On March 11, 1989, Cops premiered on American TV. The reality show—still going strong today after 33 seasons—pairs camera crews with American law enforcement, giving small-screen viewers a front row seat to the day-to-day protection provided by the men and women of countless local, state, and federal jurisdictions. Invoking memories of Cops comes Ukrainian Sheriffs, a ride-along documentary from director Roman Bondarchuk.

The doc follows the exploits of a pair of sheriffs—Victor and Volodya—in the remote Ukrainian village of Stara Zburjivka. The duo, appointed by village Mayor Viktor Marunyak, respond to any and all calls from the town’s 1,800 residents, be they issues as mundane as domestic complaints or as serious as the discovery of a dead body. With cameras ever at the ready, the film is reminiscent of that American reality crime show.

Truth be told, Ukrainian Sheriffs pales in comparison to Cops from the angle of pure onscreen gratification. Where the US television show has the luxury of cherry-picking from only the sauciest of crimes recorded, this film, despite covering a period of time that is at least a year long (based only on seasonal clues), has very little excitement in the area of criminal activity. Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe, in a town of 1,800 citizens, things like broken windows and domestic squabbles are good to be the worst things these men see. But that doesn’t make it a compelling documentary. And while it’s quaint that Victor and Volodya are less enforcers of law and more voices of reason (arbitrating conflict in most cases and deferring real crime to Ukrainian police officials), it all grows tiresome.

Bondarchuk also struggles to find anything interesting in the personal lives of his two protagonists. The film attempts to humanize these individuals, but instead only succeeds in giving the viewer a look behind a very dull curtain, revealing activity that isn’t interesting beyond the base curiosity of seeing how people live in a part of the world otherwise unknown.

Where the film excels, though, is its look at the bigger political picture. The film is slow to start, but as it gets going, it delves into political areas similar to those found in other Ukraine-centric docs like Maidan and Winter on Fire, by visiting and revisiting the escalating Crimean tensions. However, Ukrainian Sheriffs does so on a local scale—namely, how the national crisis and the battle with Russia could affect local men subject to being drafted. It’s thought-provoking stuff that offers insight into the conflicting approaches to responsibility, survival, and patriotism that these men wrestle with, and that other men judge them on.

As a whole, Ukrainian Sheriffs can’t meet the challenge to make its own subject matter interesting. It might have its moments, but those moments aren’t enough to compensate for the rest. This is a film best suited for Ukrainian doc completists or people with a vested interest in the regional ongoings.

The story behind Dean Fleischer-Camp’s documentary Fraud is an interesting one. The director is said to have stumbled upon footage on YouTube—over 100 hours worth—of a American middle-class family of four living out their lives in front of a video camera, but this isn’t just any wannabe reality story. Fleischer-Camp pared that footage down to a scant 52 minutes to paint a picture of a man and woman so materialistic, they would jeopardize their own freedom and their children’s future for the chance to spend, spend, spend.

The family of four—thirty-something parents and two young children both under the age of about seven—is introduced to the viewer on 5/26/12 (according to the camera’s date stamp). Little is known about the family other than what can put together through the footage: they live in a small, cluttered house, suggesting lower-middle-class, and they are obsessed with anything related to an affluent lifestyle. As their bills mount and their resources dwindle, the family takes desperate measures to improve their cash flow so they can live what they perceive to be the good life, consequences be damned. The film ends on 10/3/12.

Less than five minutes into Fraud, I had my hand raised, calling shenanigans (please forgive the granularity of the next paragraph; it’s in support of a greater point).

At the film’s start, The Man, who does 99% of what presents itself as around-the-clock filming, records The Woman reading a pair of bank notices. The first notice is a decline letter for a new credit card. The other is in reference to a bounced payment. I understand the narcissistic obsession that comes with self-recording, but that The Man would record something as humiliating to himself and his family as that, and The Woman wouldn’t object, felt like a stretch. Still, and despite any change in tenor to The Family’s mood, I allowed that maybe reaction shots and debates had been edited out. I allowed it, that is, until the next scene where, in the interest of raising money, The Family has a yard sale. By the time the dust settles, they take their loot and head off to several retailers, including an Apple store, where everyone in The Family scores a new iPhone.

