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Fifteen years after I first came to the Toronto International Film Festival and saw Juno, Michael Clayton, Eastern Promises, Into the Wild and The Savages, among other excellent films, I’m happy, as always, to be back at the best fest north of the border, and hopeful, as always, to match the high bar set by my first visit to it. Rather than rush to file separate write-ups of every noteworthy thing that I see and hear while on the ground here, at the cost of missing other noteworthy things, I’ve decided to file a dispatch every few days addressing a bunch of stuff. This initial piece covers the fest’s first three days.

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After flying in on Wednesday morning (my seatmate on the flight from L.A. was none other than the NBA legend Dwayne Wade, who was accompanying his wife,...

Hillary Clinton is no stranger to film festivals. In 2020, the former Secretary of State traveled to Sundance and Berlin to promote the Hulu docuseries about her career. However, this year Clinton arrived at the Toronto International Film Festival with her daughter Chelsea in a very different capacity — as executive producers. The pair launched the new film and TV company HiddenLight Productions in 2021, but the fruits of those labors just emerged this week.

Friday saw the premiere of the documentary “In Her Hands,” a portrait of former Afghan female mayor Zarifa Ghafari, which the company produced with Netflix. The movie, co-directed by Afghan filmmaker Tamana Ayazi and Oscar nominee Marcel Mettelsiefen (“Watani: My Homeland”) screened the same day as the release of the unscripted AppleTV+ miniseries “Gutsy,” which features the two Clintons in conversation with other famous women. The connection between those two projects hints at the overall focus of BrightLights...

Jeremy Strong as Irving Graff and Anne Hathaway as Esther Graff in ‘Armageddon Time’ (Photo Courtesy of Focus Features)

Writer/director James Gray’s Armageddon Time will open the 2022 San Diego International Film Festival on October 19th and writer/director Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light has been selected as the festival’s closing night film. The 21st annual SDiFF’s lineup will also include the San Diego premiere of Taurus as well as screenings of Close, Good Night Oppy, and The Banshees of Inisherin.

This year’s festival will honor Taurus star Colson Baker (aka Machine Gun Kelly) with the Spotlight Award. Baker, who made his acting debut in the Showtime series Roadies, will be presented with the honor following a special Spotlight Screening of Taurus from writer/director Tim Sutton on October 23rd.

“This year, our slate has been curated from over 3000 film submissions from 82 countries with compelling Social...

Eight years ago, Edward Snowden became the centerpiece of the Oscar race for Best Documentary as the subject of director Laura Poitras’ eventual winner “Citizenfour.” This time, that centerpiece slot goes to Nan Goldin, the photographer and activist hero of Poitras’ “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.”

The movie launched to rave reviews at Venice over the weekend and sneaked into a morning Tba slot on the last day of the Telluride Film Festival, where many audience members emerged in tears. That response is likely to continue as the movie travels to the Toronto International Film Festival and later New York, where it will be — appropriately enough — the festival’s centerpiece selection.

“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” is in good hands. Participant Media produced the project and will release it October 7 with Neon, which previously distributed her Julian Assange documentary “Risk.” Neon CEO Tom Quinn also spearheaded the successful “Citizenfour” campaign at Radius-twc.

National Geographic has revealed a first look teaser trailer for the new documentary film Retrograde, the latest from award-winning filmmaker Matthew Heineman. This initially premiered at the 2022 Telluride Film Festival over the weekend, hence the new teaser, and will be showing up later this year though an exact date isn't set yet. The film is about one of the most upsetting topics of 2021 – it captures the final nine months of America's 20-year war in Afghanistan from multiple perspectives. Focusing on the intimate relationship between American Green Berets and the Afghan officers they trained. From the Oscar-nominated & Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, Retrograde offers a cinematic and historic window onto the end of America’s longest war, and the costs endured for those most intimately involved. With everything in Afghanistan in 2021 being a major political topic, this doc should interest many viewers as it's as close as one can get to learning about...

Regardless of politics, we can all agree that the U.S. military’s exit from Afghanistan, a country our armed forces had occupied for two decades, turned into a shitshow. Not the exit itself, which was orderly and swift in the manner of a rehearsed tactical operation, but the aftermath, which saw nearly an entire country retaken by the very enemy the U.S. had assisted them in fighting for twenty years. Matthew Heineman’s documentary “Retrograde” watches the doom unfold.

