Category Archives: Film

Coming to NYC theatres and to VOD today, Tuesday, March 18: PRETTY OLD

Walter Matteson’s look at a senior beauty pageant debuted at Santa Barbara in 2012, where it won best documentary. It went on to screen at Nantucket, Woodstock, Newport Beach, San Diego, Ft Lauderdale, and Boston Jewish, among other events. It is now available via iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, Google Play, Direct TV, PlayStation, Xbox Video, VUDU and YouTube Movies, as well as for theatrical on-demand engagements via Gathr.

For the past thirty years, women over the age of 58 have come to Fall River MA to compete in the Ms Senior Sweetheart Pageant, singled out by many contestants as their favorite of similar types of events. Over the course of eleven days, thirty women join their peers for competition, but with a large dose of camaraderie, celebrating their age and experience rather than ruing it. Interweaved with backstage and onstage pageant goings on, Matteson profiles four of the engaging competitors in greater depth – who contend with cancer, Alzheimer’s, and other concerns – while also providing insight on the event’s history via its indelible founder, Lenny.

Coming to theatres this Wednesday, March 19: THE MISSING PICTURE

Rithy Panh’s memoir of Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge’s regime debuted at Cannes last year, winning the Un Certain Regard. It went on to screen at Toronto, New York, Vancouver, Cleveland, Seattle, Jerusalem, and Göteborg, among several others, and was also Oscar nominated for Best Foreign Language Film.

I previously wrote about the film out of Toronto here.

Coming to HBO tonight, Monday, March 17: PAYCHECK TO PAYCHECK: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF KATRINA GILBERT

Shari Cookson and Nick Doob’s portrait of a struggling single working mother had a sneak preview at Big Sky last month before making its official debut on HBO.

A collaboration with Maria Shriver’s The Shriver Report, Cookson and Doob’s film aims to draw attention to the plight of the nation’s 42 million women who live in poverty. Rather than conducting a survey of several subjects, the filmmakers have wisely focused in on one compelling figure, Katrina Gilbert, a 30-year-old mother of three and sole breadwinner in her family. Separated from her husband, who moves back to Tennessee during the course of the film to be closer to their children and to find a job, Gilbert works as a nursing assistant at an extended-care facility for $9.49 an hour. Hard working, but barely scraping by, having to go without costly prescriptions in order to take care of more basic necessities for her young children, Gilbert still dreams of bettering her situation through education. Reminiscent in some ways to the recent KIND HEARTED WOMAN, Cookson and Doob’s film is a sympathetic and illuminating portrait of an often under-represented, if not actively misrepresented, segment of America’s working poor.