Author Archives: Phil Hall

Few filmmakers have been willing to focus a narrative feature on the 1915 genocide of the Armenians by the Ottoman Turkish military, and it is a shame that the Italian directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani have dared to venture into this hot button area with an extremely uneven melodrama. The first half of the film [...]

Timed for release in conjunction with the premiere of the latest Tim Burton film, this rarely seen 1966 BBC production from Jonathan Miller takes a radically different approach to the Lewis Carroll landmark. The most significant aspect here is reinventing Wonderland as a warped parallel universe to Victorian England: the story unfolds amid drawing rooms [...]

Gianni Di Gregorio directs and stars in this mild light comedy about a middle-aged unemployed Roman named Gianni who is living with his 93-year-old mother in a condominium apartment. Amidst mounting debts – including an electric bill that has not been paid in three years – Gianni agrees to look after the building manager’s elderly [...]

Unlike other classic 1970s TV games shows, the appeal of “Match Game” had more to do with comedy than competition. Quite frankly, no one tuned in to root for plucky contestants or to get caught up in the addictive nature of the game. Instead, the audience was hypnotized by the show’s offbeat personality – something [...]

Quality roles for John Hurt must be at a severe minimum if the greatly underutilized actor needs to revisit his 1975 triumph as gay icon Quentin Crisp in “The Naked Civil Servant.” This much-belated and wholly unnecessary sequel follows Crisp’s relocation to New York in the early 1980s, where he established himself as a writer [...]

“Word Is Out: Stories Of Some Of Our Lives” made an unusual impact when it was first released in 1978. This documentary, helmed by six directors working as Mariposa Film Group, consisted of interviews with 26 gay men and women about their respective experiences in a less-than-tolerant American society. As a milestone in LGBT cinema, [...]

In many ways, the title for David Barba and James Pellerito’s documentary profile of ice skater Johnny Weir is inappropriate. Weir is less of a pop star than a diva – after all, a pop star is a relatively benign personality who is widely loved, but a diva is a considerable talent that has been [...]

Luis Lopez and Trisha Ziff’s documentary focuses on what might be the single most famous photographic portrait of the 20th century: Alberto Korda’s image of the beret-wearing Ernesto “Che” Guevara.The photograph itself was cropped down from a larger picture that showed Guevara at the 1960 memorial service for the victims of the La Coubre explosion. [...]

Originally broadcast on HBO, Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s re-imagining of the rise and fall of Winston Churchill’s wartime government is fueled by Brendan Gleeson’s wonderfully irascible interpretation of the celebrated leader, which won a richly deserved Emmy Award.Outside of capturing the distinctive physical and vocal dimensions of Churchill, Gleeson also taps into the leader’s brutally contradictory personality. [...]

The extraordinary story of Hannah Senesh (1921-1944) is not very well known to most people, so there is reason to be grateful for Roberta Gossman’s wonderful documentary.The daughter of a prominent Jewish family in Budapest, Senesh fled her native country for British-mandated Palestine prior to the outbreak of World War II. In 1943, she joined [...]

The focus of this documentary is the advocacy group Combatants for Peace, which is made up of members of the Israeli Defense Force that refused to go on duty in the occupied territories and former Palestinian resistance fighters who are eager to pursue Gandhian nonviolence as a means of gaining statehood.Members of both sides needed [...]

What do you think of when you hear the phrase “gay man”? Stereotypes would insist that such individuals are sissified and campy, along the lines of Paul Lynde. Christopher Hines’ documentary “The Bull Factor” is designed to pull down the dreary stereotypes and show that gay men come in masculine shapes and sizes – blue [...]

Katie Cadigan and Laura Murray’s compelling documentary traces how a group of concerned parents created a grassroots program that changed how the medical profession and the wider society viewed schizophrenia. In the post-World War II years, psychiatrists were too ready to dismiss schizophrenia in a pseudo-Freudian manner: it was considered to be the damage created [...]

Phil Grabsky’s documentary covered 25,000 miles across Europe to retrace the life and career of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The good news is that the real Mozart was eons removed from the crass buffoon portrayed by Tom Hulce in the Oscar-winning film version of “Amadeus.” The great news is that the real Mozart was a truly [...]

This DVD double feature, which is being released ahead of the Robert Downey Jr. film “Sherlock Holmes,” offers a pair of films from Universal’s popular 1940s series of Sherlock Holmes adventures, starring Basil Rathbone as the world’s greatest detective and Nigel Bruce as his sidekick Dr. Watson.“Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror” (1942) was [...]

If one subscribes to the manufactured buzz emanating from Hollywood, Jeff Bridges is due for an Oscar for his “Crazy Heart.” If that is the case, it says very little for Academy Award quality control.Bridges plays Bad Blake, a has-been country music star who finds himself, at age 57, playing bowling alleys and cheap bars [...]

Chinese film director Chen Kaige, best known for his 1993 “Farewell My Concubine,” helmed his first opera production with this lavish interpretation of the Puccini warhorse, which opened the 2008 Festival del Mediterrani in Valencia, Spain. Tiziano Mancini’s video record of the production brilliantly captures the best of Kaige’s vision for “Turandot” – a wonderfully [...]

“Invictus,” the new bad movie from Clint Eastwood, perpetuates the soggy myth that decades of virulent racial distrust can be overcome if everyone roots for the same sports team. In this case, the team is the 1995 South African rugby team that represented the post-apartheid nation during the early years of Nelson Mandela presidency.The film [...]

Christopher Swann’s 1999 documentary, which is now being re-released on DVD, is a compelling celebration of one of the most enigmatic masterpieces of 15th century Italian art: Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of the 16-year-old Ginevra de’ Benci.The portrait is significant at many levels: it was da Vinci’s first commissioned portrait (he was 22 when he [...]

Georg Wübbolt’s documentary, originally produced for German television, focuses on the conductor Herbert Von Karajan’s near-obsession with capturing his work with the Berlin Philharmonic on video.Karajan initially opposed the small screen medium, claiming the visual and audio quality of the 1950s-era television productions could not properly recreate the impact of a concert hall setting. But [...]