Movie Reviews
Critic’s Notebook: In Praise of Frederick Wiseman, America’s Greatest Living Filmmaker
Every so often, the work of a filmmaker is given a major critical and public reassessment, allowing them to enter the pantheon of great directors.
It happened in the 1950s, when French critics declared that Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock and Samuel Fuller were not only skillful helmers of genre flicks, but auteurs with distinct personal visions. Later, John Ford was revisited by Peter Bogdanovich and Lindsay Anderson, in books claiming he was more than just a maker of great Westerns. In the 1990s, the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski and the Iranian Abbas Kiarostami, both of whom had been working steadily in their homelands since the 70s, were finally celebrated abroad. More recently, the filmography of Agnès Varda was excavated in retrospectives and festivals, shining a light on a forgotten member of the New Wave.
It’s time the same thing happened for Frederick Wiseman.
First off, let’s not kid ourselves: The 95-year-old Boston native is already considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest of all, documentary filmmakers. With 46 features in nearly 60 years, he’s widely recognized as the major chronicler of American institutions, as well as a few French ones.
His movies, which have running times ranging from 75 to 358 minutes, have all been self-produced through his company Zipporah Films (named after the director’s late wife), with funding coming from PBS and other public outlets in the U.S. and, more recently, in France. They tend to have banal titles — Basic Training, Meat, Zoo, City Hall and State Legislature, to name a few — which do a clever job masking what they really are: veritable human comedies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, populated by people from all races, classes and walks of life struggling within systems they never fully control.
Over the last decade or so, Wiseman’s true greatness has been acknowledged on a bigger scale. A New York Times Magazine piece from 2020, titled “What if the Great American Novelist Didn’t Write Novels?”, argued that his output isn’t merely a collection of institutional portraits, but a series of “long, strange and uncompromising” films made by an “artist of extraordinary vision.” A year later, Shawn Glinis and Arlin Golden launched the excellent Wiseman Podcast, celebrating each movie with in-depth analyses and interviews, including one with the man himself. And back in 2010, a MoMA retrospective featured a catalogue in which Wiseman’s work was praised by artists and intellectuals outside the documentary realm.
With career-spanning retrospectives taking place this past year in New York, Los Angeles and Paris, including 33 works restored through the support of Steven Spielberg, a new generation of moviegoers has had the chance to not only discover or rediscover his films in pristine form, but to grasp the profound scope of his ambition.
I’ve personally sat through 20 or so of his movies in Paris since September, presenting a few of them to packed theaters. And with each new screening, I became increasingly attuned to the fact that Wiseman is not simply a great documentary filmmaker, which is a label he’s always rejected. He’s a great filmmaker, period. And to my mind, he’s the greatest American filmmaker living right now (even if he currently resides in France).
His films, which are set in schools, libraries, museums, offices, police precincts, department stores, museums and other public or private places, are not just faceless, factual accounts of bureaucracies and those employed by them. They are carefully structured narratives marked by moments of high drama, dark comedy and raw emotion, all starring real people giving some of the best natural performances you’ll ever see on screen.
To cite some examples: the finale of High School, during which a teacher reads the letter of a former student proudly fighting in Vietnam; the scene in Welfare in which a man compares his humiliating experience to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot; the moment in Missile when two female Air Force trainees give each other high-fives after launching a mock nuclear attack; the epic leg surgery of a thoroughbred horse in Racetrack; the drugged-out hipster in Hospital who has a vomiting fit worthy of The Exorcist; the NATO exercises in Manoeuvre that become surreal war games; the adorable little girl walking with her cane for the first time in Blind; a wolf getting shot point blank in Belfast, Maine; the heartbreaking scene in Public Housing where an elderly man is evicted from his apartment, unaware of where he’ll go next.
Wiseman of course didn’t direct any of these scenes, at least in the traditional sense of calling “action” and “cut.” But he captured them, operating sound while regular cameramen William Brayne and John Davey handled the cinematography, then shaped them afterwards into moments of pure cinema.
For those unfamiliar with his process, his movies are usually shot in stretches lasting from six to ten weeks, then edited by the director for roughly nine months to a year. If editing is what separates cinema from other art forms, offering the ability to mold time and events as one chooses, then Wiseman’s genius lies in the way he’s been able to create layered, emotional works out of all the footage he’s culled together. It’s not quite direct cinema or cinéma vérité — two documentary forms that preceded him — but the transformation of raw material into “reality fictions,” as he calls his films.