I called shenanigans again. Their declined credit card application suggests they were maxed out on their existing plastic, and the bounced payment suggests they were cash-strapped too, leaving only their yard sale earnings to fuel their shopping spree. I’ve never known a yard to generate north of $1000 in a single afternoon, and while the quick cuts of the film don’t afford a good look at the wares on sale, The Family’s living conditions suggest they didn’t have anything of high value to begin with, nor did they have a high quantity of lower-value items to unload.

This sequence is a terrific example of the film’s strength—it moves fast—but it’s also emblematic of the film’s great, great problem: it strains credulity from start to finish. Even if the action in the first five minutes of the film is factual, it raises such an eyebrow that all subsequent moments become the subject of intense scrutiny. That scrutiny then helps expose other improbable actions and events, up to and including the crime the film is named after and the subsequent cover-up; blatant timeline discrepancies between when events actually happen and the time stamp of the video; more private, humiliating moments filmed without shame or objection; the complete absence of questions from people The Family interacts with; and, perhaps most unsettling, the lack of any sense of genuine emotion between The Man and The Woman (and by extension, The Kids). These two people are more like high school buddies than a committed couple, and not once did I believe they were emotionally involved with each other or their children.

By the end of the film, so many unbelievable events and moments and decisions had happened, I called shenanigans on all 52 minutes. In a world where anyone is capable of anything, and anyone is capable of filming anything they are capable of, the four months this family spends on a money-burning binge rang as improbable as anything can.

And yet I couldn’t stop thinking about the film after it was over…and the next day, too. Despite the superficiality of it, I couldn’t deny how mesmerizing it was. Part of this is because of the audacity of the director, but the other part of it, the larger part of it, is that while this so-called family might not have gone through those onscreen moments “in real life,” a lot of families in America have indeed suffered (or enjoyed, depending on how you look at it) some of those moments—living beyond their financial means, committing fraud, endangering children, you name it—all in the name of being able to spend money they otherwise wouldn’t normally have to spend. The nuclear (wasted) family Fleischer-Camp presents onscreen is like a composite of the unseemly denizens of an America obsessed with materialism and wealth, and it is chilling.

Therein lies the dilemma in terms of rating this film. As a documentary, it’s bad, and the title is apt. In fact, I wouldn’t even grant this specious work a “docudrama” moniker. But as a piece of visual art, effectively lean in runtime and edited with surgical precision, its statement on the skewed perceptions of the importance of money versus responsibility held by so many Americans, is like nothing I’ve seen before. That it achieves this without passing judgment makes it all the more impressive. Fraud is not a documentary about one family; it’s a reflection on a culture—a reflection that is as hard to look at as it is as hard to look away from.

When Sonita premiered last year at Amsterdam’s documentary film festival IDFA, it walked away with the audience award, a win that isn’t too surprising considering the film’s story. Director Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami follows Sonita, an 18-year-old Afghan immigrant living with her sister and niece in Iran. Sonita is a restless creative, who aspires to become a rapper despite the personal, cultural, and political hurdles in her way. And perhaps the biggest hurdle comes from Sonita’s own family, who tell her she needs to come back home so they can force her into an arranged marriage. The reason for the marriage is purely financial: they’ll be selling her off to another family, and by doing so will have enough money to pay for the wedding of Sonita’s brother.

