Reviews - Page 111

Giving you our points of view on the latest docs in release and on the circuit.

Review: ‘More Human than Human’

/

More Human than Human (Netherlands, USA, Belgium, 79 min.) Dir: Tommy Pallotta, Femke Wolting Programme: Special Presentations. (International Premiere)   Tommy Pallotta, a Richard Linklater collaborator who worked on Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, and co-director Femke Wolting open their doc about artificial intelligence with montages of robots like monstrous Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still, cute R2-D2 and C-3PO, and tragic Roy in Blade Runner. The clips set up the film’s various takes on Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). The machines might be harmless friends, or potential fiends that could eventually destroy us. Near the end of the

Read More

Review: ‘The Reckoning: Hollywood’s Worst Kept Secret’

/

The Reckoning: Hollywood’s Worst Kept Secret (Canada, 90 min.) Dir. Barry Avrich Programme: Special Presentations (World Premiere)   The impact of the Silence Breakers is everywhere at Hot Docs this year. It’s a full programme devoted to women speaking against systemic misogyny. Women’s voices are at the forefront of the festival. People are listening and stories are being heard. It’s appropriate for Hot Docs to feature the snowball that got the conversation rolling. The Reckoning: Hollywood’s Worst Kept Secret covers the watershed moment that began with breaking news in The New York Times and The New Yorker exposing Hollywood producer

Read More

Review: ‘The American Meme’

/

The American Meme (USA, 94 min.) Dir. Bert Marcus Programme: Nitghtvision (International Premiere)   OMG! Paris Hilton is actually smart. The celebrity socialite, reality TV star, and entrepreneur is the biggest surprise of Bert Marcus’s plugged-in documentary The American Meme. Hilton serves as the chief talking head in this survey of social media “influencers” that considers Andy Warhol’s adage that everyone gets fifteen minutes of fame. In an era when careers are made and broken with six- second video loops and 280 character tweets, ephemeral celebrity is in overdrive. Marcus maps out the ever-growing world of social media influencers who

Read More

Review: ‘Chef Flynn’

/

Chef Flynn (USA, 83 min.) Dir. Cameron Yates Programme: Special Presentations (Canadian Premiere)   If tennis was the competitive pop-up theme for TIFF17, chefs are it for Hot Docs 2018. Eight women chefs put on The Heat for the festival’s opening night film by Toronto director Maya Gallus. Another “hot doc” in the burgeoning fine dining kitchen genre is Chef Flynn, a profile of 19-year-old cooking superstar Flynn McGarry. On the screen, 10-year-old “Chef Flynn” transforms his family’s California living room into supper club “Eureka” (note the early chutzpah) using his classmates as line cooks. With sudden fame, Flynn outgrows

Read More

Review: ‘Harvest Moon’

/

Harvest Moon (Canada, 70 min.) Dir. Zaheed Mawani Programme: Canadian Spectrum (North American Premiere)   Slow cinema nuts are in for a treat with Harvest Moon. This observational film demands and rewards patience. Harvest Moon offers a methodical and contemplative portrait of a family of walnut farmers in the forests of Kyrgyzstan. It reflects on a way of life that moves at a different pace from most of this fast-running world. Director Zaheed Mawani lets life play itself out in pensive long takes as the family readies for the impending nut harvest. These strikingly shot frames offer sharp compositions of

Read More

Review: ‘What Walaa Wants’

/

What Walaa Wants (Canada/Denmark, 89 min.) Dir. Christy Garland Canadian Spectrum (North American Premiere)   On the surface What Walaa Wants is a film about a young girl who wants to join the Palestinian Authority; however, it manages to explore a lot more than that. Walaa is a strong-willed impassioned teenager living in Balata, a refugee camp in the West Bank. Her mother was imprisoned for eight years and was part of a historic decision to release over one thousand Palestinian prisoners in exchange for one Israeli soldier. Beginning soon after her mother returns home, the film follows Walaa as

Read More

Review: ‘Golden Dawn Girls’

/

Golden Dawn Girls (Norway, Denmark, Finland, 92 minutes) Dir: Håvard Bustnes Programme: World Showcase. (North American Premiere)   Once on a tiny Aegean island called Koufonissi, an Athenian friend said to me, “There are no ghosts in Greece. There is too much light.” She was wrong. The warm, sweet Greece that I’ve loved barely makes an appearance in the haunted world of Golden Dawn Girls. It is haunted by the financial crisis that devastated countless people and dragged on for years, haunted by the Nazi occupation of the country during World War 2, haunted by the military junta that ran

Read More

Review: ‘Active Measures’

/

Active Measures (USA, 112 minutes) Dir: Jack Bryan Programme: Special Presentations. (World Premiere)   Active Measures is so loaded with information that Jack Bryan and his producers considered telling the story in a series. Watching this film back-to-back with Our New President, another Trump and Putin horror show screening at Hot Docs 2018, could bring on fear and loathing that even Hunter Thompson might have had trouble handling. The liberal media speculates about how deep Donald Trump’s corruption goes, and the suspicious nature of his relationship with Vladimir Putin. Why is he so reluctant to censure the Russian President’s dictatorial

Read More

Review: ‘Grit’

/

Grit is sure to be the great eco doc of Hot Docs 2018 and the year overall. This powerful film witnesses tragedy on an epic scale as a tsunami of toxic mud displaces over 60,000 people in Indonesia and leaves a flowing geyser of gritty goop scarring the ecosystem.

Read More

1 … 109 110 111 112 113 … 161
0 $0.00