Saturday, January 16, 2010

Theatrical Releases

Every Friday we update you all with the week's theatrical documentary releases. Now, this is not a perfect process as our beloved genre prefers the rolling/limited release schedule instead of a big nationwide or international-wide release. So apologies if a film isn't out in your area or if you are a filmmaker and we missed the boat on announcing your documentary's big day (if that is the case, please let us know and we'll correct the mistake).

Now, with that introduction out of the way, here's this weekend's releases with their current rating on the amazing website Rottentomatoes.com:

A Room and a Half- (no rating provided) Joseph Brodsky, the Russian-Jewish-American poet, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1987 and was made poet laureate of the U.S. in 1991. Given that he was expelled from the USSR in 1972, it’s not surprising that much of his writing deals with themes of exile, loss and memory. An imagined return to the parents he never saw again and his childhood home of St. Petersburg (“a city whose color was fossilized vodka”) is the essence of this wonderfully nostalgic, whimsical movie. Made by famed Russian animator Andrey Khrzhanovsky, A ROOM AND A HALF recalls the glory years of a much-loved child and the particular absurdities and indignities suffered by Jews under the Soviet regime in the ‘50s and ‘60s. The filmmaker’s light touch – his use of animation, stills, archival footage, and scripted, dramatic material – melds the sophisticated surrealism of Magritte with the folk mysticism of Chagall. (Rottentomatoes.com)

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