I would defy, for instance, any director to recreate the emotional power elicited by two remarkable sequences in the Kansas City-set Law and Order: one in which a hot-headed teenager is restrained by a squad of cops, the other in which a female sex worker is sadistically choked by a detective.
Not only are these scenes harrowing in their brutality, but their depictions of Black citizens being violently subdued by white policemen resonate as much in 2025 as they did back in 1969. Each scene in a Wiseman movie is meant to be grasped on two levels — the literal action on the surface and the more symbolic meaning behind it — and those scenes from Law and Order speak volumes about America both then and now.
Which brings us to what makes Wiseman so important today.
We live in a time of major political and social unrest, when the country appears to be changing in ways never imagined. Wiseman’s movies provide lots of clues as to what got us here, unveiling the deep currents of capitalism, patriotism, religious fundamentalism, racism and classism that have always been present, to varying degrees, in the United States.
Despite their warmth and humanism, his films can sometimes seem scathing or pessimistic — tragic comedies sculpted from the granite of American life. Yet they also reinforce a more heartening truth about the country, which is that no matter how individualistic a society we’ve become over the years, we’re still capable of laboring together for a greater cause.
In that sense, perhaps the quintessential Wiseman scene is one of people sitting around a meeting room, debating an issue until they manage to reach a decision. For the director’s detractors, these can be chunks of pure tedium, indicative of his hands-off, fly-on-the wall approach to cinema.
But at a time when our institutions seem to be in great peril, these scenes now appear to be hammering home a theme Wiseman has been slyly emphasizing all along, from decade to decade and from film to film, in a body of work that’s suddenly become more relevant than ever: the everyday miracle, now under threat, of democracy in action.
Movie Reviews
1986 Movie Reviews – Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit | The Nerdy
by | May 9, 2026May 9, 2026 10:30 am EDT
Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1986 was an exciting year for films giving us a lot of films that would go on to be beloved favorites and cult classics. It was also the start to a major shift in cultural and societal norms, and some of those still reverberate to this day.
We’re going to pick and choose which movies we hit, but right now the list stands at nearly four dozen.
Yes, we’re insane, but 1986 was that great of a year for film.
The articles will come out – in most cases – on the same day the films hit theaters in 1986 so that it is their true 40th anniversary. All films are also watched again for the purposes of these reviews and are not being done from memory. In some cases, it truly will be the first time we’ve seen them.
This time around, it’s May 9, 1986, and we’re off to see Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit.
Dangerously Close
I would love to tell you what the point of this film was, but I’m not sure it knew.
An elite school has turned into a magnet school, attracting some “undesirables,” so a group of students known as The Sentinels take up policing their school, but will they go too far?
The basic plot of the film is simple enough, but there is an oddball “twist” toward the end tht served no real purpose and somehow turns the whole thing into a murder-mystery. Mysteries only work when you know you’re supposed to be solving them, and not when you’re alerted to one existing with 15 minutes left.
Decent 80s music, some stylistic shots, absolutely no substance.
Fire with Fire
Oh wait… I may want to go back and watch Dangerously Close again over this one.
Joe Fisk (Craig Sheffer) is being held at a juvenile delinquent facility close a high-end all-girls Catholic school. One day while running through the forest as part of an exercise he spots Catholic schoolgirl Lisa Taylor (Virginia Madsen) and the two fall immediately in love because… reasons.
This film is just so incredibly lazy. The ‘love story’ really can just be chalked up to ‘hormones.’
Last Resort
Once again I am baffled how Charles Grodin kept getting work so much through out the 1980s.
George Lollar (Grodin) is a salesman in Chicago in need of a vacation. He loads up the family and takes them to Club Sand, which turns out to be a swingers resort as well as surrounded by barbed wire to keep rebels out.
There are a lot of talented people in this movie such as Phil Hartman and Megan Mullally, but the film lets them down at every turn with half-baked ideas of jokes. Supposedly, Grodin rewrote nearly the entire script and I think that explains a lot about how this film feels like unfinished ideas. It’s a Frankenstein monster of a script with half-complete ideas that feel like they are from completely different movies.
