Email Author Andrew Schenker

2010 Stories by Andrew Schenker

• A Hunger Artist on the Brink in The Sound of Insects

  published December 22, 2010

  A sort of dark flipside to Danny Boyle’s life-affirming 127 Hours, Peter Liechti’s philosophically dour The Sound of... More >>

• Open Five: Grown-up New Look, Same Old Mumblecordian Themes

  published November 24, 2010

  Those familiar with the slapdash cinematography in Joe Swanberg’s own movies might be surprised to discover the filmmaker’s... More >>

• Family Affair: Peering In on Another Screwed-up Clan

  published November 17, 2010

  The latest entry in the increasingly popular “meet my fucked-up relatives” documentary subgenre, Chico Colvard’s Family... More >>

• Blissing Out With Beat Poet Gary Snyder in Practice of the Wild

  published November 10, 2010

  Allen Ginsberg isn't the only beat poet to get the big-screen treatment this season. While Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's Howl... More >>

• Generations Clash in Indian-American Slice-o-Life Walkaway

  published October 27, 2010

  For the quartet of Indian-American New Yorkers at the center of Shailja Gupta’s Walkaway, the Old World is never far behind.... More >>

• Love Blooms Against a Harsh Aboriginal Outback in Samson & Delilah

  published October 13, 2010

  A deglamorized couple-on-the-run story, Warwick Thornton’s Samson & Delilah doubles as a portrait of a tiny Australian aboriginal... More >>

• 2-D Flatlife Tops 'Nine Nation Animation' Lineup

  published September 29, 2010

  If nothing else, “Nine Nation Animation” proves that there’s a lot more to the animator’s art than either the cutting-edge... More >>

• Arrogance Meets Autism in A Mother's Courage

  published September 22, 2010

  If Rupert Isaacson can not only pen a bestseller about his quest to curb his son's autism (the dubious vanity project The Horse Boy),... More >>

• Five to Watch at This Year's Latinbeat Film Festival

  published September 8, 2010

  Now in its 13th year, Lincoln Center's Latinbeat Film Festival continues its mission of showcasing the largely undiscovered talent emerging... More >>

• Harry Nilsson Gets the Rock-Doc Treatment

  published September 8, 2010

  The "Everybody's Talkin' " singer and John Lennon's self-described favorite "group" gets the full-on rock-doc treatment normally accorded to... More >>

• Sort of a Zombie Movie, Totally Genuine: Make-Out With Violence

  published August 25, 2010

  The product of a genuinely unique sensibility, the sort-of-zombie-movie Make-Out With Violence is inventive without being twee, quirky... More >>

• Siblings Shattered, Delicately, in Daniel and Ana

  published August 25, 2010

  The most disturbing cinematic sequences often owe their ability to shock to an uninflected, matter-of-fact presentation. Michel Franco's... More >>

• The Waning Years of WWII in Last Letters From Monte Rosa

  published August 4, 2010

  Last Letters From Monte Rosa, we're told in an introductory segment, is based on a recently discovered bag of missives written by German... More >>

• Boxers Make Good and Other Cliches in The Kid: Chamaco

  published August 4, 2010

  In his famous essay on Casablanca, Umberto Eco explained that film’s appeal in terms of the interplay—the... More >>

• Enemies of the People Finds Truth in the Killing Fields

  published July 27, 2010

  Taking in Enemies of the People is a little like watching a Cambodian Shoah, but as if we had access to the director's methods... More >>

• Mental Illness Is a Bummer in Helen

  published July 27, 2010

  "Your wife isn't unhappy—your wife is ill," a doctor explains to David (Goran Visnjic) early on in Helen, thus ensuring that the... More >>

• Brillante Mendoza's Newest, Tirador, Is Feverishly Absorbing

  published July 20, 2010

  With its frenzied depiction of a desperate economic climate, its turbulent handheld camerawork that sticks close to the cluttered streets of... More >>

• To Age or Not to Age: That Is the (Fairly Unexamined) Question

  published July 13, 2010

  'I become a serial expert on whatever idea interests me," explains director Robert Kane Pappas at the beginning of his not-quite-essay film... More >>

• The Pressure's On for Pre-Teen Speed Racers in Racing Dreams

  published July 6, 2010

  With a title designed to recall Steve James's classic sports aspiration doc Hoop Dreams, and an understanding of what's at stake in its... More >>

• Life's Big Questions Remain Unanswered in The Nature of Existence

  published June 15, 2010

  We'd all like to get to the bottom of the titular conundrum posed by Roger Nygard's The Nature of Existence, but traveling around the... More >>

• Reel Injun Dances With Wolves (and Other Native American Stereotypes)

  published June 8, 2010

  Given a formidable, fascinating subject (the depiction of Native Americans on the silver screen and "how Hollywood's fantasies about Indians... More >>

• Hasids Pedal E in Holy Rollers

  published May 18, 2010

  Inspired by a drug ring that used Hasidic Jews to transport over one million pills of Ecstasy to the United States in a six-month period... More >>

• James Allen Smith's Stock-Doc Floored

  published May 4, 2010

  Within the past decade or two, just about every profession has switched from analog to digital models and the commodities exchange is no... More >>

• Brigitte Cornand's The Red Birds Riffs on Art, Life, Womanhood

  published April 20, 2010

  Some visual artists are blessed with the ability to speak compellingly about their life and work, their insight serving as a forceful adjunct... More >>

• The Intermittently Audacious NoBody's Perfect

  published April 13, 2010

  "If I were cool about being disabled, I wouldn't be making this film," director Niko von Glasow tells a fellow "Thalidomide"—one of the... More >>