Derek Thompson was one of the best-known sports broadcasters in Britain and Ireland back in 1983 when he suddenly got a call in the middle of the night about the vanished wonder horse Shergar.
Mr Nobody Against Putin is about how you lose your country. And what we saw when working with this footage is that you lose it through countless, small, little acts of complicity. When a government murders people on the streets of our major cities, when we don't say anything, when oligarchs take over the media and control how we could produce it and consume it we all face a moral choice.
When I was about 13 or 14, I knew I was a poet. And then, of course, I knew I had to make films. Although I had hardly ever seen any films. The very first time I had noticed that there was such a thing like movies was when I was 11.
The title he really wanted was: Andre Is Dying of Cancer 'Cause He's a Fucking Idiot. My suggestion was to shorten that and lose the expletive. But he wanted that to be the title because he wanted to make sure that nobody thought he was making fun of cancer.
The project was prompted by a new practice requiring all journalists or outlets who received any non-Russian funding to self-identify as "foreign agents." At first, the reactions of TV Rain on-air host Anna Nemzer and her colleagues, forced to read an absurd disclaimer at the beginning of every story, is one of typically Russian dark humor.
If you were getting pot in the late '70s or early '80s in this part of the country, there's a good chance it may have been coming from these guys. You've got these guys who served decades in prison for marijuana, and now they're getting out into a world where it's legal everywhere.
They are exploring the nature of comedy and standup as a response to being a Palestinian now. This documentary follows the group as they attempt to put together a national tour, with shows in Ramallah, Nablus, Haifa, Nazareth and Jerusalem. In so doing, they encounter the basic problem of struggling through roadblocks, and sheer dismay and horror at the wholesale destruction of the war between Israel and Hamas.
Now he breaks the fourth wall and, with something like incredulity, says what's the point of asking him to identify his own weaknesses when all he'll give is a politician's answer. Reminded he's no longer a politician, Blair replies as honestly as at any point in the encounter: You're always a politician. It is one of the more satisfying exchanges in Michael Waldman's series, which, depending on your view, is either a futile exercise in confirming one's existing prejudices about Blair, or more than three hours of great telly.
The extended footage of Welsh in conversation is certainly engaging, as he discusses his writing and the movies it created, and his own youth in Edinburgh. Some of the rest of the interviewees aren't quite so gripping, however, and the film is padded out with a fair bit of redundant anecdotage from people on the subject of getting hilariously wasted in Irvine's company or at least his approximate vicinity.
The lone awards ceremony of the week was the Directors Guild Awards, where prizes were handed out in the categories of Feature Film, Documentary Film, and First-Time Feature Film. The First-Time Feature award didn't exist back in 1996 when Paul Thomas Anderson's Hard Eight debuted, so his win on Saturday night marked his first DGA prize in his storied career.
The Melania Trump documentary includes a portion of Jonny Greenwood's Oscar-nominated score to the Paul Thomas Anderson film Phantom Thread. In a new statement released Monday, Greenwood said that while he does own the copyright to the score, Universal Pictures "failed to consult [him] on this third-party use which is a breach of his composer agreement." "As a result Jonny and Paul Thomas Anderson have asked for it to be removed from the documentary," the statement adds.
But there's a Saturday night screening that really slapped our polka face. You may recall back in early 2023 when an SF-based burlesque group was running a Kickstarter to make a documentary about their Weird Al' Yankovic-themed burlesque troupe. Welp, they actually raised their $115,000 and made the damned thing, and now the documentary will have its West Coast premiere Saturday night at The Roxie at 8:30 pm.
Sam Hill is a name that almost anyone my age would recognize. The 8-time World Downhill MTB champion and flat pedal enthusiast is an icon in the sport of mountain biking, and has ridden for some of the most legendary brands in the industry. From Specialized Bicycles to the late Iron Horse and the now revamped Nukeproof, Hill has always been a topic of conversation.
We've long seen how charming and generous [Jackson] could be, opined Jefferson. Now we've also seen how calculating, selfish and gripped by demons he was. Leaving Neverland remains the most effective resume of that apparent duality, and of how in the case of Wade Robson and James Safechuck their memories of the singer's dream-like ranch would take on an infernal quality.
In what seems to be the most uniting moment since Chardonnay was invented, older white Republican women flocked to movie theaters this past weekend to watch Melania, the nearly two-hour-long documentary about the First Lady financed by Jeff Bezos and directed by accused sex pest Brett Ratner. The film allegedly follows her during the 20 days leading up to Trump's second inauguration in 2025, though the trailer basically just showed her wearing sunglasses.
Best documentary has become the toughest Oscar category to predict in recent years, especially when it comes to nominations. The documentary branch has become famously quirky in recent years, passing over such populist, acclaimed, and decorated titles as Won't You Be My Neighbor? , American Symphony, and Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story . Past performance is no guarantee of success-I've even heard rumors that some voters will refuse on principle to nominate a film by a previous Oscar winner-and geography is not destiny.
"With the widespread use of social media, the global spread of 'fake news' has become a serious social issue," Masahiro Yamamoto, the documentary's director, said in an email. " In Japan as well, information of mixed accuracy is circulating widely, and the situation continues to worsen. Against this backdrop, we felt there was much to learn from PolitiFact, which has been conducting fact-checking for nearly two decades."
