Words have power. We often affirm that, but we don?t always see how that power unfolds. Don?t Be Nice is a documentary about people who are seeking to speak with power. It follows the Bowery Slam Poetry Team for several months in 2016 as they struggle to prepare for...
??ou got a lot of words, but you don?t say nothing. You gotta learn to listen before you can see. Listen to this old man here.? A white writer is summoned by a Lakota elder to visit him on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The elder wants him to take his various notes about...
As Give Me Liberty opens, we hear and then see a bedridden man who tells of being told he would never walk again, and finding that it was true. But he goes on to say, ?Life, it is what it is. Life is wonderful. It?s beautiful. I love life. I love everything about...
If you strip away the sex and dragons from Game of Thrones you have the story of trying to unite warring factions into a single kingdom and bring the period of warfare to an end. Kingdom (based on a seinen manga series of graphic novels, and later a seventy-seven...
Light of My Life opens with a father and daughter camping in the woods as he tells her a bedtime story that is peripherally connected to the story of Noah?s Ark. The story is one of rescue and protection of a young female fox as the world if facing destruction. The...
Gangster movies ? The Godfather trilogy, Goodfellas, Scarface, et al. ? are often a blend of malevolence and nobility. People act cruelly and violently, but often see themselves (and we may see them) as doing so for a good cause ? family, community. Piranhas, directed...
?Where do they go? The people, when you change them?? It?s difficult to put The Mountain from writer director Rick Alverson into a familiar category. Drama doesn?t seem to say quite enough. It borders at times on surrealism, but there is also a strong sense of reality...
The emotional ghosts of the past are the driving force of the melodramatic The Price for Silence. Our first images of protagonist Kira Flynn (Lynn Mancinelli) make it clear that she is suffering PTSD centered in the emotional wounds of rape. It is not just her...
Often when we grow up, we look back at our parents? lives and think that we can do things better than they did. Sometimes we are right, but not always. New technologies lead to different ways of telling stories. My parents listened to radio. I had TV. My sons had...