Director: Keven McAlester
If a group of friends gets together once a week for years to swap stories and share a meal, they’re sociable. Put a Dungeons & Dragons rule book in the middle of the table, and suddenly they’re written off as socially malformed. Rather than picking apart the world of role-playing games or mocking the players, director McAlester’s documentary takes three gamers and shows how tabletop fantasy fits into their lives.
Continue reading Review: The Dungeon Masters
Directed by Carol Dysinger
The people of Afghanistan, who have endured millennia of invasions, have a saying: “You have the clocks; we have the time.” These words open up this depiction of three years in the forgotten war from a group whose voice is seldom heard – the Afghan National Army.
Dysinger liberates the compromised term “embedded journalism” and uses her incredible access to depict a war of inertia and ancient feuds. As foreign forces come and go, the only constant is the haunting central figure of Gen. Fazil Ahmad Sayar.
Continue reading Review: Camp Victory, Afghanistan (2010)
Directed by Edward Anderson
Starring: Peyton List, Cameron Goodman, Cullen Douglas, Dave Power, James Snyder, Tony Curran
There’s no sinking feeling like taking a cab and the driver going left instead of right, into a bit of town that just can’t be the quickest route. That loss of control is the start of Shuttle‘s horrific road trip, where five travelers get picked up by an airport shuttle, putting their increasingly gory fate in the hands of the stranger at the wheel.
It starts as a dry, subdued thriller, where small acts of violence happen offscreen or silently; the film incrementally ratchets up the tension into a realm some may dismiss as torture-porn.
Directed by René Pinnell & Claire Huie
Starring: Eagle Pennell, Chuck Pinnell, Lin Sutherland, Lou Perryman, Richard Linklater
The restoration of Austin movie classic The Whole Shootin’ Match for last year’s SXSW reintroduced the world to the work of mercurial director Glenn Irwin “Eagle” Pennell: The King of Texas is his nephew René’s attempt to explain the man. Through interviews with those that knew, loved, and sometimes fought with him (including his family, collaborators, and the Chronicle‘s own Louis Black), René portrays an artist who was both role model and cautionary tale. Just as Willie Nelson proved a successful country musician didn’t have to go Nashville, Pennell proved the power and artistry of regional cinema.
Directed by Ian Fitzgibbon
Starring: Dylan Moran, Mark Doherty, Keith Allen, Amy Huberman
One death is an accident. Two are a coincidence. Three and a dead dog, well, that’s just bad DIY. In this coal-black farce, set among the elegant but crumbling Victorian apartments of Dublin, the luck of the Irish is all dreadful. Indolent actor Mark (Doherty) and his neighbor, failed film writer and failed recovering alcoholic Pierce (Moran), are wastrels with no lives. But they quickly become the only characters left alive as a series of avoidable deaths in the ill-repaired house they share claims everyone they would have a motive for killing.
Continue reading Review: A Film With Me In It (2009)
Directed by Joel Anderson
Starring: Talia Zucker, Rosie Traynor, David Pledger, Martin Sharpe
As Blair Witch is to The Shining and Cloverfield is to Godzilla, so Lake Mungo is to Picnic at Hanging Rock. In that Australian gothic classic, four schoolgirls went into the Outback; only one came back. This time, the four members of the Palmer family go for a swim, but only daughter Alice (Zucker) never makes it back to shore.
Directed by Amy Elliott, Elizabeth Donius
What makes a man want to build the world’s biggest lava lamp? From the 40-foot metal stalks of wheat in Williston, N.D., to the bull-sized fiberglass killer bee of Hidalgo, America’s heartland has long been a home to giants.
Continue reading Review: World’s Largest (2010)
Directed by Craig Zobel
Starring: Pat Healy, Kene Holliday
Martin is a nonentity, a failed radio engineer who dreamed of being a deejay. As played by Healy, he hangs onto a shadow of his dream of being “something” in music. With Holliday’s gregarious Clarence, he’s dispatched by a record firm as a talent scout. At least, that’s what they think they are. Really, they’ve been duped into scamming wannabe musicians. They are “song sharks,” getting hopeful nobodies to hand over cash for a record that will never be released.
Continue reading Review: Great World of Sound (2007)
What’s that old saying about a prophet being despised in his homeland? Until his death in 1994, Bill Hicks was a cultural exile in the United States, a stand-up comedian both cerebral and visceral who poured fiery scorn on corruption and apathy, Reagan Republicans, and corporate whores like Jay Leno. For his effort, he was a cult performer, notoriously censored from The Late Show With David Letterman. But in Great Britain in the early 1990s, when the culturally literate stared in despair at the nation that gave the world the First Gulf War and Carrot Top, he was the best evidence for the defense. Hicks was the angry American whose fury was driven not by greed but by disappointment that things weren’t just better.
Matt Harlock, half of the team behind new documentary American: The Bill Hicks Story, explained, “I was one of the guys who was at university in the UK in the late Eighties, early Nineties, who was handed a sweaty and much-coveted bootleg” of Hicks’ work. For co-director/producer Paul Thomas, the interest was much more professional. Harlock explained, “His job for [Welsh TV broadcasters] HTV and the BBC was to find and bring on new comedians, so he came upon [Hicks] that way.”
Continue reading Interview: Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas on American: The Bill Hicks Story (2010)
Directed by Robinson Devor
Bestiality. An act many people can scarcely comprehend how, never mind why, it’s done. But when a man died in 2003 after having sex with a horse, the quiet rural town of Enumclaw, Wash., was confronted with the trans-species taboo. In an elegiac and perturbing exploration of the events, documentary-maker Devor mixes re-enactment and audio interviews with two communities: the zoophiles, who cannot understand why they are shunned, and the families and friends that struggled to understand them.