Audience Member
An okay documentary that interviews a bevy of talented directors and doesn't have a whole lot to say about them since so many of them are covered. No film can be bad that spends a good deal of time talking to David Lynch about his work, but so many of these directors are given too little time to say anything of serious interest about their work and career. Worth a look, but temper expectations appropriately.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
02/01/23
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Audience Member
B+
I expected an entire movie about great directors talking about how film has changed the world. What I got was a female director interviewing only ten of those directors. But despite the fact that I want more voices and more directors, everything these directors say is great and inspiring.
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
02/15/23
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Audience Member
Great Directors is a simple, but interesting documentary about great filmmakers
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
02/25/23
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Audience Member
Too much European bullshit, but interesting otherwise.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
02/09/23
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Audience Member
Gathering together directors from different milieus and merging their interviews into one film sounds great, but with ineffectual editing and not enough variety in your directors, what you get is this documentary. Director Angela Ismailos travelled the world interviewing directors for, what she calls, clarity in her own film endeavors. It's a very apparent vanity project, which often finds Ismailos edited into the interviews for no apparent reason, so she can give her two cents. Throughout the film I kept thinking, "Why is she onscreen? We don't care about her!" The directors she assembled were an interesting selection, including David Lynch, Todd Haynes, Liliana Cavani, Catherine Breillat, and Bernardo Bertolucci. For the length of the film, and all it covered, it would have been better to see even more directors talk about their films, or else have a narrative within the framework of the documentary to explain bigger concepts. Ismailos lets these people ramble on about aspects of their lives without a clear reason, and so it feels incoherent and dull. The interviews deal in obscurity, gender politics, New Wave cinema, and indie fare, but don't coalesce at any point. We don't learn anything about the directors as people or much about their work, only anecdotes better put to use as blurbs in an online profile in Variety.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
02/11/23
Full Review
Audience Member
The only reason to see this film is because of the significant nuggets of wisdom embedded in the interviews of this strangely disparate group of directors: Bernardo Bertolucci, Catherine Breillat, Liliana Cavani, Stephen Frears, Todd Haynes, Richard Linklater, Ken Loach, David Lynch, John Sayles, and Agnès Varda. Angela Ismailos, the director, is, unfortunately, nothing more than a wealthy dilettante (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/01/fashion/01close.html?_r=0) who has managed to parlay her connections and money into access to these filmmakers.
The movie is filled with far too many shots of her, whether she is walking in black & white slo-mo through abstract landscapes or talking with her subjects (including her many reaction shots). It's a vanity project, and she is not even capable of asking interesting questions, since she clearly doesn't have the film knowledge to allow her to do so. Why these particular filmmakers, and why present them in this particular order? And why only ask them about certain movies (for example, Bertolucci never even mentions "The Conformist," the film that put him on the international map!
If you get the DVD, skip the actual movie and watch the bonus-feature interviews with each director. If I rate the film higher than my above comments might warrant, it's because not even Ms. Ismailos can ruin the wealth of information pouring from the mouths of the artists.
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
02/01/23
Full Review
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