Screen debut of rapper Eminem, a pop-star acting vehicle not unlike some of the more serious (everything being relative) of the early Elvis vehicles: Loving You, Jailhouse Rock, King Creole, Wild in the Country. (The Eminem character is even addressed on occasion as "Elvis.") On the score of "realism," one …
Michael Moore's seat-of-the-pants travelogue on his forty-seven-city tour to promote his best-selling book (nonfiction), Downsize This! After Roger and Me and his small-screen series TV Nation, there is nothing really new to say for or against his journalistic methods. They remain as unfair and confrontational and cranky as ever. But …
Michael Moore's engaging and enraging documentary on gun culture in America, and by extension violence, homicide, and the climate of fear in America. Dishevelled as ever in his baggy clothes and collection of ballcaps (one of them emblazoned with "Writer"), usually unshaven, a definitive schlump, he is still his own …
Michael Moore's overview of the American economy is, needless to say, not a love story. "Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil." In other words, Capitalism: A Horror Story, the moral of which might best be summed up as capitalism, no; democracy, yes — a tricky distinction for …
Consciousness-raising, conscience-pricking documentary by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott, reciting a laundry list, two and a half hours long, of the vices of big business past and present. A rotation of experts (CEOs, Harvard profs, Milton Friedman, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, many more) lectures directly to the camera and over …
From Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, the team that brought you Jesus Camp, comes another cable-ready documentary content to skim the surface. Detroit is the fastest shrinking city in the United States; the population has reached its lowest point in 100 years. We follow several locals - a video blogger, …
Michael Moore’s output during the Obama years confirms the obvious: just as a ship needs a rudder, the director is nothing without a Republican commander-in-chief to shepherd his contempt. Still, credit Moore with finding fault in Mrs. Clinton’s pampered approach to politics. (His was the only liberal voice to predict …
Michael Moore's blistering critique of the Bush administration in toto and its War on Terror in particular (just in time for the 2004 presidential campaign, too) is at bottom a pair of devil's horns drawn on the head of Dubya. But if Moore were only making fun, he'd only be …
Credits normally withheld for a closing crawl open director Aleksandr Sokurov’s (Russian Ark), latest self-important hymn to the importance of art museums. Listen as the disembodied voice of the documentarian expresses disappointment over his latest production. He’s not the only one. Borrowing a page from the Michael Moore playbook, Sokurov’s …
Nora Ephron, in a sort of comic counterpart to A Simple Plan, tells what happens to the people, and those around them, who successfully scam the Pennsylvania State Lottery for six-point-four million, but who then must find somebody else to cash in the ticket: a "beard." It isn't pretty, and …
An unlikely source of mirth: a documentary about the layoff of 30,000 auto workers from eleven General Motors plants in Flint, Michigan. The Roger of the title is Roger Smith, GM Chairman; the Me is first-time filmmaker Michael Moore, whose Leftist bona fides had been well established in ten years …
Michael Moore, documentarist, polemicist, provocateur, pest, scold, nag, and wag, takes on the American health-care system and finds it sorely lacking, particularly as compared, in turn, to that of Canada, the U.K., France, and even Cuba. Anecdotal, rambling, repetitive, unbalanced (not to say mentally), the film contains few real surprises, …
Hectoring documentary on the relationship between American fast food and American obesity, and insufficiently funny to compensate for the preachment. Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, attempting to walk in the shoes of Michael Moore, risks his own body for science, if not for art: eating nothing but McDonald's for thirty days straight. …
Kirby Dick's video documentary on the inconsistencies, injustices, etc., of the anonymous and arbitrary MPAA ratings board. The blabbedy-blah of the talking heads -- filmmakers, critics, lawyers, scholars -- is intermittently alleviated by some Michael Moore-style mischief, whereby a lesbian private investigator attempts to ferret out the identities of the …
Given all the anti-Trump dogma that’s crossed my screen over the past four years, it’s time to give Dinesh D’Souza, this administration’s answer to Leni Riefenstahl, his due. Listen closely: there’s as much Pesci as President in the voice artist hired by D’Souza to ape his adored liberator. (The celebrity …