It opens with a scene straight out of Breaking Bad – a group of masked men are cooking barrel loads of meth by moonlight. The Mexican cartel members even mention that they were taught by a father and son team from America, reminding viewers of Walter White and his surrogate son Jesse Pinkman. (more…)
The biggest questions surrounding The Wolfpack – a documentary about 6 brothers who’ve grown up in near total isolation with movies as their only window to the outside world – are how did the director get access and is their incredible story true? (more…)
Time and time again, documentaries often prove that truth is stranger than fiction. The most fertile subjects don’t need to be exaggerated because they’re compelling enough on their own, and the HBO documentary Going Clear: Scientology and The Prison of Belief knows this trope and leans into it. (more…)
Director Douglas Tirola boasts (somewhat cheekily) that Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead features more bare breasts than any other documentary in history. Judging by the raucous end result that details the hard-partying genesis and spectacular flameout of the National Lampoon humour magazine, he may well be right. (more…)
“God has to be busy with everyone else” intones a young man near the end of the plainly poetic and visually sumptuous documentary Rich Hill. It’s heartbreaking and hopeful, like much of the film itself, and implies a faith that things can improve and a knowledge that it hasn’t yet happened for him. (more…)
The bootstrapping American Dream of Horatio Alger’s myths seem further away than ever. An eroding middle class, widespread globalization, ongoing conflicts, and the new normal of near-constant economic turmoil have made it abundantly clear that true “rags to riches” stories are few and far between. Yet there’s still opportunities to be had if you look hard enough, and one such boomtown is Williston, North Dakota. (more…)
Citizenfour (2014)
Dir: Laura Poitras
Citizenfour plays like a modern paranoid thriller about the erosion of our civil liberties and rise of the global surveillance state, but gains considerable impact from the fact that it’s a documentary about what’s happening here and now, in our lifetimes. (more…)
Glen On Film 