Documentaries
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#SXSW: Kashmere Band Doc Thunder Soul Builds Buzz
Film Festival rule number one: ask people what they like, and when two in a row say the same film, get thee to the next screening.
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#SXSW: Tiny Furniture, Brotherhood Win Dramatic Jury and Audience Awards
At the SXSW closing awards ceremony Tuesday night, Lena Dunham's offbeat autobiographical drama Tiny Furniture won the narrative feature jury prize. Shot in November and edited in December, the filmmakers finished the micro-budget drama last Monday, and flew into Austin with a tape in hand. Dunham a...
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Oscar Backstage: Short Subjects
The three short films, animated, live action and doc, did not go the way I expected. I thought Logorama--a must-see clever short made up entirely of commercial logos-- would be too hip for the Academy, which would go for Nick Park for the second time, but they must have gotten tired of Wallace & Gromit being nominated five times before. The live action short The New Tenants was my favorite and I shouldn't have listened to the people telling me why it couldn't win! So much for winning any Oscar pools. The five films vying for doc short were all strong, but I admit that HBO's Music by Prudence, about a disabled South African singer, haunted m...
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Indie Spirits: Precious Sweeps, Izzard and LA Live Fizzle
Take the Independent Spirits back to the beach!
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Berlinale 60 Day Nine: En Familie, The Killer Inside Me, Rock Hudson, Making the Boys
Our Berlin correspondent Meredith Brody experiences highs and lows as the festival winds down, from the skillfully-made documentary Making the Boys to the huge yet hugely disappointing Nine:
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#Sundance: Mark Lewis Gets Down with 3-D Cane Toads
With 1988's Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, Australian documentary filmmaker Mark Lewis (The Natural History of the Chicken) introduced Sundance audiences to the cane toad--an amphibian imported Down Under in 1935 to control sugar cane larvae. Of course, the cane toad did nothing of the kind, and...
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Hetherington and Junger Talk Afghan War Doc Restrepo
Restrepo doesn't resemble your standard documentary, in any way. It's not like other embedded war docs, or voice-over narration films, or movies with a strong personality or clear narrative spine. It's another animal. UPDATE: The movie is one of the final five Oscar nominees for best documentary, wi...
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#Sundance: Davis Guggenheim Talks Waiting for Superman
Ex-Variety.com staffer David Lewis reports on Paramount Vantage pick-up Waiting for Superman and the Q & A:
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Sundance Exclusive Video: Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
After the dark places that Darfur documentary The Devil Came on Horseback took filmmakers Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg, they decided to lighten things up on their next movie. "We wanted to do something on women and comedy," says Stern. "It was still for the most part an all-boys club. Joan was a wi...
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Oscar Watch: Kenner Talks Food Inc.
Can a documentary change the world? Sundance entry An Inconvenient Truth, which won the 2006 documentary Oscar, certainly did. So did Super-Size Me. And so has Food Inc., Robert Kenner's probe of America's food industry. Initially inspired by Eric Schlosser's bestselling expose Fast Food Nation, Foo...
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