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Later this week, fans of Greta Gerwig’s wholly charming brand of cinema are in for a very big treat when her solo directorial debut “Lady Bird” arrives in limited release. Already lauded on the festival circuit and considered something of an Oscar contender in a slew of categories, the film draws much of its inspiration from Gerwig’s own coming-of-age in suburban Sacramento. Featuring Saoirse Ronan as the eponymous Lady Bird (sure, her birth certificate says “Christine,” but the whipsmart high school senior doesn’t have much time for such restrictions), the film follows the restless teen as she comes to grips with the push-pull of home, family, friends, and boys, all as she’s about to go enter full-scale adulthood.

While Gerwig has been a bit cagey on the exact parallels between Lady Bird and herself (at a recent New York Film Festival press conference, the filmmaker said,...

“I’d like to propose a toast.” They’re just six simple words introducing “The Ladies Who Lunch” in the musical Company, but they’re the six words that introduced the scene that got theater and cabaret audiences talking about Elaine Stritch, who died today at age 89.

This bit, which unfolds over about 12 minutes with the tension of an ace Hitchcock thriller, is about as apt a descriptor of Stritch’s legacy as any: In the benchmark 1971 D.A. Pennebaker documentary Company: Original Cast Album, Stritch famously tries to get through a marathon show album recording. Tugging at her hair with voice tired and weary,...

As one of the pioneers of the Direct Cinema movement back in the 1960s, D.A. Pennebaker has long been associated with mostly observational films and concert docs, including the classics Don’t Look Back, The War Room, Monterey Pop, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders of Mars, Town Bloody Hall and Company: Original Cast Album. Neither he nor his wife and filmmaking partner, Chris Hegedus, are thought of as directors of issue films. Their next feature, therefore, seems like a departure, though it probably isn’t as behind a cause as it sounds. The doc is called Unlocking the Cage and it follows attorney Steve Wise in his attempt to give animals the same legal rights as humans. Chimpanzees are the main focus, having been involved in his landmark lawsuit demanding personhood for the apes, one of which was a plaintiff in court last December. In their campaign video on Kickstarter, where...

New York -- Elaine Stritch would rather get on with it.

The 88-year-old Broadway legend and New York icon – as much a fixture as the Statue of Liberty, but with a whole lot more to say – has made her way slowly into the Chelsea theater where the documentary "Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me" was premiering Friday at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Led to a green room before the show starts, she's displeased about the seating options, and, coming off a hip surgery, would prefer to go directly into the theater. She isn't shy about it. First, though, she grips a reporter by the forearm, fixes her gaze on him, and says in that unmistakable, feisty voice:

"There are ways around my life, if you know what I mean."

She has lived a full one, from defining performances of Stephen Sondheim tunes on Broadway to the Tony- and Emmy-winning one-woman show "Elaine Stritch: At Liberty...

Richard Leacock, 1921-2011

The noted filmmaker Richard Leacock, best known as one of the pioneers of the “cinema verite”-style of documentary filmmaking–a more direct, realistic approach to the form–died on March 23. He was 89-years-old.

Though he directed some 20-plus feature films and shorts (including 1984’s Lulu in Berlin, a documentary on actress Louise Brooks, and the popular 1963 short Happy Mother’s Day about a woman who gives birth to quintuplets), Leacock is best known to DiscDish as the cinematographer of some of finest documentaries of the 1960s and 1970s, many of which he collaborated on with such well-known colleagues as D.A. Pennebaker (The War Room) and Albert & David Maysles (Grey Gardens).

Here’s a group of fine documentaries wherein the late Mr. Leacock was behind the camera as the director of photography, snagging each and every shot that served the real-life story each movie was telling.

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