Documentary

Reviews

Clean Slate

By: Jeff Ching Clean Slate is a documentary that can be described as The Fabelmans meets Dopesick.  Instead of trying to cover the opioid crisis and the countless lives that have been ruined because of it, Clean Slate takes a more grounded approach; simply focusing on two best friends (Cassidy and Joshua) in rehab, whose lives have been ruined by their addiction to painkillers.  However, Cassidy and Joshua share one passion – their love of…

Reviews

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Academy Award-winning director Laura Poitras (Citizenfour; My Country, My Country) doesn’t hold back in her latest documentary, a devastating portrait of fiery artist and activist Nan Goldin. Words like “heartbreaking” and “inspiring” are insufficient to describe this powerful story of community, activism, and survival.

Reviews

Eternal Spring

Representing Canada in the competition to be selected for the Best International Feature Film category is Jason Loftus’ semi-animated doc Eternal Spring, and I’m honoured to have such a strong movie in our corner.  But while we wait for confirmation that the movie made the cut, audiences can check out this Hot Docs award-winning masterpiece during its current, exclusive theatrical run – I urge you to seek it out and see it on the biggest…

Reviews

Moonage Daydream

Brett Morgen is a brilliant documentarian as seen in The Kid Stays in the Picture, Jane, and Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck – the last flick mentioned being, what I believe, is one of the best movies ever made about a musician.  His latest endeavour Moonage Daydream, a documentary about enigmatic artist David Bowie, is cut from the same cloth as Montage of Heck with the movie resembling a mixture of mediums but, this time,…

Reviews

TIFF 2022: ‘Moonage Daydream’

Brett Morgen is a brilliant documentarian as seen in Jane and Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck – the latter being one of the best movies ever made about a musician.  His latest endeavour Moonage Daydream, a documentary about enigmatic artist David Bowie, is cut from the same cloth as Montage of Heck but, this time, it’s billed as more of a “cinematic experience”.  And, it appears that most of the production’s focus has been applied…

Reviews

This Land

By: Jeff Ching While watching This Land, I was reminded of 2011’s experimental documentary Life in a Day.  For that movie (produced by Ridley Scott, directed by Kevin Macdonald), participants all over the world were asked to shoot a day in their lives (July 24, 2010) and the finished film would serve as a time capsule to capture a collective human experience, with the main theme of interconnectedness.  This Land (executive produced by Jim Cummings of Thunder Road…

Reviews

My Old School

My Old School is a peculiar documentary that intrigues audiences with an unconventional narrative gimmick, and further attracts viewers with its strange, entertaining, and deliberately confusing yarn.  The movie is, simply, unforgettable.

Reviews

Fire of Love

“Do I like this movie, or do I just like the footage?” I frequently asked myself this during Fire of Love, a documentary about the relationship between volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft and their explosive expeditions.