Another Awesome Documentary and Those Oscar Nominations They Shall Not Grow Old (New Zealand/UK https://www.theyshallnotgrowold.film/ )   New Zealand director Peter Jackson is best known for the fictional Lord of the Rings trilogy.   But it’s his longtime interest in military history that has led to this amazing work, released during the centenary of the armistice that ended the First World War and dedicated to a grandfather who served in the British army from 1910-1919.   On January 21 I braved extreme windchills to see it on the big screen, a one-day only showing at Cineplex theatres in Canada.             The painstaking production drew from some 100 hours of archival footage originally shot during the war itself, and 600 hours of audio recordings by WWI veterans made in the 1960s and 1970s. These voices of firsthand experience provide all the narration.   Given the variable quality of extant archiva...

RBG, Laurel and Hardy On the Basis of Sex (U.S. http://www.focusfeatures.com/on-the-basis-of-sex ) One of the finer documentaries of 2018 is RBG which covers the trail-blazing career of liberal U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who turns 86 on March 15).   A multiple award winner, including being named best documentary by the National Board of Review, it’s a contender for an Oscar nomination to be announced January 22.             Director Mimi Leder’s narrative takes a rather jaunty inspirational melodrama approach to its subject, focusing on the period from 1956, when Bader Ginsburg (Felicity Jones) was among a handful of women admitted to the Harvard Law School, to the 1970s when she, representing a male client, won a groundbreaking case before a federal appeals court that hinged on overturning gender discrimination in tax legislation. From the outset, and in that seminal case, Bader Ginsberg, then a...

The Best of 2018 Notwithstanding the popularity of at-home streaming services led by Netflix, movie-going to theatres is not declining.   Indeed in 2018 North American attendance is up with a record box office of almost US$12 billion. Even if much of this is for tentpole blockbusters centred on comic characters, the big screen appeals more broadly.   Take the case of my best movie of the year, the Spanish-language Roma .   A Netflix production available online since December 14, the large Ottawa theatre where I saw it a second time was still packed for a post-Christmas showing in a 10-day run. Good news indeed.   10 Best Narrative Features 1.       Roma (Mexico/U.S.) Viewed on the big screen the immersive luminous black-and-white cinematography and ambient soundscape is even more impressive in this semi-autobiographical masterwork from Alfonso Cuarón which features a sublime performance by first-time actor Yalitza Aparicio as the ...

SCREENINGS & MEANINGS BLOGS 2018 http://gjschmitz.blogspot.com/ http://screeningsandmeanings.com/ September: The Human Condition My most recent peak cinematic experience was in the last days of August at Toronto’s Bell Lightbox, home base of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) which starts September 6. (I’ll be seeing about 25 films at this year’s edition. That’s for a later blog.) This was the screening over three days—August 25, 26, and 28—of the monumental Japanese masterwork The Human Condition directed by Masaki Kobayashi and released as three two-part films— No Greater Love, Road to Eternity, A Soldier’s Prayer —from 1959 to 1961. Presented as part of TIFF’s “Summer in Japan” series, this was a rare chance to take in a theatrical showing of one of the greatest achievements of Japanese cinema. The timing also coincided with the 80 th birthday on August 28 of a longtime Ottawa friend George Wright whose son Roger and family with two young granddaugh...