American Playboy: The Hugh Hefner Story, the new 10-part docuseries on Amazon Prime, asks us to imagine its subject as the Don Draper of gentlemen's magazines. From humble origins, Hefner ascends the hierarchy of mid-century media, aided by a potent alchemy of ambition and chiseled instinct. He is – for the most part – amoral, though not without specific convictions. Stirred by Alfred Kinsey's seismic 1948 report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, he determined in his junior year of college that sexual taboos were not merely hypocritical, but fundamentally damaging. American popular...
- 4/18/2017
- Rollingstone.com
Werner Herzog's documentary about a triple murder in Texas is a compelling reflection on capital punishment
Many film-makers cut their teeth directing documentaries before moving on to features. Relatively few continue making them in tandem with their fiction work. Louis Malle is perhaps the most notable example of a director who did, and there is a fascinating and fruitful interplay between the two aspects of his career stretching from his first movie, Le Monde du silence, the film of marine exploration he co-directed with Jacques-Yves Cousteau in 1956, to his final film, Vanya on 42nd Street, in 1994, where it is hard to say whether it's a documentary about an Andre Gregory production of Chekhov in New York or a fictional film built around the play.
Born a decade after Malle and a key member of the German new wave that followed the French one, Werner Herzog's career has taken him along a similar path.
Many film-makers cut their teeth directing documentaries before moving on to features. Relatively few continue making them in tandem with their fiction work. Louis Malle is perhaps the most notable example of a director who did, and there is a fascinating and fruitful interplay between the two aspects of his career stretching from his first movie, Le Monde du silence, the film of marine exploration he co-directed with Jacques-Yves Cousteau in 1956, to his final film, Vanya on 42nd Street, in 1994, where it is hard to say whether it's a documentary about an Andre Gregory production of Chekhov in New York or a fictional film built around the play.
Born a decade after Malle and a key member of the German new wave that followed the French one, Werner Herzog's career has taken him along a similar path.
- 3/31/2012
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
There's a snag of resistance at the start of Into the Abyss, Werner Herzog's new documentary about the execution of Michael Perry, the 2001 triple homicide he was convicted of (but never confessed to) with Jason Burkett, and the relatives of their victims. The film opens with a shot of a cemetery filled with identical white crosses where the unclaimed bodies of inmates are buried, and an interview with the man standing in front of it, Reverend Richard Lopez, a clergyman for death row inmates in Huntsville, Texas. He tears up as he talks about counseling men who are about to be given a lethal injection, about how, with their permission, he holds their ankle as they're on the gurney so that they have the comfort of human contact as they pass.
- 11/9/2011
- Movieline
IMDb.com, Inc. takes no responsibility for the content or accuracy of the above news articles, Tweets, or blog posts. This content is published for the entertainment of our users only. The news articles, Tweets, and blog posts do not represent IMDb's opinions nor can we guarantee that the reporting therein is completely factual. Please visit the source responsible for the item in question to report any concerns you may have regarding content or accuracy.