Category Archives: Releases

Coming to PBS’s American Masters tomorrow, Friday, March 26:
TWYLA MOVES

Director:
Steven Cantor

World Premiere:
SXSW 2021

About:
A portrait of acclaimed choreographer and dancer Twyla Tharp.

With a career spanning nearly 60 years, Twyla Tharp has left an indelible mark on the world of dance. Filmmaker Steven Cantor provides a compelling retrospective of her pioneering work while, slightly less successfully, using a minor project created during the pandemic to demonstrate her process. The latter is a three-minute piece with four dancers, each in different time zones and in separate Zoom frames. While showcasing how Tharp resolves the imposed limitations of lockdown, and how she works with dancers, as a whole this thread feels too slight to serve as a backbone for the film. Far more engaging is the bulk of the film, tracing Tharp’s notable achievements, eclecticism and range, and championing of inclusion based on gender, race, and size. If she sometimes comes off as somewhat overly rehearsed when recounting her past, this too demonstrates the precision and exactness she displays in her wide-ranging work.

Coming to NYC’s Quad Cinema this Friday, March 26:
MY OCTOPUS TEACHER

Director:
Pippa Ehrlich, James Reed

World Premiere:
Thessaloniki Doc 2020

Select Festivals:
Docs Against Gravity, EarthxFilm, Jackson Hole, Guangzhou Doc

Notable Recognition:
The doc has been nominated for the Academy Awards.

About:
A man bonds with a normally solitary cephalopod.

Seeking to reconnect with the natural world, filmmaker Craig Foster begins to freedive in the kelp forest off of South Africa’s Cape of Storms. In the process, he grows curious about an octopus he chances across, and slowly begins to develop an unusual cross-species friendship. Establishing that he is no threat to the young female, Foster is surprised to find the octopus seemingly as curious about him as he is about her, reaching out to explore his hand and swim with him. Over just under a year – the typical lifespan of an octopus – Foster returns daily, visiting with and observing his new friend as she hunts, cleverly disguises herself from nearby predators, and even plays with schools of fish, further demonstrating this solitary creature is not exactly antisocial, after all. While undeniably a crowdpleaser and critical darling, Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed’s film is, at its heart, a carefully constructed – one might say manipulative – project, leaning too much on anthropomorphism and sentimentality. While the transcendence it aims for feels unearned and manufactured, the doc nevertheless remains an appealing watch as a whole.

Coming to PBS’s American Masters and to DVD tomorrow, Tuesday, March 23:
FLANNERY

Directors:
Elizabeth Coffman and Mark Bosco, SJ

World Premiere:
Hot Springs Doc 2019

Select Festivals:
New Orleans, Austin, Oxford

About:
A biography on the acclaimed Southern Gothic author Flannery O’Connor.

I previously wrote about the doc here.

New to Discovery+ this week:
GROOMED

Director:
Gwen van de Pas

World Premiere:
Discovery+ (March 2021)

About:
The filmmaker confronts the manipulation and sexual abuse she suffered from an older man.

In her youth in Holland, filmmaker Gwen van de Pas had a secret boyfriend who sent her letters, gave her gifts, and made her feel special. But she was a preteen, and he was an adult, and now, years later, van de Pas recognizes that she was a victim, and that this older man manipulated her into a sexual relationship. He also never faced any consequences – and, she realizes, who’s to say she was his only victim? Seeking to make sense of her past – and to expose his crimes – she sets out to explore how perpetrators carefully groom their victims, identifying and exploiting their vulnerabilities and making them co-conspirators and even apologists in their abuse. While disturbing and at times illuminating – particular an extended, candid interview with a convicted perpetrator, who functions as a proxy of sorts for her abuser – the project sometimes crosses the line into filmmaking-as-therapy, and suffers from some clunky storytelling and technical aspects, including an overly heavy score, that ultimately hamper its effectiveness.