SHE SAID is a compelling story that is well told by director Maria Schrader and screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz. Based on the book of the same name by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, it follows those two New York Times reporters as they crack the story of Harvey Weinstein’s decades of sexual harassment, abuse, and rape… Read More »
THE WAY I SEE IT
The canny undercurrent of Dawn Porter’s documentary THE WAY I SEE IT, about White House photographer Pete Souza, is a consideration of the free press in an era when “fake news” has become a catch phrase for those who see journalists as the enemy of the people. It’s equally canny in the way it contrasts… Read More »
WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT
WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT is being sold as a comedy and that shortchanges everyone. Based on the memoir by Kim Barker, “The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” about her time in the early 2000s as a war correspondent in Afghanistan, it is a trenchant look at media, politics, and the separate reality that… Read More »
SPOTLIGHT
SPOTLIGHT does more than dissect the passions at work in the investigative news process. As riveting as the specifics are of how The Boston Globe’s special investigative team chased down the sex-abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, it’s the larger question, that of how wide-spread sexual abuse of children by priests could have flourished for… Read More »
TRUTH
James Vanderbilt’s TRUTH is a careful, disturbing dissection of the triumph of style over substance, flash over facts, insinuated itself, and then took over, television news. Based on the book Truth and Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power by Mary Mapes, it examines that moment in history when the eponymous truth… Read More »
James Vanderbilt Examines TRUTH
I did not expect James Vanderbilt to do his impression of Roland Emmerich for me. And I certainly didn’t expect it to be so dead on. Vanderbilt was talking to me on October 2, 2015, about his upcoming collaboration with Emmerich on the sequel to INDEPENDENCE DAY, the script for which Vanderbilt contributed, and I… Read More »
Jason Segel and James Ponsoldt Celebrate THE END OF THE TOUR
You never know what gem of an information nugget you will unearth when conducting an interview, or, as in the case of my chat with Jason Segel and James Ponsoldt, before the formal interview began while I was checking the sound levels on my recording equipment on May 2, 2015. I had spoken to Ponsoldt… Read More »
Alex Gibney Ponders GONZO: THE LIFE AND WORK OF DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON
When I spoke to Alex Gibney on April 8, 2008, the first question was the one that stuck with me from the minute I heard about this documentary. Where do you begin with a man who was larger than life, as was his writing? Gibney, with a succinct erudition, summed up his own struggle with… Read More »
Brit Marling & Zal Batmanglij Listen to the SOUND OF MY VOICE
For co-writers Zal Batmanglij and Brit Marling, making SOUND OF MY VOICE wasn’t just a labor of love, but one of passion. Batmaglij directed and Marling stars as Maggie, the enigmatic leader of a cult who claims to have come from the future to save her followers in a film that lets the audience decide… Read More »