Female Film Critics 24/375
Writer/director Benny Safdie deconstructs the sports/action biopic as we know it and turns UFC champ Mark Kerr’s life into the Wide Wide World of Sports. The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat is showcased in Safdie’s docudrama, The Smashing Machine. Safdie doesn’t sugarcoat anything. Every vein of Kerr’s story is popping with reality making viewers feel like flies on the ropes of the boxing ring.
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The erasure of women from the annals of history is usually figurative – they are overlooked, conveniently forgotten, somehow missing from the picture. But Eileen Gray (1878-1976), the pioneering modernist Irish designer and architect, was almost literally removed from the architectural record by one of its most looming figures – Le Corbusier himself. A lovely new docudrama, “E.1027 – Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea,” by Beatrice Minger, revisits a chapter that sounds like a parable of how the great men of history can ensure they alone receive credit for shaping it
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The Criterion Collection is releasing trailblazing filmmaker Martha Coolidge’s feature film debut, the autobiographical docudrama “Not a Pretty Picture,” in August. In 1962, as a 16-year-old boarding school student, Coolidge was date raped. A dozen years later, she worked through the experience in her unflinchingly personal hybrid of documentary and fiction. A high-stakes experiment in metacinema that broke new ground with its uncompromising examination of date rape, Not a Pretty Picture delves into questions about the on-screen representation of sexual violence and the limits of artistic catharsis.
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Adding to the astonishing true stories of life in Nazi Germany, The Invisibles dramatizes the improbable experiences of four young Jewish men and women hiding in plain sight in Berlin during WWII. German writer/director Claus Räfle expertly intertwines the featured survivors’ formidable contemporary interviews, black-and-white archival footage from 1940s Berlin, and color reenactments of critical moments and desperate decisions.
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In this true docudrama the Turner Family; Father, Mother and three children are among others just like them in our country that go beyond a normal life to pave a better road of happiness and well-being. Darren Turner (portrayed by Justin Brening) not only signed up with the Army to fight at Bagdad in Iraq, but also went to a Seminary to be commissioned as a Chaplain.
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