It's more location-based than somebody making a CD or documentary or invention.
Sin Nombre is solid and watchable, well acted and executed with real nerve, but ultimately earnest and pedestrian, lacking the narrative invention and documentary intensity that might have made it exceptional.
Writing ecstatically about an ecstatic movie, it's easy to get carried away — to see most clearly what sparks the most intense emotion — and one of those things in the viewing of Leos Carax's "Holy Motors" is the impulsive vigor of the filming: the tone of spontaneous invention, creative urgency, documentary curiosity.
Morris had the clear idea of documentary as creation, of first-person invention as inseparable from the reconstruction of the past, but, in "The Thin Blue Line," he creates not too much but too little; his fabrications lack invention.
Then, with the scene seemingly complete, the director reaches into his virtual paintbox and adds an extraordinarily florid touch of spontaneous invention — and the little documentary reveals the technical trickery that makes it possible.
Over the past few years, Dr. Mann has critiqued what he calls the totalitarian possibilities of technology through inventions like SeatSale and documentary films like "Shooting Back," which is part Marshall McLuhan and part Michael Moore.
Barry Walters from Rolling Stone commented that "Jonas Akerlund's 2005 kinetic yet personable documentary of Madonna's 2004 Re-Invention Tour lacks the dishy delights of the diva's 1991 Truth or Dare doc.
Herzog says that he "stylizes" his documentaries only when the subject agrees that an invention aptly illuminates his character.
For all its visual invention, there's an essential element of documentary at work, a fascination with the tones and textures, the forms and moods of the teeming, clotted, already old-fashioned neighborhood.
The tension between accuracy and drama, between inventory and invention, is one with which even the most documentary-minded dramatists must grapple.
