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GERALD PEARY

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How About You

TV movie
TV movie

By: GERALD PEARY | December 11, 2008

Paralyzing hopelessness at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam
Simply, there’s no more prestigious place for a documentary to debut than IDFA, rightly regarded as the very best documentary festival in the world.

By: GERALD PEARY | January 23, 2009

Pray the Devil Back to Hell

A moving historical documentary
Remember the old "essentialist" argument that women are by nature pacifist and nurturing whereas men are aggressive and warlike?

By: GERALD PEARY | December 05, 2008

Andy Warhol: Denied

A wry, amusing bit of art-world sleuthing
Andy himself would love the to-do concerning his mountains of left-over work.

By: GERALD PEARY | November 25, 2008

Patti Smith: Dream of Life

An intimate, affectionate, non-linear visit
This collage of a documentary emanates from an 11-year collaboration between punk poet/rocker Patti Smith and her filmmaker friend Steven Sebring.

By: GERALD PEARY | December 09, 2008

No Eden

The story is too familiar
There's a utopian pastoral painting on the wall of Billy and Breda Farrell's bedroom, but their actual marriage is no Eden.

By: GERALD PEARY | November 19, 2008

Let the Right One In

A remarkable vampire film
Who would have predicted that the finest horror picture in years, reminiscent of Val Lewton classics of 1940s Hollywood, would come from Sweden?

By: GERALD PEARY | November 11, 2008

Stranded: I’ve Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains

A redundant, overlong documentary
The story has been told already, and vividly, in Piers Paul Read's Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors .

By: GERALD PEARY | November 11, 2008

Save Me

A decent, but not great, soap opera
Mark (Chad Allen), a trashy young gay man into motel sex and coke, makes a sea change by agreeing to reside at a Christian halfway home, where the once-gay clientele are weaned away from homosexuality and into the arms of Jesus.

By: GERALD PEARY | November 05, 2008

Louise Bourgeois: the Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine

A remarkable and ambitious documentary
What we learn, in intimate conversations at her Brooklyn studio, is that she remains furious, 80 years later, that her father in France took a mistress in front of her mother.

By: GERALD PEARY | November 04, 2008

Fear(s) of the Dark

Competent but uninspired French animation
Of the stories we’re offered, the best is a mean little sketch of a psychotic old man roaming the countryside with a pack of wild dogs on a leash.

By: GERALD PEARY | October 28, 2008

Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story

An excellent and frightening documentary
Barack Obama is darn lucky that Lee Atwater, who died in 1991, isn’t around to lead the Republican dirty-tricks department.

By: GERALD PEARY | October 25, 2008

Frontrunners

A very entertaining documentary
Comparisons with Alexander Payne’s Election won’t fly.

By: GERALD PEARY | October 25, 2008

Saving Marriage

Dramatic moments of the gay-and-lesbian struggle that escaped our newspapers
Roth and Henning, dedicated partisans, were everywhere with their cameras in those historic years 2003–2006.

By: GERALD PEARY | October 15, 2008

Balkan Rhapsodies: 78 Measures of War

A ruminative experimental mosaic
Is there some poison in the air of the Balkans, as one individual asserts, that breeds eternal ethnic bloodletting?

By: GERALD PEARY | October 16, 2008

Days and Clouds

Well shot but predictably depressing
Not exactly the escape movie the doctor ordered from abroad for our own economic miseries.

By: GERALD PEARY | October 09, 2008

Religulous

Unabashedly agnostic and skeptical
He’s as cocky and smarmy as Michael Moore, but somehow Bill Maher is also more endearing and credible, as he prances about the globe making jest of sanctimonious true believers.

By: GERALD PEARY | October 02, 2008

Allah Made Me Funny

But not that funny.
Muslim comedy is still a work-in-progress, to judge by this videotaped rendition of a three-man stand-up comedy show of Muslim-American jokesters.

By: GERALD PEARY | October 01, 2008

Blindness

An old-fashioned disaster-movie yarn
The Fernando Meirelles–directed film is, of necessity, less literary and philosophical.

By: GERALD PEARY | October 01, 2008

To Hell and Harry

Hell Girl, The IT Crowd
American hetero pornography is, most often, a fantasy celebration of exhibitionist sluttiness, itchy whores on their knees, opening their legs, without a moment’s hesitation or a flicker of shame.

By: GERALD PEARY | September 24, 2008

Making us stronger

Boston’s What Doesn’t Kill You scores at Toronto
I’m back from the 33rd Toronto International Film Festival, where the unexpected hit among discerning critics was a Boston-made crime melodrama.

By: GERALD PEARY | September 17, 2008

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