Flash Frames

"She started banging on her door pounding on it, “let me in,” and then... bang!" Director: Geeta Gandbhir Synopsis: “Police bodycam footage reveals how a long-running neighborhood dispute turned fatal in this documentary about fear, prejudice and Stand Your Ground laws.” __________________________________________________ I’m self-aware enough to admit my failings as a newer critic, and one of those is that I rarely watch documentaries. It’s not that I don’t like them, but for the most part, I just don’t gravitate towards them. However, The Perfect Neighbor immediately stood out to me back in January when it premiered at Sundance. I didn’t personally know what it was about yet, but all I knew was that this doc was almost entirely made up of footage from police bodycams. There’s seemingly no interviews and no commentary of any sort either; you’re seeing simply what happened, intentionally designed that way to form your own thoughts on this incident. It’s a lot to ask from the ...

Still from SLY LIVES! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) I’m aware that I have my blindspots in film, so this post is going to be a little bit outside of my comfort zone. Documentaries haven’t only been pretty tough for me to write about, but I haven’t seen a lot of the popular documentaries. When it comes to documentaries on things I know a good amount about, I think I could maybe get something down together. There are two recent documentaries that I’ve recently seen that really should’ve gotten more awards consideration. The first is Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story , and as incredible as this was to see in a theater, the Oscars normally don’t nominate the celebrity-focused documentaries that feel one step away from a biopic. The second is Mati Diop’s Dahomey , and I was really shocked that this didn’t get any sort of love. It did win the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, though, which is a huge honor. It was shortlisted in a couple categories, but it didn’t make the cut a...

We’re finally coming to a point in my writing since the beginning of this decade. If you don’t know, I wrote album reviews from about 2020 to 2022, and even though that really isn’t my thing anymore, it did help shape out what my current taste in music would end up being right now. That blog is actually still up to read somewhere (it’s not exactly hard to find). However, I’m going to throw a big curveball in there: I barely knew who Talking Heads were about two years ago. I knew the name David Byrne, but that was at the point where I regularly mixed up the names David Byrne and David Lynch. It’s actually been a little over a year since I watched Stop Making Sense , the 1984 concert film conceived by Talking Heads frontman Byrne and directed by the late Jonathan Demme, who’d go on to direct movies like The Silence of the Lambs , Philadelphia , and The Manchurian Candidate . Watching it for the first time as a 720p rip on YouTube wasn’t exactly the ideal way for me, but something clicked...