Sonita plays out as a conventional success story, and Maghami’s commitment to this structure eventually holds the film back from exploring issues beyond Sonita’s own story. It’s an issue that comes to a head around the midway point when Sonita is days away from being taken back to Afghanistan. After Sonita’s mother says she’ll postpone the wedding if they get some money, Maghami considers paying the family off herself, a breach of ethics that even her own crew tells her to avoid doing. Maghami’s transparency about her own involvement into the story, along with her selfish intentions (at one point she says that if Sonita goes to Afghanistan her movie will be over), adds a layer of complexity that winds up highlighting her film’s shortcomings.

By paying off Sonita’s family to let her stay in Iran, Maghami exposes her desire to mold the film in a way that fits the success story narrative. And while Maghami’s openness about becoming a direct player in her film is commendable, it’s not a topic she dwells on too much; the debate over her actions gets swept under the rug not long after it’s brought up, and the focus switches over to Sonita making a music video for her first proper single. It’s not the manipulation itself that’s bothersome (documentaries always manipulate in some form or another, and the expectation of objectivity is an archaic one), it’s that Maghami does it to help her film follow a smooth, accessible narrative arc.

Still, Maghami has found a compelling presence in Sonita, and her film has a feel-good quality that’s undeniable. But it’s hard to remove the feeling that, because of her motivations, Maghami is less of an observer and more of a puppet master.

The implicit trust that comes with viewing documentaries gets abused in Penny Lane’s NUTS!, a documentary about an interesting—and overlooked—story from Depression-era America. The subject in Lane’s film is Dr. John Romulus Brinkley, a doctor from Kansas who attempted to cure impotence by putting goat testicles into his patients. The method appeared to work, and Brinkley went on to be a success, turning his fortune into an empire when he invested it into building a radio station. As Brinkley’s success grew, the American Medical Association began targeting him because of his unorthodox medical practices, taking him to court and trying to ruin his businesses. Lane tells Brinkley’s story entirely through animated re-enactments, with a few talking head interviews along the way.

If the idea of goat testicle transplants curing impotence sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is; Brinkley was nothing more than an excellent con artist who took advantage of the placebo effect to paint himself as a medical genius. And Lane, taking inspiration from Brinkley, structures her film as a con job on viewers, treating Brinkley’s story as true until she pulls back the curtain in the final act. But Lane’s decision to deceive is misguided. In her attempt to point out how people are easy to let themselves be duped Lane only highlights the staleness of her message, along with the ethical murkiness of lying about such slight material. In reality, Lane’s deception is fueled by entertainment more than anything, as it gives her the ability to manufacture a twisty narrative while excusing her own behaviour by explaining herself at the end.

If NUTS! had a purpose for its narrative structure beyond trying to pull a fast one on viewers for kicks, it might have been less objectionable. Instead, Lane takes advantage of non-fiction for petty and selfish reasons, which makes Lane not too far removed from her own subject.

Watching a documentary filmed in real-time is always fascinating to me. Unlike a traditional doc that starts with an idea and involves months of planning, research, scheduling, and execution, a real-time doc feels much more adventurous; the filmmakers are just as unaware of what will happen next as the viewers. It requires a little luck, too. Picking a compelling subject for a traditional doc is one thing, but for something compelling to happen to a subject in a real-time doc is another thing entirely. Director Christy Garland hopes to capture some of that magic in Cheer Up.

The city of Rovaniemi, Finland is located at the Arctic Circle and, as one might expect, offers a stunning and picturesque winter landscape. But in addition to all that beautiful snow and cold, the city is home to the Ice Queens, a competitive cheerleading squad led by Coach Miia. The term “competitive” is as literal as it is generous, though. The squad technically competes at the Finnish National Qualifiers, but they are dreadful, even to the amateur eye. Tired of losing and tired of coaching a lackluster team, Miia seeks inspiration where nobody does cheerleading better: Dallas, Texas, USA. At Cheer Athletics, Miia visits with the staff and squads who put on a cheering (and coaching) clinic, producing the kind of results Miia could only dream about. Dazzled by the energy of the staff and the commitment of the cheerleaders, Miia returns home energized and ready to make some changes for—and to—the squad, until developments happen in her personal life that change the course of the team’s collective future.

