The Cruise

Timothy Speed Levitch, a guide on New York's double-decker tour buses, spends his working day describing the city and in fact describes the inside of his own head. The film follows him on tours, on the street, and through the temporary places he sleeps. It is not interested in guiding tourists around New York. It is interested in an obsessive relationship with a city: Levitch talks about buildings as characters rather than history, and turns the routine of a tour bus into a poetic performance. The form cannot be separated from the subject. Shot on video and blown up to black and white, the image is coarse and grainy, the camera shakes, and nothing is lit. That raw texture goes with the rhythm of the talk. This is Bennett Miller's first feature and a one-man shoot: over three and a half years he filmed it himself with a handheld video camera, a radio mic on Levitch and a shotgun mic. His next films were Capote, Moneyball and Foxcatcher, so one of the most controlled directors in American cinema began alone and without a dolly. Who it is for: anyone drawn to New York documentaries, to portraits of talkers, and to early examples of low-budget digital documentary. Who it is not for: viewers who care about image quality, and anyone who will find one man talking non-stop exhausting. There is almost nobody in this film except Levitch.