Review: Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son

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Review: The End of the Line

Doomsday from under the sea

By GERALD PEARY | July 22, 2009

3.0 Stars

Eating fish is great for you — but it's a different story for the poor fish. That's the semi-doomsday message from Rupert Murray's documentary call to action, which roams the globe to show how the overfishing of our oceans by greedy multinationals has endangered popular species like bluefin tuna, marlin, and Atlantic salmon.

So, we should farm fish instead? Sorry, the process of farming is often ruinous to the environment. Murray's film is based on the muckraking book by Charles Clover, who makes a fine on-camera probing journalist.

The only downer is the filmmakers' decision to try to hook audiences for their important polemic with slick, glib editing montages.

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The cheeky title conjures up belovedly tacky 1950s Japanese sci-fi films, but Jessica Oreck’s actual effort is a pallid, thinly poetic documentary essay about Japan’s obsession with insects.
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Had someone fire-bombed an annual college-Republicans meeting in the early 1980, he would have spared this country a lot of pain and strife.
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One of the most enigmatic close-ups I’ve seen on screen this year is of a sheep. It stares into the camera at the beginning of Ilisa Barbash & Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s documentary about a round-up of the critters in Montana’s Beartooth Mountains, ruminating thoughtfully, as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa.
Review: The Cartel
First-time documentarian and TV journalist Bob Bowdon’s broad primer on what’s rotting American education runs like a 90-minute 20/20 segment.
In a Dream
If you find yourself groaning through the first five minutes of Jeremiah Zagar's Academy Award-shortlisted feature documentary about his artist father Isaiah, you might just be its target audience.
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Tom Shadyac found a perfect nest for his low-watt-lightbulb sensibility in today's Hollywood, where he helmed a series of blockbuster comedies that ranged in quality from the passably silly ( Ace Ventura: Pet Detective ) to the unforgivably execrable ( Patch Adams ).
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When you romanticize, everything awful is awesome and inspiring. And so it is with the nostalgic, now-middle-aged, indie filmmakers interviewed in Céline Danhier's Blank City, reflecting on the late '70s and early '80s on New York's Lower East Side.
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