In her third feature documentary, Christy Garland doesn’t simply cover the sad-sack exploits of the cheerless cheer squad. She also focuses her lens on the private lives of three individuals from the team: Coach Miia and two teenage cheerleaders, Aino and Patricia. On the surface, they are all unique. Aino is the raven-haired rebel, smoking behind the school and partying at night when she isn’t trying to land a flip. Patricia is the girl-next-door, but one garnering sympathy with a life marred by the loss of her mother. And Miia is the single woman whose obsession with Marilyn Monroe ranges from decorations on her walls to bleach-blonde hair and a “Monroe piercing” above her lip.

While these differences make the young women unique, and while cheerleading connects them, what bonds them (unbeknownst to them) are their fractured relationships with men and their sometimes staggeringly-poor life choices. Aino rushes to live with her immature boyfriend, Patricia is at stubborn odds with her father, and Miia’s man trouble defies even a veiled mention here for fear of revealing too much.

This is the kind of narrative that makes real-time documentary filmmaking so great—a director chooses a general topic that is unique, finds the smaller stories within the larger tale that might lead to something special, and pursues those stories. All of these components are present in Cheer Up, and yet the magic never quite happens.

Most of where Garland struggles is with trying to keep the story compelling. The monotony of the lives of these women seeps through the screen to turn the experience into a monotonous experience. This is no indictment of the women or their lives, but rather how they are presented on film. It’s as if Garland is concerned with being melodramatic, so she reigns everything in so tightly she creates something anti-dramatic. The result is observation to a fault.

Even the most structured and well-planned of documentaries need some kind of drama, so surely a real-time doc needs it too. Cheer Up doesn’t have it.

Garland also retreats from any kind of ongoing focus on the cheerleading aspect of the story, instead occasionally returning to it as a reminder that, oh yes, this is what these girls do. There are moments in practice when Miia pushes the girls harder, and there are moments when more than one girl loses a little blood in the process, but it’s all very rote in its revisitation. The lessons learned in life never translate to lessons learned in the gym, nor vice-versa.

Cheer Up is incredibly well-intended and has some good moments, particularly Sari Aaltonen’s cinematography. But with its flat presentation and dearth of any riveting moments, the film plays more like an after-school special about the pitfalls of teen decision-making than it does a documentary about young women struggling to make something more of their lives.

Wizard Mode, from directors Nathan Drillot and Jeff Petry, is named after a term used in the pinball community. Some pinball machines have something akin to a video game’s hidden or locked bonus level achieved after executing a series of difficult tasks. Salazar attempts to make a metaphoric connection between this achievement and the achievements of Robert Gagno, a top-10 globally ranked competitive pinball player and a twentysomething young man suffering from autism, who has been trying to live his life as normally as possible.

At a high level, the metaphor works. Just as Gagno strives to win pinball tournaments, climb the world rankings, and achieve “wizard mode” in those machines that have it, he realizes over the course of the film he has to put the same kind of focus on gaining his independence. He has goals—a job, a driver’s license, living on his own, and eventually romance—but it will take a “wizard mode”-level effort to achieve this.

Presented in the film are some components one would expect about the life of an autistic pinball wizard, like old home movies flashing back to Gagno’s youth while haunting voiceovers from his parents offer memories of learning about their son’s condition. There’s also footage of some tournaments Gagno competes in (with his father playing the role of chaperone, driver, and coach), plus a who’s who of globally ranked pinball players, about each of whom Robert can point out player strengths. But with the exception of that narrated home footage, none of these parts are the least bit compelling in their presentation. Even the moments at the tournaments—regardless of how Gagno performs at them—fail to generate any sense of excitement or intensity.

