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• Damage Control

  Hemingway’s life was a dazzle and a disaster, replete with fame and glamour, three wars and three houses, a 38-foot custom-made fishing boat, bullfighting, big-game hunting, life-threatening accidents, several traumatic and permanent brain injuries, a string quartet of wives and three sons—everything fuelled, as the film tells us, by alcohol.

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  Cinema Like the Music

  Arthur Jafa’s unparalleled seven-and-a-half-minute-long video opens and closes with two kinds of Black hero.

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  Andy, We Hardly Knew You

  In his lifetime Andy Warhol took an inventive approach to the facts of his biography. At different times he claimed to have been born in 1929, 1930 and 1933; he even lied about his age to his doctor; and he changed his place of birth from Philadelphia to Newport, Rhode Island, and to Cleveland.

• Words About Pictures

  In this suspicious and cynical time it is obligatory, in the interests of transparency, to admit to something referred to as “full disclosure.” Since I am a creature of my time, here is my admission: I am a print interview freak.

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  The Best Damn Way to Write History “Mike Wallace Is Here,” directed by Avi Belkin

  It takes four minutes and 14 seconds before the title of Avi Belkin’s brilliant documentary about legendary American journalist Mike Wallace finally turns up. That interval is a capsule of what the remaining 127 minutes will reveal: that Wallace’s 60-year-long career was more complicated than you could ever guess by simply watching the game-changing, compelling interviews he did on 60 Minutes, beginning in 1968 and continuing until his retirement 37 years later.

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  The City of Mything Persons

  The fiction connected to a myth is what makes it true. The myth attached to the Winnipeg Film Group (WFG) is that it is a magical place inside a freezing and isolated city that produces eccentric filmmakers and unique films.

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  Angelic Order

  Memory’s dark twin is forgetfulness. Because of its presence, history is often obliged to curl back on itself so that it can set in motion a different story. Chuck Smith’s 78-minute-long documentary on the place of Barbara Rubin in New York’s film and music underground in the 1960s is a film that puts memory so unequivocally back into the historical narrative, it is impossible to view the years from 1963 to 1968 in the way they had previously been presented.

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  What More Is There to Say?

  The last thing we see in “Anthropocene: The Human Epoch”, the devastatingly important documentary made by filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal, cinematographer Nicholas de Pencier and photographer Edward Burtynsky, is a text dedicated to Sudan, the name of the last surviving male northern white rhino.

• The Destiny of Pictures: The Donald’s Hollywood on the Potomac

  I have been the film columnist for this magazine for 15 years and for many years before that was the film critic for CBC television in Winnipeg. I admit that I had become jaded watching Hollywood producers, year after swampy year, pull from their filmy top hats the same old tired cinematic rabbit tricks, so I take special delight in being able to review a movie masterpiece.

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  The Impossibilist

  In Paris in 1964 the Swiss-Italian artist Alberto Giacometti asked James Lord, his friend and an American art critic, to sit for a portrait. It would require only a single sitting lasting two or three hours and then Lord could go back to America as he had planned. A fortnight later, and after 18 unpredictable sessions

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  Notes on a Celluloid Gold Mine

  The history of culture is a negotiation between what we already know and what we still have to find out. Every once in a while a discovery is made that adds something new to that elusive process.

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  Painting by Numbers

  “Loving Vincent” is set a year after the death of Vincent van Gogh in 1890 and uses as cast members and locations the people and places the artist painted during his lifetime.

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