Matt Tannenbaum is all about stories. He loves telling them and living them, and for over 40 years, he has loved selling them through his beloved local institution, The Bookstore, in Lenox Massachusetts. Hello Bookstore pays homage to him and to his store. As far as recent economics are concerned, his is a common tale. …
Director Sam Greene’s emotional and experimental documentary 32 Sounds makes the viewer or listener feel gloriously bathed in sound for over an hour and a half. It is a meditation on its power. The film allows and invites you to consider sound in ways perhaps, unless you’re a sound technician or sound artist, you haven’t considered it …
Whenever filmmaking team of Betsy West and Julie Cohen are slated to release a new documentary, I get excited. They have a way of being sensitive and hard-hitting in equal measure. What is most striking about their new documentary Gabby Giffords: Won’t Back Down is how, for most of the duration of the film, viewers will likely …
As a hybrid documentary, Sell/Buy/Date is one freaky little non-movie, or what ‘I-can-do-it-all’ poster gal, writer/director/producer/performer Sarah Jones calls an ‘unorthodoc’. Sell/Buy/Date considers how the sex industry is at the intersection of race, feminism, power, and money, through the lens of one Black woman with many voices seeking to better understand sex work. The Tony Award-winning playwright and performer …
Picture the scene in 1962’s Dr. No, where Ursula Andress as Honey Rider appears from beneath the waters singing “Underneath the Mango Tree”, or its more recent counterpart, Halle Berry as Jinx rising dolphin-like and in slow motion in Die Another Day. You might think these moments of objectification and sexualization are particularly memorable, but they are …
Co-directors Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes remind viewers of the importance of knowing our collective history in their timely new documentary The Janes. The film profiles the Jane Collective, a fearless, radical group of underground activists that believed in reproductive freedom, and came together to aid women of the pre-Roe V. Wade era in getting safe …
Though Cat Daddies sounds like the name of either a rockabilly band or a group you’d find in a kink dungeon, it’s actually the hashtag used online to describe feline-loving dudes, and as such is the perfect title for a new documentary from writer/director Mye Hoang, Cat Daddies. This joyful movie profiles a collection of 9 men, proud …
Are plants aware, and what does that even mean? Is it true using psilocybin in a controlled environment can actually alter understanding of self permanently? What is left of us, of our consciousness, when we die? These are just a few of the universal subjects being examined in the documentary Aware: Glimpses of Consciousness, from filmmaking …
Chances are, if you know a lot of children, you probably know a young child who already strays from the “norm”. With that kid, It’s pretty hard not to root for their acceptance, or their ability to go about life just as they are, yes? Now imagine the cutest, sweetest, most genuine, openhearted child you …
Dave Thomas called comedian Del Close “a delicate basket of eggs ready to break at any moment”. Close wore a t-shirt that read ‘terror is freedom.’ He smelled of body odor, berated his students, and routinely disappeared without warning for days at a time. He was also, by nearly all accounts, a genius. One thing …
