Category Archives: Documentary

Lunenburg Doc Fest Review — Taming The Garden

September 25, 2021 flawintheiris

Directed by Salomé Jashi | 91 min This is a slow and strange portrait of an enormous landscaping project. Georgian billionaire and former Prime Minister, Bidzina Ivanishvili — he never appears in the film but is spoken about like he's a king, a devil, or a myth — has paid to have enormous, ancient trees…Read More

Lunenburg Doc Fest 2021 review — Fanny: The Right To Rock

September 23, 2021 flawintheiris

On the podcast I co-host, LENS ME YOUR EARS, a recent episode focussed on music documentaries, which introduced me to a few artists and bands I'd previously known very little about. Now that I've seen Fanny: The Right To Rock, the opening film at this year's Luneburg Doc Festival, I'm a little bummed we didn't wait…Read More

#FIN2021 Reviews — Petite Maman, Flee

September 22, 2021 flawintheiris

Attending multiple screenings in one evening at a film festival you can't help but bear witness to unintentional, sometimes poetic cinematic segues. They were out in full force on Tuesday evening at the FIN Atlantic International Film Festival. First off, I attended Dementia, Dad & Me, Hannah Minzloff's documentary about her family and her father's…Read More

The Sparks Brothers review — The eternally hip

August 15, 2021 flawintheiris

Directed by Edgar Wright | 140 min | On Demand I had the suspicion when I first heard about this project it was a mockumentary, that Sparks was a fake band dreamed up for chuckles. I mean, I know a bit about popular music, so how did I get to this ripe age without having…Read More

Val review — The life and vanity of Val Kilmer

August 8, 2021 flawintheiris

Directed by Leo Scott and Ting Poo | 109 min | Amazon Prime Val Kilmer is no longer the dashing, handsome method actor/movie star you might remember from Top Gun, The Doors, and Heat. At 61, he's a cancer survivor who struggles to speak, even as he still has a sparkle in his eye. He's also…Read More

Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street review — A joyful return to “a unique experimental series”

May 14, 2021 flawintheiris

Directed by Marilyn Agrelo | Based on a book by Michael Davis | 107 min | Crave Plus This week I saw this Tweet from Amber Sparks (@ambernoelle): "I think a thing that young people could not possibly understand about Gen X and older Millennials is that our entire personalities were shaped by watching shows…Read More

Kenny Scharf: When Worlds Collide review — Artist plays in colour

April 16, 2021 flawintheiris

Directed by Max Basch and Malia Scharf | 77 min | Carbon Arc Cinema The second '80s New York artist documentary to show up at Carbon Arc in as many months, but the films' tonal differences and only slight overlap — mostly in the way AIDS impacted the scene — actually make them complementary. If…Read More

Wojnarowicz review — Artist rages against the darkness

March 26, 2021 flawintheiris

Directed by Chris McKim | 108 min | Carbon Arc Cinema This is an intense, art-filled documentary about David Wojnarowicz, a New York queer multi-media artist from the 1980s. The film is a montage of photos, film, music, painting, illustration, text, answer-machine messages and recorded monologues from Wojnarowicz, spiked with commentary from others in the…Read More

Softie review — A portrait of grassroots political change

March 25, 2021 flawintheiris

Directed by Sam Soko | 96 min | Carbon Arc Cinema This film is about Kenyan news photographer-turned-politician Boniface "Softie" Mwangi as he runs for public office in Nairobi. Director Soko gets an all-access pass to Mwangi's family, life, and campaign, and as an audience we're given a window into a former colonial culture where…Read More

FTA review — Defiant anti-war activists are finally heard

March 20, 2021 flawintheiris

Directed by Francine Parker | The FTA Show written by Michael Alaimo, Len Chandler, Pamela Donegan, Jane Fonda, Rita Martinson, Robin Menken, Holly Near, Donald Sutherland, Dalton Trumbo and Nancy Dowd | 97 min | Carbon Arc Cinema FTA is an interesting slice of early 1970s anti-war culture, a document of a "political vaudevillian" show…Read More