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Dreamy Food Doc “The Last Magnificent” Follows Celebrity Chef Jeremiah Tower’s Lonely Rise
Even though he’s one of the world’s most celebrated celebrity chefs, Jeremiah Tower is a solitary man. In the CNN-produced documentary Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent, he mostly travels around all by his lonesome, walking the Earth like Caine in Kung Fu. That’s how he’s been since he was a kid. His verbally abusive dad […]
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The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki: The Least Overbearing Underdog Boxing Movie Ever?
Who is Olli Mäki, and why should you care about the happiest day of his life? These might not seem like urgent questions if you don’t possess a wealth of knowledge concerning Finnish boxers active in the early 1960s, but co-writer/director Juho Kuosmanen’s answers prove nuanced and endearing. A hit at Cannes (where it won […]
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The Mad King’s Splendor: Visconti’s Decadent ‘Ludwig’ Hits Home Video
“Ludwig, you are the favorite of the Lord because more than any other man, you are exposed to sin.” A compassionate priest says this to the mad king of Bavaria about halfway through Ludwig, Luchino Visconti’s sprawling 1972 film, now finally available, in all its uncut glory, in a gorgeous Arrow Academy Blu-ray set. You […]
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A Village Voice Dossier: Julie Dash and ‘Daughters of the Dust’
Last November saw the triumphant (and long overdue) restoration and re-release of Julie Dash’s epochal 1991 film Daughters of the Dust. With the restored version of the film now out on Blu-ray, it seems to be an appropriate time to revisit some of our coverage of this remarkable film and its visionary director. From November, […]
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“Finding Oscar” Digs Into a Heartbreaking Guatemalan Mystery
“Usually we’re looking to identify the dead, but here we’re looking for the living,” says a forensic anthropologist early in Finding Oscar, a documentary seeking to do just that. Looking back to Guatemala’s 1982 Dos Erres massacre, director Ryan Suffern focuses not on the nearly 250 villagers who were murdered by commandos working for the […]
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Fragmented Thai Feature “By the Time It Gets Dark” Contains Everything, Including Itself
In the spirit of master of mystery Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the languid Thai elliptical is now apparently a national house style. For hearty film geeks it can become an addiction: “slow cinema” observations that seem to ooze cosmic empathy, jungle greenery blazing with tropical sunshine, enigmas hidden in plain view, a sense of meditative Buddhist celebration […]
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Richard Gere Shrinks Down to Shlemiel Size for “Norman,” Another New York Story
The back end of some future film festival’s Complete Richard Gere Retrospective won’t be lacking for fascinating surprises. Like Oren Moverman’s Time Out of Mind (2015), a pained study of homelessness, Joseph Cedar’s Norman finds Gere as a lost soul haunting a Manhattan that just doesn’t see him. What other movie star diminishes himself, seeks […]
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Somehow, the Animated “My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea” Is Even Better Than Its Title
Few things promise a wild visual ride like a movie titled My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea opening with an epilepsy warning, and Dash Shaw’s animated whirligig of a riff on The Poseidon Adventure does not disappoint. Self-absorbed sophomore Dash (Jason Schwartzman) is a writer and unreliable narrator whose annoyance that his best […]
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Frederick Wiseman’s Earliest Documentaries Chronicle the Messy Strength of American Institutions
It is a peculiar truth of American life that, for all our myths of individualism and independence, this country’s defining trait may well be its faith in its institutions. Sure, the institutions can fail us — schools can produce dysfunction, courts can dispense injustice, politicians can sell us out — but we seem to persist […]
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The Quad Relaunches (and Pleasingly Confounds) With an Unanticipated Pick
Now under new management (real estate magnate and cinephile Charles S. Cohen) and guided by ace programmers C. Mason Wells and Gavin Smith, the Quad Cinema has returned, nearly two years after going dark for extensive renovations. The relaunch also follows the theater’s most disgraceful era, roughly spanning the first half of this decade, when […]