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Reviews
Ava (2020)
By the book
Cliché-ridden film. Takes 40 minutes before any actual dramatic tension is introduced, and even that is without mystery because the film telecasts who the good guys and bad guys are. By the way, that first 40 minutes includes some painfully bad family drama subplot. I mean, soap-opera level stuff.
A Rainy Day in New York (2019)
Skip this one
I own almost all of Woody Allen's movies, and have followed his career for three decades. This one was torturously dull. Honestly. If it didn't have Allen's name attached, nor actors you were familiar with, you might think it was a very well shot student film. Such a disappointment.
General Orders No. 9 (2009)
Pretentious claptrap
Labored, pretentious, self-indulgent nonsense. As another reviewer said, this could have made all its points in 30 minutes.
Public Money (2018)
Such a wasted opportunity
A look at NYC's experiment in participatory democracy, where residents of certain neighborhoods were allowed to vote on how some city funds would be spent on in their neighborhood. It's basically a cinéma vérité documentary, and therein lies the problem: it's 25 minutes of, mostly, people in neighborhood meetings discussing possible projects. But there should have been more context other than a few lines of text on screen at the beginning, such as even the briefest explanation of the alternative, or status quo, of government spending at that level. Who decides, normally? What are the flaws in that system, etc. The interest here lies in the drama of seeing how people feel about the participatory scheme, yet we here from no one about what they learned from the process, or whether they felt more tied to their community, or any of a million other reactions they could have had. We don't know how long it took for some of the selected projects to come to fruition, or whether, once built, the community valued those projects as much as they thought they would when the selected them, etc. Granted, the above changes would have meant taking much longer to produce the doc, but it would have been more interesting than watching people sitting around a table with a wish list.
Into the Night: Portraits of Life and Death (2017)
It could have been interesting
Be prepared for a lot of flowery narration (including the obligatory Dylan Thomas poem, and a lot of generic comments about attitudes toward death, etc.) that give the impression the director wanted to impart some "gravitas" to the proceedings. I suppose they didn't feel the subject of death carried enough weight on it's own.
There are a series of interviews/comments by various people discussing their experience with (a relative's, their own impending, etc) or views about death, and philosophizing endlessly about same. There are a few interesting commentators, such as Maajid Nawaz, a reformed Islamist extremest who now runs a counter-extremism think tank, but, overall, the majority are not that compelling, and their thoughts are so common that there wasn't a need to put them on film.
What you have here is a documentary made by someone who wishes they were directing narrative films, and thus tries to imbue a sense of Great Significance.
In case you thought it might be a focus, only one subject discusses a near-death experience.