy’s Antiques and Props, one of the last remaining bastions of ruffian funk in the Bowery area of downtown Manhattan. Aggressive music, in-your-face performances and a general air of malaise and malodorousness mark the sketch-style assembly, which has garnered favorable remarks from local denizens Jim Jarmusch and Abel Ferrara, who notably said “This movie is fucking real.” Read the rest of this entry »
RECOMMENDED
Battling the man in Brooklyn: can one man stand in the way of devastating progress as a neighborhood is sacrificed to a oligarchic developer’s profit? In Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley’s Oscar-shortlisted longitudinal doc, “Battle for Brooklyn” follows several years in the life of Daniel Goldstein and his family, renters in the Prospect Heights neighborhood who are besieged by an especially shabby case of eminent domain abuse on the part of Bloomberg’s New York City. Read the rest of this entry »
RECOMMENDED
Lutz Hachmeister’s genial “Three Stars” (Drei Sterne) is another welcome addition to the smorgasbord of approaches to documenting the endlessly fascinating process of how food is prepared. Nine Michelin-starred chefs on three continents allowed the filmmaker into their kitchens, with an emphasis on their philosophy and routine. “They laugh because they don’t know what it means,” a sommelier says of what his friends know of his work, leaned back in a chair after served, “But when I explain? They think it’s great.” Read the rest of this entry »
RECOMMENDED
Benjamin Marquet’s 2008 documentary falls neatly between two equine film studies this year, the inspirational “Buck” and the soaring “The War Horse.” (More on this next week.) A study of Steve, Florian and Flavien, three petit fourteen-year-old jockeys and their education at a rudimentary training center for future male and female “Lads & Jockeys” in the village of Chantilly outside Paris, the visual style is observant and straightforward for the most part, with an only slightly insistent score. Read the rest of this entry »
RECOMMENDED
Edmon Roch’s engaging, dramatic documentary “Garbo The Spy” recounts the life of Juan Pujol Garcia, a bourgeois Barcelonan who became one of the leading double agents in World War II, ostensibly working for the Germans but actually in the pay of the Allies, and who set up a network of fictional agents to deceive the Germans about the timing of the landing at Normandy. One of the strategies for conveying the life of a man who was a shadow is to use clips from espionage thrillers, pushing home the idea that a man who was code-named “Garbo” for his performance skills was the equal of the actors on screen. Read the rest of this entry »
