As the Toronto International Film Festival gradually unveils its programming, we’ll be providing cheat sheets with each major announcement. Still from Errol Morris’s Tabloid courtesy of TIFF. CATEGORY: Documentaries, i.e. those films which claim to have a greater purchase on reality than their mutated, “fictional” cousins. HEAVY-HITTERS: The line-up of “documentary all-stars” announced today includes, [...]

Remember when grandpa said, “Here, son, take a swig of this—it’ll put hair on your chest,” and that kind of made you want to drink it even less because thorax fuzz is sooo passé? In Bear Nation, a new documentary making its way to Toronto this weekend, that very fuzz is downright necessary. After 2006’s [...]

Yay, movies! We like free entertainment. We also like HotDocs, Toronto’s annual documentary film festival and self-proclaimed largest documentary film festival in North America (beginning this year on April 29). Yesterday, HotDocs went and combined both of those things by launching an online doc library, financed with a little help from the Department of Canadian [...]

Photo by Tim Leyes. Watching an Allan King film is like being uncomfortably trapped inside a series of someone else’s highly personal moments. Devoid of narration, his documentaries often feature long, uninterrupted takes of critical human events, but never with any whiff of sensationalism. Astonishingly, King’s authority as a documentarian was cemented right from the [...]