Short Circuit
Lets just get this out of the way: What in the world was Fisher Stevens doing?
NOVA Laboratory has come up with a new series of military robots called S.A.I.N.T. (Strategic Artificially Intelligent Nuclear Transport). Following a successful demonstration for the military, Five is struck by an electrical surge and finds itself needing ‘input.’ After inadvertently escaping the lab, it wands into the life of Stephanie Speck (Ally Sheedy), who cares for animals and takes Five in. Dr. Newton Crosby (Steve Guttenberg) is trying to get five back, while the security team wants to destroy it.
Overall, the film is thin, but harmless. The 80s did seem to love a ‘technology being used for the wrong reasons’ theme, and this falls into that camp. What is mind-blowing, however, is Stevens as Ben Jabituya, Crosby’s assistant. Not only is he wearing brown face, but he’s doing a horrible Indian accent and later reveals he was born and raised in the U.S.
His whole character is mystifying.
Honestly, a couple of decades ago I may have recommended this movie, but it’s a definite pass now just for being offensive.
1986 Movie Reviews will continue on May 16, 2026, with Sweet Liberty and Top Gun.
By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer
Posted: May 8th, 2026 / 08:34 PM
AFFECTION movie poster | ©2026 Brainstorm Media
Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Jessica Rothe, Joseph Cross, Julianna Layne
Writer: BT Meza
Director: BT Meza
Distributor: Brainstorm Media
Release Date: May 8, 2026
AFFECTION is an odd title for this tale. While it is about a number of topics and emotions, fondness isn’t one of them. Obsession, definitely. Love, possibly. The kind of general warm fellow feelings associated with “affection”? No.
There have been a lot of movies lately in which characters – mostly women – are grappling with false identities and/or false memories imposed upon them, mostly by men.
Let us stipulate that the protagonist (Jessica Rothe) in AFFECTION is not an android or in an artificial reality. However, we can tell something is way off from the opening sequence. A car is stalled on a tree-bordered highway. Rothe’s character is lying face down on the asphalt beside it, possibly dead.
But then the young woman rises, dragging a broken ankle. She experiences a full-body seizure. Fighting to recover, she sees oncoming headlights and tries to run, only to be hit by a car.
The woman wakes up in a bed she doesn’t recognize, next to a man (Joseph Cross) she likewise is sure she’s never seen before. One big confrontation later, the man says his name is Bruce – and that the woman is his wife, Ellie.
Ellie insists that her name is Sarah Thompson, and she is married to someone else, with a son. When she sees her reflection in a mirror, she doesn’t relate to the face looking back at her.
Bruce counters that Ellie has a rare neurological condition that causes her to block out her waking life and believe her dreams are real. This is why they agreed, together, to move to this isolated house, without the kinds of interruptions that can hinder Ellie’s recovery.
The set-up is presented in a way where we share Ellie’s skepticism. But Ellie and Bruce’s little daughter Alice (Julianna Layne) immediately identifies Ellie as “Mommy!” Alice appears to be too young to be in on any kind of deception, so what is going on here?
AFFECTION eventually explains this via a helpful videotape, though it’s so convoluted that viewers watching on streaming may want to replay the sequence to make sure they understand the exposition.
Writer/director BT Meza musters a sense of menace and lurking weirdness, as well as making great use of his location.
We still have a lot of questions, many of which are still unanswered by the film’s end. It may not matter to the points AFFECTION is trying to make, but a better sense of exactly how all this started might help our investment.
As it is, despite a heroically versatile performance by Rothe, a credible and anguished turn by Cross and appealing work from Layne, we’re so busy trying to piece together what’s important and what’s not and how we’re supposed to feel about all of it that it can be hard to keep track of the action as it unfolds.
Agree or not, Meza’s arguments are lucid and illustrated clearly by AFFECTION’s events. However, the movie is structured in a way that becomes more frustrating as it goes. We comprehend it intellectually but can’t engage viscerally.
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RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) — In this episode of 8News Reel Talk, digital producer Julia Broberg is joined by anchor Deanna Allbrittin and reporter Allison Williams to talk about “The Devil Wears Prada 2.”
The hosts gave their reviews and assigned the following star ratings:
Deanna: ★★★★.5
Allison: ★★★.25
Julia: ★★
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