Like the tides, romance or dentists’ waiting rooms, Kenny G has always seemed to exist. But have you ever wondered what he’s like? It is the saxophonist’s particular curse to take up the most mental real estate in his biggest detractors — critics and purists who dismiss his mass appeal brand of virtuosic musical Novocaine…
The first thing I did after finishing “Charm Circle” was clean my room. Named for a patch of Kew Garden Hills in Queens, NY, where red brick semidetached homes form a pseudo suburb, the documentary by Nira Burstein is as intimate — and dirty — as filmmaking gets. Burstein follows her parents, Uri and Raya,…
Albert Speer, the Nazi architect who built a Cathedral of Light for Hitler and commanded millions of prisoners in the forced production of weaponry, had a comfortable second life. After serving 20 years in prison, Speer became a best-selling author, penning the memoir “Inside The Third Reich.” Naturally, in 1971, he and his publisher were…
Monica Lewinsky knows a little something about public shame. “I was patient zero of having a reputation completely destroyed worldwide because of the internet,” she says in the introduction to her new documentary, “15 Minutes of Shame.” That’s why Lewinsky seems as if she would be the perfect guide to take viewers through the minefield…
Spike Lee’s searching curiosity makes him one of our best and most eclectic filmmakers. But sometimes he may be asking the wrong questions of the wrong people. As Jeremy Stahl reported Tuesday in Slate, in an advanced cut of the final episode of Lee’s new documentary miniseries on HBO, “NYC Epicenters 9/11–2021½,” the director devoted…
I should have trusted my bullshit detector; Anthony Bourdain would be ashamed of me. (At least I think he would.) There were moments in Morgan Neville’s “Roadrunner” that seemed a bit too perfect. The perfection didn’t stem from cinematography or editing or the arbitrary intercuts of Kurosawa films. It didn’t come from the insights of…
The best episode of Anthony Bourdain’s food and travel show “No Reservations” is probably “Beirut.” Bourdain and his crew were in Lebanon in 2006. They filmed two scenes and then the second Israel-Lebanon war started. Bourdain’s local fixers knew what was coming and the host had to reckon with what he was doing — the…
When I first heard about a new documentary, “Tacheles,” which follows a group of Germans designing a video game about the Holocaust, in which “Jews can defend themselves and Nazis can act humanely,” I thought it sounded like a recipe for disaster. At best, it seemed like a poorly thought-through attempt at catharsis; at worst,…
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