Dick Johnson: Last News

Lise Pedersen Opening her masterclass at doc film festival Visions du Réel in Switzerland, cinematographer and filmmaker Kirsten Johnson – an Emmy and Sundance award winner for “Dick Johnson Is Dead” – started by naming each and every member of the technical crew on set. “What I often find upsetting with cinema is that we forget to acknowledge all the people it takes to make these moments together.

We are becoming part machine.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Through films as varied as “The Father,” “Dick Johnson is Dead” and “Relic,” dementia and neurodegenerative disease have been extensively portrayed on screen in recent years — a subgenre that carries a trigger warning for anyone with off-screen experience of the subject. For those who think they cannot stomach one more, Maite Alberdi’s “The Eternal Memory” treats inexorably sad material with a lighter, more lyrical approach than most — focusing less on the day-to-day ravages of living with Alzheimer’s than on the slippery, transient concept of memory itself, as formed, held and lost both in the individual mind and a wider collective consciousness. Key to the film’s thesis is that its subject is Augusto Góngora, a veteran Chilean political journalist who labored through the 1970s and 1980s to bring the iniquities of the Pinochet regime to public attention — and later dedicated himself to conserving that national memory for future generations.

Kristen Stewart is no stranger to biopics, with “Seberg” in 2019 and “Spencer” in 2021. Now she has another to add to her upcoming projects, but this one has a meta twist.

Lamorne Morris and Hannah Simone are reliving their time on “New Girl” alongside Zooey Deschanel as hosts of the iHeartRadio podcast “Welcome to Our Show”. The stars catch up with ET Canada, touching on everything from on-set gags and take-home props, to the Cece-Winston friendship and the episode Morris wrote amid police violence against Black citizens in the U.S.

Every Tuesday, discriminating viewers are confronted with a flurry of choices: new releases on disc and on demand, vintage and original movies on any number of streaming platforms, catalogue titles making a splash on Blu-ray or 4K. This biweekly column sifts through all of those choices to pluck out the movies most worth your time, no matter how you’re watching.

We’re not even there yet, but The Criterion Collection is planning on ringing in 2022 with a bang and doing so by celebrating some amazingly inventive women filmmakers. The crown jewel of their just-released January announcements is Jane Campion‘s masterpiece from 1993 “The Piano,” which was nominated for eight Oscars that year, including Best Picture, winning three for Best Screenplay (Campion), Best Actress (Holly Hunter), and Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Anna Paquin; the youngest winner ever at the time).

In yet another sign the Television Academy may need to seriously reconsider some of its categories, Claire Foy won her second Emmy Award for playing Queen Elizabeth II in “The Crown.” This win, however, came in the Guest Actress in a Drama Series category and for a less than 5 minute appearance in the fifth season of the series. A season in which another Emmy nominee from the series, Olivia Colman, will likely lose her Lead Actress category for playing the same character (although a few decades older).

Emmy nominations in the doc categories are giving films passed over by the Oscars a shot at some trophies of their own.

The Oscar documentary shortlist abounds with memorable love stories—between a woman and her incarcerated husband in Time, between a man and a mollusk in My Octopus Teacher, and in Dick Johnson Is Dead, between a daughter and her aging father.

Tenet” (for score and visual effects), “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” (for the original song “Wuhan Flu”), “Eurovision Song Contest” (for song) and “Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Story” (for score, song and makeup) are in the initial mix.Academy Award nominations will be announced March 15.The documentary category includes “ Collective,” “ MLK/FBI, ” Netflix’s “ Crip Camp ” and “ Dick Johnson is Dead.” The competitive list also has “The Truffle Hunters,” “ Time,” “ Boys State,” “All In: The Fight for Democracy,” about voter suppression, “ Welcome to Chechnya, ” about Russia’s anti-LGBTQ efforts, and “ 76 Days,” about the early pandemic in Wuhan.The 15 films were culled from 238 eligible titles.

283 films were submitted for the Academy Award’s Documentary Feature Oscar and now just 15 remain. AMPAS revealed the shortlist for both the Documentary Feature and Documentary Short with the former category featuring few upsets.

Today, the 2020 Critics Choice Documentary Awards were handed out. The fifth annual non-fiction offshoot of the Critics Choice Awards, it’s obviously given out by the Critics Choice Association, of which I’m a member. As such, I did vote on these awards (including for some of the winners), but regardless of that, the crop of honorees is really top-notch. Sure, there were some snubs, like Miss Americana and Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You, but largely, this is a terrific batch of nominees, which in turn became a great group of winners. The biggest award went to Dick Johnson is Dead, which took home Best Documentary Feature, as well as Best Director for Kirsten Johnson. All of the winners can be found below…

The winners of the 2020 Critics Choice Documentary Awards were unveiled Monday morning, with Dick Johnson is Dead taking the top prize of best documentary feature as well as best director for Kirsten Johnson. The other film winning two awards is My Octopus Teacher, which won best cinematography and best science/nature documentary.

A documentary maker who repeatedly staged her father’s death to help her deal with his descent into dementia has said the film is “an act of defiance”.

“Dick Johnson is Dead” is not the typical documentary. In fact, one could argue that it’s more of a therapeutic exercise than a film.