The film starts by following a troop of American Green Berets deployed to Camp Shorab whose orders are to train the Afghan military in modern combat, teaching them how to use the weapons they’ll need to continue fighting the Taliban on home soil. The camp is outfitted with attack helicopters, surveillance blimps, tanks, rockets, and everything the local army needs to be taught how to use.

The operation had barely begun when,...

Matthew Heineman’s latest documentary, “Retrograde,” opens with a pan from left to right across the mountain ranges of Afghanistan. Audio clips overlay soundbites from four generations of Presidents discussing the American invasion of the Middle East, from the purposeful threat-neutralizing of the Dubya years to Obama-era fatigue to the wavering defeatism of Trump to Biden’s resolution for withdrawal. As the situation goes quagmire and the hope in their cascading voiceover fades away, the frame changes along with it, sliding on a gradient from crisply defined peaks backlit by sunrise into the murky limited visibility and ominous unknowability of night.

Continue reading ‘Retrograde’ Review: Matthew Heineman’s Afghan War Doc Takes A Blinkered, Sanitized View Of America’s Role [Telluride] at The Playlist.

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If “documentary-style” has become shorthand for a certain kind of blandly flat aesthetic that viewers have learned to code as “reality,” you can’t blame Matthew Heineman.

In only a decade of directing docs, Heineman has set a template for astonishingly well-shot films marked by impeccably intimate access and the sort of eye for compositional detail you’d expect from a feature film with the budget and time for elaborate set-ups and uncannily placed lighting, not a seat-of-your-pants shoot in some of the most precarious situations imaginable. Put more simply, from Cartel Land to City of Ghosts to his TV work on The Trade, Heineman makes films that are both pretty and pretty unnerving.

A more negative interpretation would be that I’m frequently so impressed with the look of Heineman’s films — and his ability to somehow have cameras in places cameras...

One of the most anticipated documentaries of the fall festival season is “Retrograde,” Matthew Heineman’s new National Geographic film about the final days of the United States’ military presence in Afghanistan. After two decades of fighting the War on Terror, the withdrawal quickly became one of the biggest foreign policy debacles in American history. The Taliban made massive gains almost immediately after American troops left, leaving many to wonder if anything was gained from the entire endeavor.

While the high-level political decisions have been debated at length, “Retrograde” promises to give audiences an unprecedented look at what happened on the ground as American troops wrapped up their operation and prepared to leave. The harrowing footage was captured at great risk to Heineman’s safety, but the documentarian is no stranger to risking his life to make films.

He recently braved the front lines of the Covid-19 pandemic to make “The First Wave,...

The Telluride Film Festival’s emphasis on documentary has not wavered in recent years. But the prominence of nonfiction fare at the 49th edition has arguably made this year’s Telluride the autumn Sundance, where some of the biggest buzz is for docs.

The lineup, kept under wraps until the eve of the fest’s opening on Sept. 2, includes 16 docs from novice and veteran documentarians, including Steve James (“A Compassionate Spy”), Matthew Heineman (“Retrograde”), Chris Smith (“Sr.”) Ondi Timoner (“Last Flight Home”) and Ryan White (“Good Night Oppy”). (Additional “secret” screenings have yet to be announced.)

The rising level of documentaries at the Colorado fest is largely due to the influence of Telluride executive director Julie Huntsinger.

“This year, there is almost parity with the narrative features in the [main feature] program,” says Huntsinger, who co-directs Telluride with Tom Luddy. “It’s not us actively seeking it. For lack of a better word,...

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A tribute to Cate Blanchett, a Sam Mendes romance set in a cinema house and a bumper crop of documentaries are on the agenda at the 49th edition of the Telluride Film Festival, which kicks off Friday in the Rockies and runs through Monday.

The intimate Colorado event serves as the unofficial stateside kickoff of awards season, but Telluride may be most notable this year for the arguments its movies start, says festival executive director Julie Huntsinger.

“There’s so many more divisive films,” says Huntsinger, who programs Telluride together with the festival’s sr. consultant, Tom Luddy. “There’s so much more angst. There’s just tumult and upheaval in the world, and it’s reflected in the films. People will fight about movies this year more than they ever have.”

Among the movies screening at Telluride that may spark furious debates...

Maggie Rogers remembers the morning of her college graduation at Radio City Music Hall in May 2016. It was 4:30 am, and she was the first NYU student to arrive. She stood on the proscenium, looked out at six thousand empty seats, and began to cry.

Rogers made a promise to herself that she would return to the stage of Radio City in 10 years. It took her three; this month, Rogers performed two sold out shows at the iconic venue. However, sitting down in a swanky hotel restaurant in the Lower...