Film diary

Going into Crips and Bloods: Made in America, I was concerned that it would just be a sensationalist exposé on LA’s two most notorious gangs. But I was pleased to find that it has a genuine curiosity about its subject, which extends beyond the violence and traces the roots of African-American marginalization from the early twentieth century to present day. It is often a bit too stylish for its own good, and I wish it… See more →

Just Like Being There

Scout Shannon

One of the smartest things Just Like Being There does is to go out of its way not to ignore the “gig” part of “gig posters”. The film is thick with music in both the background and foreground, and the handful of live performances it features do a good job of capturing that certain kind of magic that only a great rock show can provide. Capturing that magic is… See more →

The Swedish hardcore band Refused took a few years to get great, and shortly after it did, it imploded. Given its incendiary legacy, fans might expect fireworks from this “documentary” about the band’s final days and rather abrupt end, and sporadic live footage does offer a taste of what all the fuss was about. But for all Refused’s unique energy, its breakup story is pretty standard – the tour’s not going well, somebody has a… See more →

You don’t need to know anything about chess to enjoy Bobby Fischer Against the World, but you may well want to learn more about the game after you’ve seen the film – if you don’t take it as a cautionary tale.

Bobby Fischer’s story is a true American tragedy, and possibly the twentieth century’s most fascinating example of the tenuous divide between genius and madness, as this film makes abundantly clear. The pacing is a… See more →

Much of Life During Wartime initially led me to believe it was a postmodern prank whose genesis took this form: “What if I made a sequel to Happiness? God, what a pointless, stupid idea. I’ll do it!”

As Michael Haneke’s Funny Games charges audiences with being complicit in the real-life violence they flock to see fictionalized on screen, Todd Solondz’s Life During Wartime seems to make a mockery of the compulsion to drag new and… See more →

The extraordinary devotion Bill Cunningham has for his work means that any film about him is worth a look, but it’s a shame this one is not a more illuminating portrait. Amiable though he may be, Cunningham has made a career out of being an observer rather than a participant, and his years behind the lens have trained him well in the art of evasion. No one interviewed in this documentary seems to know anything… See more →

There were at least two high profile odes to testosterone of the pull-the-superhuman-war-hero-out-of-retirement-for-a-suicide-rescue-mission variety in 1985: Rambo: First Blood Part II and Commando. Both traffic in the big, loud, and dumb of 1980s Cold War action tropes. But only Commando is actually fun, because it has the good sense not to take itself so seriously.

Each of Arnold’s one-liners in Commando is a winking acknowledgement that this is high octane escapism, a celebration of wanton… See more →

Apparently the myth of the American sleepover is that its volume can rise above a whisper. This film tries so hard for understated adolescent authenticity that it forgets those first tentative steps into adulthood tend to be just as clumsily vibrant as they are furtively awkward. For a story that spans several nocturnal teenage gatherings on the last weekend of summer, it is remarkably – and fatally – sedate. I have no lack of patience… See more →

Surely no one was more disappointed by Sarah Palin’s absence from the 2012 presidential race than Stephen K. Bannon, the director of this two-hour campaign commercial.

The Undefeated is a chore. With “tell, don’t show” as its storytelling mantra, it chronicles Palin’s public works in her own words (using excerpts from her audiobook) and the words of the people who helped her. And there are so, so many words, all of them black or white,… See more →