Dallas Buyers Club Movie Review

People make a big deal out of actors packing on or shedding the pounds for the sake of a role. Think about De Niro in Raging Bull, Christian Bale in The Machinist, or Tom Hanks in Cast Away and images immediately come to mind of an altered body paired with a great performance. It’s easy to conflate physical transformation and great acting or to think that the one causes the other. I suppose it helps the actor get into the mind of the character in some cases, but regardless, the actor still has to do the work in his head even after the physical aspect has taken root.

How to Survive a Plague Movie Review

Documentary films are first and foremost supposed to do just that – document a story, an event, a person, etc. It tends to be the case that most documentaries are contemporary and many are a call to action for some pressing issue that the filmmakers feel strongly about. The recent Oscar winners An Inconvenient Truth, which deals with global warming, and The Cove, about dolphin fishing in Japan, are two examples. Sometimes they tell a story of events long ago, perhaps bringing to the public’s attention events they otherwise would have known little to nothing about. Those we might refer to as historically educational documentaries. These include just about every Holocaust documentary in existence. Some are just plain good stories and would make for an emotionally moving experience if adapted into a narrative film. Last year’s Oscar winner Undefeated as well as Man on Wire from several years ago come to mind. But while I sat through How to Survive a Plague, one of this year’s Documentary Feature nominees, I kept thinking it felt so strangely anachronistic.