Posted from Venice on 9.5.25: David Kittredge’s Boorman and The Devil, which I saw this morning at 9 am, is one of the wisest, deepest, most poetic-minded, most eloquent and most satisfyingly assembled “inside baseball meets human vulnerabilty” documentaries that I’ve ever seen.
It ranks among the four or five best films I’ve seen in Venice thus far…seriously. It’s truly masterful.
Kittredge doesn’t just cover the whole, calamitous, chapter-by-chapter story of the making of John Boorman‘s The Exorcist II: The Heretic. He also assesses Boorman’s entire career while examining his personal passions and tendencies.
The most intriguing aspect is an atmospheric recreation of the fascinating Hollywood milieu of 1976 and ’77, which was when the film was made…the closing chapter of the whole sprawling saga of New Hollywood, which began in ’67 (The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde) and ended with the super-successful, game-changing release of Star Wars in May ’77.
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Manhattan-wise, Kittredge’s doc opens at the Quad Cinema on 8.28 — exactly four weeks from now.