The night before the SXSW Film Festival got under way, Michael Barker, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, defended his communal love of film in theaters. "In pursuing the new future, we c...
I started blogging—reluctantly—in April 2004. In my first blog post, creatively titled “My First Blog” (which is now lost in a black hole of 404 URL errors), I wrote: “The whole thing ...
http://blogs.indiewire.com/anthony/goodbye-reelpolitik-20150529
After a several-month, multi-city listening tour , PBS, its New York affiliate, WNET, and indie documentary leaders POV and ITVS have come to an agreement, and hashed out a multi-point plan ...
http://blogs.indiewire.com/anthony/pbs-launches-indies-initiative-will-it-stick-20150423
There were many more documentaries to see at Tribeca than the 10 (plus 1) I've listed below. But I'm a highly targeted viewer, seeking out only films that I think I will appreciate. As always, I ...
http://blogs.indiewire.com/anthony/10-top-docs-at-the-tribeca-film-festival-20150421
In Indiewire's review of Steve Hoover's new documentary "Crocodile Gennadiy" (great doc, bad title) playing at the Tribeca Film Festival this week, the critic evokes the dreaded label "poverty p...
Summer blockbuster season is just around the corner, but there's no need to wait until then to see a great movie. April brings us a wide variety of women-centric projects, as well as quite a few ...
http://blogs.indiewire.com/womenandhollywood/april-2015-film-preview-20150401
On April 15, low-wage workers, unions, community groups and allies will stage a coordinated "Day of Action" calling for a $15/hr minimum wage and the right to unionize. When filmmakers Robin Blo...
Former Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed, the central figure in the highly acclaimed documentary "The Island President," was sentenced to 13 years in prison Friday after being convicted of a ter...
The campaign to free Mohamed Nasheed--the climate change activist, former president of the Maldives, and central figure in Jon Shenk's acclaimed documentary "The Island President"--is heating up....
Plenty of general news outlets have reported on the recent arrest of former Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed, the star of his own documentary "The Island President." But the staid reports of N...
Jokes about the industry's prejudice against African Americans. Check. Jokes about the industry's prejudice against immigrants. Check. Clarion calls for equal pay for women. Check. Call-outs agai...
I should say that this isn't a comprehensive list--how does one possibly see more than 100 movies in five days, many of them playing at the same time. For that very reason, I missed some of the m...
http://blogs.indiewire.com/anthony/my-top-10-films-and-then-some-from-sundance-2015-20150129
At its Sundance premiere, Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering's "The Hunting Ground" was warmly received by its activist audience, who after the screening, pledged to help find ways to tackle the film's m...
I haven't seen all of the documentaries that would likely qualify for a list of the best nonfiction films of 2014 (see my omissions below, please forgive me), so consider this not a definitive li...
http://blogs.indiewire.com/anthony/the-top-12-documentaries-of-2014-20141209
Filmmaker Travis Wilkerson ("An Injury to One") is joining forces with a number of other independent filmmakers to launch Now! A Journal of Urgent Praxis, a website made up of movies and writings...
http://blogs.indiewire.com/anthony/now-filmmakers-respond-to-ferguson-with-short-docs-20141203
Filmmakers, artists and creative-types of all sorts, please take the 2014 mid-term elections as a wake-up call. This blog is called ReelPolitik, so I feel it's in my purview to state that it's bo...
In the Fall issue of Filmmaker Magazine , my latest Industry Beat column (print only) asks the question, "Has the Cinematic Water Cooler Run Dry?"--in other words, do indie films have cultural ca...
http://blogs.indiewire.com/anthony/has-indie-film-jumped-the-shark-20141029
In my latest Reality Checks column for Indiewire, I felt the pleasure and paranoia of gaining an understanding of the risks involved in investigating corporate and/or government wrongdoing and t...
Just when the news from Occupy Central, the student-led protest movement in Hong Kong, was beginning to fade from the headlines, the conflict between pro-democracy demonstrators and police is hea...
In the new teaser trailer just released for Laura Poitras' long-awaited look at whistleblower Edward Snowden, the clip offers a very, very brief glimpse of the new documentary. One of the main t...
http://blogs.indiewire.com/anthony/i-go-by-ed-citizenfour-to-humanize-edward-snowden-20141010
Danish filmmaker Anders Østergaard, director of the Oscar-nominated doc "Burma VJ," will world premiere his latest film "1989," at the opening night of CPH: DOX, and simultaneously throughout th...
How cool is it that Rachel Boynton's 2005 documentary "Our Brand is Crisis" is being re-made as a new film directed by David Gordon Green and starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock, and is no...
Laura Poitras' highly anticipated Edward Snowden doc is hitting theaters this October. The announcement came with little warning -- at least to me -- along with the news that it would premiere at...
Just when you thought the war in Afghanistan was a distant memory, "The Kill Team" (opening in theaters on July 25) reminds us that America's military missteps in the country remain an open wound...
Is there a more prophetic documentary, or title, than James Longley’s visionary "Iraq in Fragments"? More than eight years since the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2006...