Film-Forward

War

Eye in the Sky

Gavin Hood’s new movie sets the benchmark for depictions of drone warfare in film. Helen Mirren, Aaron Paul, Alan Rickman, and Barkhad Abdi star in this global tragicomic dance of uncertainty, fear, and godlike power.

Film Comment Selects 2016

Once again, the Film Society of Lincoln Center leans on the staff of its monthly magazine, Film Comment, to present this annual series, an eclectically curated group of overlooked and perhaps underappreciated films. This year proves no exception to the typical high quality of noteworthy films from around the world, many of which are making […]

Censored Voices

Censorship always adds the allure of the forbidden to material, and that notoriety seems to be the case with Censored Voices. With rare archival footage, director Mor Loushy illustrates this collection of audio interviews with Israeli veterans of the 1967 Six Day War that were taped almost immediately after Israel captured the West Bank, East […]

Macbeth

The opening shot of a dead child about to be buried as his parents mourn graveside sets the tone for this efficient and at times absorbing retelling of Shakespeare’s violent tragedy. The few and infrequent bits of the play’s comic relief have been excised for one uniform, despairing depiction of warrior Macbeth’s murderous ascent to […]

Frame by Frame

Frame by Frame combines vérité, interviews and never-before-seen archival footage to showcase four Afghan photojournalists documenting their war-torn country. The documentary opens with photojournalist Massoud Hossaini rushing to cover another suicide bombing and segues into historical television and radio reports over a montage of compelling historical photographs. This sets the scene of the country’s complex […]

Rock in the Red Zone

There is a fascinating story within the documentary Rock in the Red Zone, about musicians and artists under constant rocket attacks in a small town in Israel, but it gets a bit lost. American director Laura Bialis travels to the border town of Sderot, the target for homemade rockets called Quassams lobbed over from Gaza […]

Theeb

Set amid the stark beauty of the Jordanian Desert, director Naji Abu Nowar’s noteworthy debut film is a coming-of-age story steeped in Bedouin culture and the events of 1916. World War I is raging, and the Ottoman Empire is in a state of upheaval. Arab factions wage a revolution, and Great Britain defends its rights […]

McCullin

While you may not know his name, Don McCullin’s iconic photographs will be familiar to many. McCullin, produced and directed by siblings Jacqui Morris and David Morris, documents the career of the internationally known, and notoriously private, British photojournalist. With unprecedented access, Jacqui, his former camera assistant, captures Don reflecting on a career that spans […]

Labyrinth of Lies

Vergangenheitsbewältigung: to come to terms with the past, as postwar Germany has consistently done regarding the Third Reich. True, right? Since the Nuremberg Trials, the country has cultivated an image of a contrite nation that accepted with alacrity its responsibility for genocide and that has conscientiously required historical education so future generations would learn from […]