Documentary

“Alive Inside” opens on a ninety-year-old woman, sitting in a chair set against a black background, explaining that she can’t remember anything. The setting is very deliberate: she suffers from dementia, and as the film will argue repeatedly throughout, people with dementia in nursing homes live in a world devoid of meaning. We watch her start listening to Louis Armstrong’s “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and she lights up, telling us it reminds her of her school days. Then, the film cuts to an old black-and-white film strip, a stand-in for the kinds of memories the music must be evoking. The stories of her life start pouring out. What the social worker Dan Cohen discovered is that music seems to unlock a previously inaccessible world of memories for people with dementia, and “Alive Inside” follows his journey to bring this joy to more people.

Is it possible to have a successful band when its members may not be musical equals, even if they are all very talented virtuosos? It was a central question in Cameron Crowe’s film Almost Famous about the often bickering, fictional band Stillwater, which had a guitarist who had musically surpassed his peers. Since it was also […]

In a time when painters were rigourously trained, how did the untrained Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) create such luminous, lasting masterpieces? According to inventor-techie Tim Jenison, he may have been equally adept at tinkering and made use of optical devices to help create a realistic look. Jenison sets out to prove this theory in Teller’s new […]