Reviews - Page 139

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

TIFF Review: ‘Angels are Made of Light’

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Angels are Made of Light (USA/Denmark/Norway, 117 min.) Dir. James Longley Programme: TIFF Docs (International Premiere) James Longley returns to the Middle East a decade after his 2006 Oscar-nominated documentary Iraq in Fragments. Longley’s latest, Angels Are Made of Light, brings him to post-war Afghanistan to chronicle how a nation looks to rebuild in the aftermath of a long and brutal war. The doc offers a portrait of Afghanistan’s children as Longley sharpens his focus to tell the stories of the kids at Kabul’s Daqiqi Balkhi School. The powerful doc is a tough but necessary portrait of the generation that will rebuild a country

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TIFF Review: ‘The Death and Life of John F. Donovan’

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The Death of Life of John F. Donovan (Canada/UK, 107 min.) Dir. Xavier Dolan, Writ. Xavier Dolan, Jacob Tierney Starring: Kit Harrington, Jacob Tremblay, Natalie Portman, Thandie Newton, Ben Schnetzer, Susan Sarandon, Sarah Gadon, Emily Hampshire, Kathy Bates Programme: Special Presentations (World Premiere) I really feel for Xavier Dolan. When critics eviscerated his 2016 film It’s Only the End of the World, many of them, particularly the Americans, made a point of panning him personally while ripping apart the claustrophobic family drama. Making it personal shouldn’t be part of the job. The consequences of these deep digs and hot takes are

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TIFF Review: ‘Screwball’

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Screwball (USA, 105 min.) Dir. Billy Corben Programme: TIFF Docs (World Premiere) Who knew baseball could be so entertaining? America’s two favorite past times—baseball and crime—join forces in a Billy Corben’s hilarious and eye-opening documentary Screwball. This madcap doc is one of the hidden gems in the TIFF Docs line-up this year. Screwball is a truly original home run in documentary storytelling. This true crime farce interviews a peanut gallery of stupid criminals as Corben dives into the recent scandal of performance enhancing drugs in Major League Baseball. The film gives new meaning to the USA’s “three strikes rule” as Corben recounts the all-American tradition of lying, cheating,

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TIFF Review: ‘Maiden’

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Maiden (UK, 93 min.) Dir. Alex Holmes Programme: TIFF Docs (World Premiere) There’s a fairytale aspect to Maiden, a documentary about a pioneering women’s sailing crew that waived the rules and ruled the waves. One day, while working in the sailboat of a kitchen in the mid-1980s, a young English woman named Tracy Edwards found herself talking to Jordan’s King Hussein, who was touring the boat. Hussein said she should follow her dream of sailing around the world. Later, when Edwards was struggling to raise money for her project to take the first all-female crew in the 1989-1990 Whitbread Around the World Race

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TIFF Review: ‘Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes’

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Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes (USA, 107 min.) Dir. Alexis Bloom Programme: TIFF Docs (World Premiere) Near the start of Alexis Bloom’s documentary, Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes, we hear a voice-over of Ailes, the mastermind behind Fox News who resigned in disgrace in 2016. He’s describing how he grew up in Warren, Ohio a town of real American values, not like Hollywood or the East Coast. Real American values — like extorting sex from women, eavesdropping on employees and promoting paranoia, what Fox News producers called “riling the crazies”, to boost ratings? Of course that’s entirely

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TIFF Review: ‘Ghost Fleet’

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Ghost Fleet (USA, 90 min.) Dir. Shannon Service, Jeffrey Waldron Programme: TIFF Docs (International Premiere) A revealing documentary about modern slavery, Ghost Fleet manages to put viewers inside a real-life rescue mission while shining a light on broad issues about human rights and consumer responsibility. The rescue mission at the centre of this documentary is led by a woman, the Thai human rights activist, Patima Tunqpuchayakul, who travels with two male colleagues from Bangkok to Indonesia, sailing into dark coves at night and searching villages door to door to locate men who were kidnapped years before and held as slaves working in deep sea

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TIFF Review: ‘What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire?’

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What You Gonna Do When The World’s On Fire? (France/Italy/US, 123 min.) Dir. Roberto Minervini Programme: Wavelengths (North American Premiere) Roberto Minervini, the expat Italian who’s made his life and art for the past decade in the neglected regions of the American south, is one of the most interesting documentary artists working today. His last film, 2015’s Louisiana: The Other Side, is particularly provocative. Divided into two unequal parts, about an impoverished white community overrun by drugs and a nativist militia, it has a decent claim to being the only documentary to predict and fairly represent the forces that gave rise

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TIFF Review: ‘The Elephant Queen’

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The Elephant Queen (UK/Kenya, 96 min.) Dir. Victoria Stone, Mark Deeble Programme: TIFF Docs (World Premiere) In The Elephant Queen, we find a family of elephants lead by powerful matriarch Athena. The titular queen, responsible for the well-being of her herd (especially the newborns), we watch as Athena shelters her family from a drought. An educational documentary, Elephant Queen nevertheless creates plot, drama, and warmth in its depiction of its subjects. Athena is a kind and caring ruler who will do anything to protect and guide her family. With Mimi, the youngest addition to the herd, they begin their life at a watering hole. The

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TIFF Review: ‘The Truth About Killer Robots’

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The Truth About Killer Robots (USA, 83 min.) Dir. Maxin Pozdorovkin Programme: TIFF Docs (World Premiere) The Truth About Killer Robots focuses on the insidious nature of robots. Creeping into our lives with humans too dazzled by convenience and the spectacle of technology to notice the downfalls of anything from faster manual labour to self-driving cars, robots can, and have, resulted in the deaths of humans. Maxim Pozdorovkin’s latest film opens with just that: the death of a worker in a Volkswagen factory. But while the question of physical violence is present, Killer Robots is more intent on the question of the capitalist casualties. When

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TIFF Review: ‘Carmine Street Guitars’

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Carmine Street Guitars (Canada, 80 min.) Dir. Ron Mann Programme: TIFF Docs (North American Premiere) There’s a great scene in Michael McGowan’s 2012 drama Still Mine in which James Cromwell sits at the family dinner table and runs his hands along every nick and scratch in the soft pine surface while fondly recalling memories of his wife and children. There are stories housed in the objects we cherish. If something is built to last, it contains history as it passes from hand to hand and generation to generation. Ron Mann’s wonderful new documentary Carmine Street Guitars shares this philosophy evoked in the scene of Cromwell caressing

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