Best of Enemies (2015; Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville) GRADE: B- By Daniel Barnes I generally recoil when I hear the word “important” in a documentary. Besides being an utterly meaningless evaluation, it’s a red flag of self-inflation. If you need to bring on a stacked deck of […]
The Look of Silence (2015; Joshua Oppenheimer) GRADE: A- By Daniel Barnes In the Fall of 1965, the military-led, American-supported government of Indonesia oversaw the genocide of nearly one million people under the guise of eradicating Communism, and the people who ordered and carried out the butchery became […]
The Act of Killing (2013; Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn and Anonymous) GRADE: A By Daniel Barnes *This review originally ran on March 6, 2014. Reprinted in anticipation of Joshua Oppenheimer’s follow-up film The Look of Silence. “More Profound Than Mere Fact” One of the great, unique, often intangible […]
Tangerine (2015; Sean Baker) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes A relatively minor up-all-night comedy elevated to the status of a significant breakthrough by casting transgender performers in the roles of transgender prostitutes, and by refraining from ever psychoanalyzing or judging them. Meanwhile, harsh judgment gets rightly reserved for […]
Cartel Land (2015; Matthew Heineman) GRADE: B+ By Daniel Barnes Beyond the usual genre themes of heroism and sacrifice, the greatest war films tend to project a sense of an intractable and ultimately unwinnable situation. Whether it be WWI in All Quiet on the Western Front or WWII […]
A Poem is a Naked Person (1974/2015; Les Blank) GRADE: B+ By Daniel Barnes Documentarian Les Blank (Burden of Dreams) started shooting A Poem is a Naked Person in 1972 and completed it in 1974. However, the film was held up for decades by legal issues, and it’s […]