Those tournament scenes also expose two fatal flaws in the film. The first is that it’s incredibly one-sided. Perspectives are offered from Gagno and his parents, but the pinball community is not tapped to speak to the type of person or player Gagno is. The second is more of a technical issue: Salazar doesn’t know how to make pinball very interesting. There is a lot of visual action in the game of pinball, from the speed of the silver sphere to how much of a nudge will earn the player a tilt. All of that visual action, combined with the glorious sound of an arcade running at full speed, should grab the viewer’s attention, but that never happens.

Despite some strengths, Wizard Mode’s inability to ever find a rhythm is too much for the film to bear. Gagno seems like a good person, and pinball sure looks fun, but in this film neither of them are sold very well.

One of the great joys for fans of true independent documentary filmmaking is having the chance to hear stories that might not otherwise be told. High-profile documentaries are great, and those stories need to be heard as well, but for every flashy doc there are countless other docs that offer unique glimpses into unknown lives, uncharted worlds, and times that have long since passed. Such is the story of Hotel Dallas from Livia Ungur, who acts as co-writer and co-director on a film about her own experiences.

As the 1980s wound down, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu recognized that the people oppressed under the boot of his Communist tyranny were growing restless and itching for freedom. In a placating move, Ceaușescu allowed the state-run television station to air reruns of America’s wildly popular drama Dallas. The prime-time soap starred Larry Hagman as evil oil tycoon J.R. Ewing and Patrick Duffy as his much kinder brother, Bobby. So popular did the show become in Ceaușescu’s corner of the Eastern Bloc, an entrepreneurial individual modeled a building after the home of the Ewings’ fictitious Southfork Ranch and turned it into a hotel, where guests could temporarily pretend they were living in 1980s Dallas.

While it’s technically accurate to call Hotel Dallas a documentary, the term both oversells and undersells the film, a juxtaposition that offers an interesting opportunity for Ungur (and her co-creator/husband Sherng-Lee Huang), but one that hampers the work as a whole.

From the oversell perspective, Hotel Dallas offers less in the way of what a viewer might expect in a documentary set in this place and time. While the filmmakers properly frame the geopolitical landscape so the importance of the TV show to oppressed Romanians is clear, there isn’t a great amount of interest from the filmmakers in exploring it too deeply. There are some fine voiceover testimonies to be heard from people who lived there and then, and it’s clear the show was a godsend to those people (and perhaps something of a backfire on Ceaușescu), but they are only soundbites offering a sketch, not narratives offering a complete picture.

This is where calling it a documentary somewhat undersells the film, as it is far more artistically experimental than the average documentary, with parts of the film delving into everything from philosophical oppression to complete fantasy.

The highlights of this avant-doc portion of moviemaking are three scenes played out by Romanian child actors dressed as Pioneers—Romania’s Communist youth organization. In one scene, the kids reenact the death of Bobby Ewing as seen on TV (something Ungur admits to being traumatized by when she was a child). In another scene, Bobby Ewing is “reborn,” a moment taken from Dallas‘ now-infamous shower episode. In the third scene, and in keeping with themes of life and death, the children replay the Christmas execution of Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena—a chilling moment in stark monochrome, especially as performed by youngsters. There is also the chance to see an old Romanian oil company commercial starring Larry Hagman.

But the most fascinating artistic piece is the inclusion of Patrick Duffy himself throughout the entire film. He plays a character named Mr. Here (with a clever comic reason behind the name), but he channels his Bobby Ewing persona as if it were in a constant state of semi-consciousness. He is only seen onscreen once (in a recording studio scene that is slickly edited), and the rest of his “appearances” are voiceover, but from his POV. His purpose in the film is to bridge the gap between Hollywood fantasy and Romanian reality, along with bridging the time between Ungur’s modern-day existence and her Romanian youth. The pair actually travel back in time throughout the length of the film.

