PRINCESS is an intimately observed film that forces us to face some uncomfortable truths. Told with unflinching honesty, completely eschewing the sensational in favor of the perceptive, we are plunged into a 12-year-old’s waking nightmare lived in a highly sexualized atmosphere created by her mother and her mother’s live-in boyfriend. The girl is Adar… Read More »
Amir Bar-Lev Visits HAPPY VALLEY
Avoiding black holes. Amir Bar-Lev used that term when describing his approach to interviewing a victim of child sexual abuse, and it was a strikingly original way to describe how he wanted to be honest, but not salacious when it came to dealing with the charges against Jerry Sandusky in his documentary, HAPPY VALLEY. What… Read More »
CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS
Beyond the riveting look at a family falling apart under the weight of its own emotional baggage, CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS explores the elusive nature of truth. By the end, far from establishing what is and isn’t true, we are left with the unsettling realization that what is real at any given moment for one person… Read More »
THE WOODSMAN
THE WOODSMAN is the bravest film of the year, perhaps of the decade. Emotionally challenging and ferociously unforgiving, it is an astonishing work of surprising delicacy played out with the rawest of emotion simmering just beneath the surface. In telling the story of Walter (Kevin Bacon), a convicted pedophile, it demands that we look beyond… Read More »
Andrew Jarecki on CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS
For a debut film, Andrew Jarecki couldn’t have picked a more controversial or attention-grabbing subject that child sexual abuse. Yet his film dealing with the emotional impact on the family of the accused father and son transcends sensationalism and becomes a consideration on the nature of truth and universality of family life. When I spoke to… Read More »