Smashbomb

"As someone who’s really passionate about what he does, I have a lot of opinions about documentary films. A lot of documentary filmmakers don’t really think about their films cinematically, and some documentaries almost seem like they were just copy-and-pasted like Microsoft Word documents. I’ve always loved how Errol Morris takes a wrecking ball to those conventions. His films are constantly exploring the idea of what a documentary is. His films tweak and twist reality, and they don’t just try to serve the audience digested ideas on a platter. If I had to pick a favorite, it’s his transcendent 1988 classic The Thin Blue Line, which recounts a murder case and then riffs and re-riffs on it like a Bach fugue. It was the first film to really use re-creation and reeneactment scenes in a new and highly cinematic way, both to explore a case and to challenge a viewer’s own bias and subjectivity. Nowadays, its approach and editing style loom over every one of these multipart true crime series and podcasts. The Thin Blue Line is almost like the influential band that’s been ripped off so often that new converts may not realize just how significant it is."

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Kudos

Kim Pook (101 KP) rated American Murder: The Family Next Door (2020) in Movies

Oct 14, 2020

Contains spoilers, click to show

This documentary is told through video clips and police footage regarding a missing mother and her children. Shannan is shown in a montage of social media videos talking about her happy family and everything appears normal, they are a family of husband, wife, 2 children and a dog.
After a friend is unable to contact Shannan, the police are called as well as Chris - Shannans husband-who come out to her house and find no trace of anybody in the house, it's like the family vanished into thin air, even a neighbour has no footage of them on his surveillance camera to show of anything suspicious. That neighbour does suggest, however, that something seems off with Chris but it is brushed off.
As the documentary continues, it becomes evident that the neighbour had every reason to be suspicious.
It's certainly a different way to tell a story, as usually it's told through interviews given to the camera or interviewer, so I wasn't sure if I would enjoy it. It turned out I found it just as interesting as a regular documentary if not more, because of watching everything unfold in reality. It was an interesting watch that's for sure, but the outcome is very sad.

Kudos

Fire At Sea (2016)

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Movie Watch

Winner of the Golden Bear for Best Film at the Berlin Film Festival 2016, Gianfranco Rosi’s...

Movie Critics (823 KP) rated BMP (Beats Per Minute) (2017) in Movies

Oct 17, 2017

It’s a compelling feature about love, life and friendship which can be compared to David France’s 2012 documentary How To Survive A Plague, about ACT UP in the United States.

Critic- Peter Bradshaw
Original Score: 5 out of 5

Read Review: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/may/20/120-beats-per-minute-review-passionate-and-defiant-account-of-80s-aids-activism

Kudos

Emily Morgan (51 KP) rated The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann in TV

Oct 22, 2019

This absolutely did not require 8 episodes, which all in all made the documentary feel very bloated, and repetitive in nature. Not all successful documentaries need to be of binge watch proportions. It was interesting to gain insight into those who were working on the case or in the media at the time, but all in all, there is no new information here.