Tag: Documentary

The 20 best documentaries of the 2010s

How to watch the 20 best documentaries of the 2010s
In a decade where reality and fiction blurred, these movies showed us who we really are.
Alissa Wilkinson, Vox

20. Dawson City: Frozen Time
19. This Is Not a Film
18. Fire at Sea
17. Citizenfour
16. Pina
15. Amazing Grace
14. Quest
13. The Work
12. In Transit
11. Shirkers
10. Actress
9. No Home Movie
8. Stories We Tell
7. I Am Not Your Negro
6. The Prison in 12 Landscapes
5. In Jackson Heights
4. Minding the Gap
3. Hale County This Morning, This Evening
2. The Act of Killing
1. Cameraperson

Point of Order! Review by Andrew Sarris

The strange ironies of history aside, the star of the show is still the late Joe McCarthy — and what a performer he was! One can recall his jowly menace and five-o’clock shadow, but it is shocking to rediscover his nervous giggle and his showbiz personality. There was a strangely populist appeal working for McCarthy as the last apostle of direct democracy unsullied by all the confidential “arrangements” of the well born and well educated. When Ike plugged up his keyhole after throwing Stevens to the wolves outside the door, McCarthy was finished. Even the Trotskyists, who had toyed with the idea of using McCarthy as their golem against the Stalinists, were soon bored by Joe’s ludicrous inexactitude. Curiously, Joe’s medium was neither television nor radio, and he was hardly a Huey Long out on the stump. With succinctness as his forte and fear as his gospel, McCarthy may have been the first and last demagogue of the wire services.
—Village Voice, January 16, 1964

Andrew Sarris reviewing, Point of Order!, by Emil De Antonio and Daniel Talbot, from the book, Confessions of a Cultist: On the Cinema, 1955-1969

Sunshine Hotel

SunShine Hotel_

A portrait of one of the few remaining men only ‘flophouses’ on New York City’s infamous skid row, the Bowery.

Ray: Once you take the cherry out of life. Once you take your wife, or your love or however….the cherry, life ain’t nothin man. It ain’t nothin man. You’re a zero, and everything else you’re doing is just fucking around.

Nathan: You haven’t lived until you’ve been in a flophouse with nothing but one lightbulb and 56 men squeezed together on cots. With everybody snoring at once, and some of those snores so deep and gross and unbelievable dark, snotty, gross subhuman wheezings from hell itself. Your mind almost breaks under those deathlike sounds and intermingling odors of hard, unwashed socks, pissed and shitted underwear. And over it all, slowly circulating air much like that emanating from uncovered garbage cans. And those bodies in the dark, fat and thin and bent some legless, armless. some mindless. And worst of all, the total absence of hope. It shrouds them and covers them totally. It’s not bearable. Those men were all children once. What has happened to them? And what has happened to me? It’s dark and cold out there.

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