Synopsis
SUBJECT TO REVIEW charts the rise of the instant replay system Hawk-Eye in professional tennis, probing how the technology exposes deeper questions of spectacle, justice, and imperfect human knowledge.
Subject to Review
2019 Directed by Theo Anthony
Director
Producers
Erin Leyden Riel Roch Decter Sebastian Pardo Marquis Daisy Gentry Kirby Brian D'Ostilio Deirdre Fenton Eliza Moley Adam Neuhaus Vin D'Anton Jenna Anthony Eve Wulf
Writer
Editor
Cinematography
Executive Producers
Lighting
Additional Photography
Visual Effects
Choreography
Composer
Sound
Genre
Releases by Date
Premiere
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USA
New York Film Festival
11 Oct 2019
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USA
Hamptons International Film Festival
TV
22 Dec 2019
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USA
Releases by Country
USA
09 Oct 2019
- Premiere New York Film Festival
11 Oct 2019
- Premiere Hamptons International Film Festival
22 Dec 2019
- TV ESPN: 30 for 30
Popular reviews
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Wow.
Theo Anthony's use of voiceover is outright virtuosic. RAT FILM was good enough, but SUBJECT TO REVIEW is unfair. He's just doing donuts in the proverbial parking lot of cinema, at this point. No one does digi-terror like Anthony; this project reconfigures cinema as yet another tool of modernity, set to erase the curvature of our respective lives and make straight lines of us all.
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Theo Anthony makes some really great documentaries, I love the way the message is delivered. Visually beautiful, Subject to review has the perfect runtime to be engrossed in this world. It's intense how Tennis is really a technical sport. I Will soon watch Rat Film, but this director is rapidly becoming one of my favorites in the documentary genre.
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Between this and Infinite Jest, I have reason to believe that Tennis is the weirdest and most obsessive sport there is and also seems to be a reasonable lens to view the imperfections of our world.
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[7]
Anthony's most successful film to date, chiefly because he sticks to the assignment. By focusing his critical lens on a single issue -- the introduction of the Hawkeye digital replay system in professional tennis -- he avoids the digressions that compromised the coherence of Rat Film and All Light, Everywhere.
This could also be a good teaching tool. The film's précis of the Muybridge / Stanford connection and the origins of motion-study is admirably tight.
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One of the great films; or simply one that satisfies my funny bone in just the right way. Will likely rewatch a few times. But it's exactly what I'm looking for from a documentary: "images that describe but don't explain."
(dvr)
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My kind of 30 for 30. Really fantastic, eerie meditation on instant replay in tennis, and film in general, and how these modes of capturing reality offer us only imperfect methods of determining objective truth, and even stranger, how these instruments change the thing they’re watching. Plays like Laura Poitras directing an adaptation of a David Foster Wallace essay. Incredible tone, and manages to offer a plain, easily understandable truth that we may already know, and yet haven't summoned to consciousness until watching it. Wonderfully uncanny, unsettling and strangely familiar. I loved it.
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“the ball, according to Hawk Eye, is both in and out at the same time” *wipes tear* wow schrodingers balls
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“In the Talmud, a rabbi writes: we do not see things as they are; we see things as we are.”
One million percent my shit, an odd, dreamy exploration of the super slow-mo cameras used to analyze and judge tennis matches doubling as an exploration of digital sight, digital spaces, etc. Totally rules.
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surely one of the greatest social crises of our time: our unquestioning faith in the objectivity and authority of technology. also tennis.
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Impossible to say if this is a 3 1/2 or 4 1/2 star movie.
FYC Michael Grant for Best Actor though.
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I’m a huge fan of Theo Anthony’s work and this is a perfect companion piece to All Light Everywhere. He has an incredible knack for taking subject matter that may seem dry and technical on paper and making it vital and compelling. So many documentary filmmakers present concepts that most people take for granted with little explanation before moving on to their larger project, but Theo takes nothing for granted. He assumes we know nothing and then explores his subjects in such granular detail you feel like you’re viewing their atomic structure. In this case, the seemingly minute differences between technological representations of reality and their real-world counterparts become weightier with every moment as their larger implications are made apparent. Good shit.