Directed by Alan Hicks Written by Hicks and Davis Coombe Produced by Quincy Jones and Paula DuPre’ Pesmen Released by Radius/The Weinstein Company USA. 86 min. Rated R Keep On Keepin’ On intimately catches lightning in a bottle, for what is usually only talked about but rarely seen on film: how a dedicated mentor can […]
Directed by Catherine Gund Produced by Gund and Tanya Salvaratnam USA. 82 min. Not rated This look at the life and work of choreographer Elizabeth Streb features some genuinely jaw-dropping moments. They are compiled from a career spent pushing the limits of motion in search of a kind of human flight. Of course, the first […]
Directed by Mitra Farahani Produced by Marjaneh Moghimi Released by Music Box Films Farsi with English subtitles USA/Iran/France. 97 min. Not rated Some people make living an art form. This portrait of the artist as an old man follows Bahman Mohassess, an exiled Iranian painter and sculptor, as he attempts to live (and die) according […]
Directed by Alex Gibney Produced by Gibney and Jack Gulick Released by Kino Lorber US/UK/Nigeria/France. 119 min. Not Rated Finding Fela started out as the making-of the Tony-winning Broadway show Fela!, before journeying with the American production’s tour to superstar Fela Kuti’s home base in Lagos, Nigeria. With the discovery of rare performance outtakes and […]
The Power of Art: Real or Fake Documentaries on artists are an annual presence at the Tribeca Film Festival, but the breadth of art this year is exceptional. Tomorrow We Disappear By the time directors Jimmy Goldblum and Adam Weber finally got around to finishing Salman Rushdie’s 1981 novel Midnight’s Children (just before I […]
Directed by Andreas Johnsen Produced by Katrine A. Sahlstrom Released by International Film Circuit English and Mandarin with English subtitles Denmark. 89 min. Not Rated Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case overlaps and then follows-up Alison Klayman’s Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (2012). But it stands alone as an intimate portrait of a stubborn artist inspired to […]
Edited, Produced, and Directed by Tamar Halpern and Chris Quilty Released by Tamaroland Pictures USA. 88 min. Not rated Halfway through Llyn Foulkes One Man Band, the title subject is at a gallery staring at one of his paintings. Actually it’s a photograph of a rock formation blown up to about 8 by 10 feet […]
Directed by Deidre Schoo and Michael Beach Nichols Produced by Schoo, Nichols, and Christopher K. Walker Released by Baxter Brothers Film Releasing USA. 86 min. Not rated In Brooklyn, there’s a dance style known as flexing. Its practitioners claim there are “no rules and no boundaries.” They use everything they can think of—costumes, stunts, masks, […]
Written, Produced and Directed by John Maloof and Charlie Siskel Released by Sundance Selects USA. 83 min. Not rated If you put aside the deep knowledge Finding Vivian Maier imparts about an undeniably powerful contributor to photography, and the stark sense of the wildly eccentric character behind the images, you are left with one of […]