a review of

As a documentary about a director, a retrospective (didn't know he'd also done Zardoz!), I think this is a very watchable and charming movie, and you really get the sense that the people in it are enjoying the interview and being given a chance to talk through what was a very difficult job for many of them. That opening bit of the film is a lot of fun to watch I'm not rating this higher because when it gets into Exorcist 2 and how many things went wrong, its thesis about what exactly happened and why the sequel turned into a bit of a mess, isn't convincing . In both films, things really start going off the rails as soon as the locusts show up. E2 isn't a good movie, but it's not an awful one either. This film has a narrative about what went wrong -- Burton's drinking, production overruns, the five week pause in production -- but having seen Exorcist 2 now, I think the problem was the editing, or lack of it. There's a lot of disconnected bits of story and it's not put together well. It is the 1970s and I'll overlook some of the more dated parts of the story, but there could have been a coherent story made out of the footage in the final cut and there just wasn't