truefilm

OK, Taggart Siegel’s film rode the festival circuit a couple years ago and was on PBS last June. But in a flip of the usual order of events, The Real Dirt on Farmer John is now getting a national theatrical release.
The film tells the life story or John Peterson, a third-generation farmer, “whose inspirational story […]

Andrew O’Hehir says in Salon that the music documentary Gypsy Caravan is much much better than he expected:
It’s a two-hour movie, and I’m only sorry it isn’t two or three times as long. Let me read your thoughts: You’re not much interested in Gypsy music, and the historical and cultural stuff might be pretty dry. […]

Josh Caldwell and Hunter Weeks quit their jobs so Josh could ride a Segway scooter from Seattle to Boston while Hunter shot and directed a documentary about the 100-day trip (Josh edited the film). The resulting doc, 10 MPH, just came out on DVD.
I don’t know if I could handle this for 90 minutes, let […]

A review on the Fox News website calls Michael Moore’s new documentary investigating the US healthcare system, “brilliant and uplifting.”
The review, by Roger Friedman, continues

“Sicko” works because in this one there are no confrontations. Moore smartly lets very articulate average Americans tell their personal horror stories at the hands of insurance companies. The film […]

Last Friday saw the debut of The Hoax, a film about the notorious “Authorized Autobiography of Howard Hughes” that Clifford Irving wrote without any authorization or any input from Hughes. You can watch the trailer for The Hoax, but that’s not a documentary.
Instead, you could watch a teaser on YouTube for the 1974 Orson Welles […]

Finally, a film about a political campaign where viewers will want to root for several candidates (I think). Vanessa Roth’s and Alexandra Gray’s film The Third Monday In October covers the Fall 2004 election…at four middle schools in the United States.
The film follows a dozen 12-year-old candidates at schools in Marin County (near San Francisco), […]

From a Boston Globe article about the film, Into Great Silence:
NEW YORK — When German filmmaker Philip Gröning was invited by the nearly 1,000-year-old Carthusian order of monks to become the first outsider allowed to film inside the Grand Chartreuse, one of the world’s most ascetic monasteries, nestled deep in the French Alps, he sought […]

Newsday critic Andy Edelstein describes Lawrence Welk’s TV Treasures, the upcoming PBS doc on accordion-wielding bandleader, as, “‘Behind the Music’ - minus the sex, scandal and drugs.”
The Oklahoma Network, Welk’s home during his public TV years, issued a press release, posted a Making Of article (You think you have media management issues: “With over one […]

Sometimes a trailer is so good, I don’t want to see the whole film for fear that it won’t live up to the three-minute tease. The trailer for Air Guitar Nation is great, but I’ll still go see the film (in spite of the film’s use of the increasingly-common shtick of hanging the narrative on […]

John Anderson, writing in the New York Times, says some people like Michael Moore, some despise him. We already knew that. He continues, “The Toronto-based documentary filmmakers Rick Caine and Debbie Melnyk started out in the first camp. But during the course of making an unauthorized film about Mr. Moore they wound up somewhere in […]