Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
January 27, 2009
In the 1970s, Roman Polanski’s career was at its zenith with classics like The Tragedy of Macbeth (1971) and Chinatown (1974) but his personal life was in shambles. His wife, model-turned-actress Sharon Tate had been brutally murdered by the Charles...
Joy Division
June 11, 2008
While Control (2007) was the dramatized account of the rise and fall of British rock band Joy Division and its troubled lead singer Ian Curtis, Joy Division (2007) is a feature-length documentary chronicling the band’s all-too brief lifespan. Their...
Tilt: The Battle to Save Pinball
April 17, 2008
Anyone who grew up in the 1960s and especially the 1970s has probably played a game of pinball at least once in their lives. At its core is a simple game of hitting a little ball with a couple of paddles controlled by two buttons but it also requires...
In the Shadow of the Moon
February 25, 2008
“One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” And with those iconic words, spoken by astronaut Neil Armstrong, we landed on the Moon. It was the first time that a human being visited another world. Documentary In the Shadow of the Moon (2007)...
Kurt Cobain: About a Son
February 20, 2008
Since Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994, many books have been written about him and his band Nirvana that try to get the real story about the musician and reluctant rock star. Arguably, the best book about him is Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana by Michael...
WR: Mysteries of the Organism
July 12, 2007
WR: The Mysteries of the Organism (1971) is one of those cinematic oddities that could only have come out of the 1960s and be made (and released) in the 1970s when pushing the boundaries of cinema was prevalent. It is a funky hybrid of documentary, fiction...
Dont Look Back: 65 Tour Deluxe Edition
February 27, 2007
D.A. Pennebaker’s legendary documentary Dont Look Back (1967) chronicles Bob Dylan’s last acoustic music tour in England during the spring of 1965. The filmmaker was allowed complete access to the folk singer both on and off stage and captured it...
American Hardcore
February 22, 2007
While there have been plenty of books and documentaries chronicling the New York and British punk rock scenes of the 1970s, there has been very little of substance covering the subsequent emergence of the punk (what was labeled as “hardcore”) scene...
Grey Gardens/The Beales of Grey Gardens
January 5, 2007
Grey Gardens (1976) is an odd curio even by the Criterion Collections’ standards – a documentary about Jackie Kennedy’s aunt Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edie who lived in a run-down, 28-room house on Long Island. How did these two members...
Tales of the Rat Fink
November 28, 2006
Ron Mann is a Canadian filmmaker who specializes in documentaries about alternative culture; be it comic books with Comic Book Confidential (1988), a famous dance craze with Twist (1992) or marijuana culture with Grass (1999). His latest film, Tales of...
