Doc Corner: 'Navalny' is the first Oscar contender of '22

By Glenn Dunks

What luck it is to be a filmmaker in the room at such moments of historic opportunity. Canadian director Daniel Roher has made one previous feature, a music bio-doc about The Band, which probably isn’t the sort of bellwether for somebody who is about to capture evidence of the plot to assassinate the political rival of Vladimir Putin. But here we are.

Because of that luck and whatever directorial smarts got him there, Roher and his film Navalny are surely very real contenders for the documentary Oscar, the first such major title of the year.

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Doc Corner Catch-Up: White Hot, The Automat, and ¡Viva Maestro!

By Glenn Dunks

White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & FitchYou may have noticed that the Doc Corner column has been a bit quiet. I have been unfortunately quite slack with the reviews in the first four months of 2022. It is usually a quiet period at the beginning of the year in general, but fatigue (awards season + life) means I have unfortunately missed the chance to talk about some of the titles that have come along. And then added onto that, I had COVID and despite being in mandated isolation for the week, my brain was living strictly on a diet of Harrison Ford movies and television catch-up (Shining Vale, Abbott Elementary, Troppo among them).

But we are here on the first of May. And so before we get back into regular coverage of some pretty big titles (some of which will be angling for Oscar's attention), we’re going to play a little bit of catch-up today. We have war-torn Ukraine, the history of American dining and fashion institutions, and globe-trotting philosophers...

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Doc Corner: Amy Poehler's 'Lucy and Desi'

By Glenn Dunks

I hadn’t expected it, but I somehow became a defender of an Aaron Sorkin movie across the most recent awards season. Unexpected because I was not a fan of Sorkin’s earlier directorial efforts. But his somewhat fictionalized film about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnez, Being the Ricardos, had—for all its faults—a point of view about its subjects and as a piece of storytelling. At least one that went beyond the more predictable birth-to-death narrative of star-laden biopics where performers are essentially asked to pantomime through famous moments across history.

I am sure many fans who disliked Sorkin’s film will embrace Amy Poehler’s documentary, Lucy and Desi. It’s also not a comedy in the way that non-fiction can be funny, but it plays a lot of clips from I Love Lucy, The Lucy Show and more, so it plays more like one...

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Doc Corner: David France's 'How to Survive a Pandemic'

By Glenn Dunks

Documentaries about the COVID-19 pandemic aren’t rare. Just over two years into it, and already a long list of titles exist claiming to offer us insight into some area of the response. Some have worked (Nanfu Wang’s In The Same Breath, Hao Wu and Weixi Chen’s 76 Days—both shortlisted for the Oscar) while others haven’t delivered where you would expect. They have been sometimes rushed, likely out of sheer determination to be completed in time for relevance, little knowing just how deep we would be without a clear exit. Because of this reason, many are dated by the time we get to see them.

How to Survive a Pandemic is unfortunately more of the latter. The film is something of a curiosity for its director David France. Curious because despite having the weight of timeliness on its side, Pandemic lacks the propulsive immediacy of his earlier films How to Survive a Plague and Welcome to Chechnya.

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Doc Corner: A comeback for 1992's 'Rock Hudson's Home Movies'

By Glenn Dunks

Subtext is a funny thing. The very idea of it revolves around the idea that some people just don’t get what’s being shown on screen. That for some, there’s nothing there at all. For others, there is a whole other world bubbling away told through code, gestures, innuendo, and subtlety. In today’s very connected world, this isn’t a good thing. Where once artists and scholars may have been revered for being the smartest person in the room—when did you last see anybody credited as an “intellectual” on television news anymore? —nobody today likes to be told “you just don’t get it”. How else could we have multiple online discourses at once about the artistic merits of Spider-Man: No Way Home versus (of all things) Drive My Car? Curiosity with art by the masses seems more or less gone completely.

Perhaps that is why Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog has frustrated so many viewers. That film, like many Rock Hudson films, plays with the ideas of masculinity and femininity in ways that don’t immediately leap out. But once they do...

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