The press notes for York Alec Shackleton’s 211 claim the film was inspired by the Battle of North Hollywood, a real-life shootout between two heavily armed bank robbers and the Los Angeles Police Depa…
Film Canon : The Heroic Ones [1970]
There are many Revisionist Westerns and there are many Revisionist chanbara, but there are very few, if any, Revisionist wuxia. While Western and Japanese filmmakers have freely interrogated their nat…
The Last Witness Examines the Katyn Massacre by Way of a Romantic Thriller
Piotr Szkopiak’s The Last Witness is the latest cinematic attempt to reckon with the Katyn massacre, the horrific mass execution of an estimated 22,000 Poles—mostly members of the Polish officer…
Tribeca 2018 Movie Review: When She Runs
Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck’s When She Runs is far from an accessible film. Composed primarily of narrative negative spaces that have little if anything to do with a plot, the directors pai…
Tribeca 2018 Movie Review: The Man Who Stole Banksy
There are enough interesting ideas in Marco Proserpio’s The Man Who Stole Banksy to fill two or three fascinating documentaries about the legality of street art, the impact of Western street artists i…
Tribeca 2018 Review Blowin’ Up and Roll Red Roll
The Tribeca Film Festival may not have the acclaim or popularity of other, more prominent United States festivals like SXSW or Sundance, but over my years covering it their documentary slates had pro…
Tribeca 2018 Movie Review: Blue Note Records – Beyond the Notes
How many music labels can honestly claim to be more than just a label, but an actual brand? Blue Note Records, that scrappy little label founded by two German immigrants in 1939, is one of the few tha…