For any cinephile, finding and watching a film or a documentary about filmmaking is a treat. François Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973) or the documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015) come to mind. Every film is, in some fashion, a nod or a reference to yet another film, and the journey of that kind never ends. The impossibility of such an end is what can be both frustrating and beautiful in the eyes of the filmmaker and the cinephile.
Odes to films can be satisfying, engaging, and lead the audience to probe more questions about the nature of cinema and filmmaker’s particular choices. Alexandre O. Philippe’s documentary, Lynch/Oz (2022)—now streaming on the Criterion Channel—wants so badly to accomplish that but the road to Oz is paved with overly analytical gray pavers.
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