While some of the filmmaking is quite good when being judged on its own merits, the blending of documentary and drama becomes too cute by half. Even if every scene was good, the filmmakers don’t quite have the skills to pull off something this audacious. Using fantasy to tell the truth, or injecting the truth with fantasy to make a point, is tricky, and too often I found myself wondering what was real and what wasn’t, a question a viewer shouldn’t have when watching something that presents itself as factual. The filmmakers’ raw talent here is evident, but it’s unfocused. The facts are interesting, and the artistic choices are compelling, but the two aren’t meaty enough to work together very well.

Darius McCollum loves public transit. More specifically, he loves the trains that stream through the MTA system. The New York subway has been a lifelong obsession for him—a playground, a safe haven, and a place where new friends are never in short supply. It’s also a forbidden source of temptation, as Darius has been arrested more than 30 times for impersonating a train operator as well as various other transit employees. Considering his passion for the Transit Authority and his considerable knowledge of subway routes and procedures, one might wonder why Darius doesn’t apply for a position with the MTA rather than continue on as a criminal. As director Adam Irving details in Off the Rails, the reality of the situation is not so simple.

At the root of Darius’s compulsion is his Asperger’s syndrome. A defining characteristic of the disorder is an intense interest in one subject, and this has led Darius to study everything there is to know about the New York subway system. There is nothing malicious about his repeated transgressions. While most hijackings of public transit might spring from violent derangement or anarchistic intent, Darius’ actions rise from personal fulfillment and uncommon dutifulness. He follows the schedules, making every stop without deviation and carefully attending to any malfunctions with the necessary precautions.

Off the Rails takes viewers through the origins of this infatuation using home movies, cartoons, and testimonies from his mother as well as extensive interviews with the subject himself. We learn that Darius was bullied as a child and struggled to make friends. He found solace in the subway, where people didn’t judge him. Beloved by MTA employees for his enthusiasm, Darius became a kind of junior volunteer, helping out the operators with various tasks and eventually being taught how to run the train (an experience he compares to losing his virginity). But things turned sour when he was spotted behind the controls by police at the age of 15. Darius was arrested on the spot and soon became Public Enemy Number One to MTA executives for his repeated crimes, as posters bearing his image covered the subway walls. Even after growing to be of age, every application Darius sent to the corporation was rejected. Most of his life since that first arrest has found him wavering between jail time and virtual homelessness.

The documentary builds upon the context of Darius’s past to deliver a compelling study of his character and inner conflicts. We spend a lot of time with Darius, as the filmmakers capture his feelings with a compassionate camera, juxtaposing personal reflections with vibrant montages of train yards, bustling subway stations and brief scenes of everyday NYC street life. Listening to Darius, one gets the impression of a heartbreakingly sincere man—a man who sees the value in a few words of levity spoken to brighten another person’s day, who refers to Superman as a moral standard to live by, and who wrestles with delusions of his capacity for self-control. Darius may call himself “shy,” but he makes some fascinating insights, and his consistent presence really holds the film together.

Unfortunately, the audience isn’t allowed to draw its own conclusions on his behavior, as multiple therapists and Asperger’s specialists are brought on as talking heads. A certain degree of clinical observation is necessary to better understand Darius’ needs, but the impulse to frequently cut to the experts feels excessive. Rather than letting the implications of the subject’s words and actions stand by themselves (with perhaps some minor supporting commentary from those close to him), the filmmakers lean a little too heavily on the objective assessments to fill out their central characterization. As a result, Darius’ narrative comes off as slightly less intimate and more constructed.

About halfway through Off the Rails, the film begins to shift its focus from Darius to the legal system he finds himself ensnared in. Irving confronts the perpetual cycle of law-breaking and incarceration, taking aim at a courtroom that fails to acknowledge Darius’ unique psychological circumstances and a correctional department that doesn’t know what to do with him. This is where the sound bites from therapists and experts are most meaningful. The film campaigns for common sense solutions, calling upon the MTA to hire a man who would likely be their best employee and arguing for court rulings that wouldn’t serve to exacerbate the situation. A portrait of injustice begins to take shape and Darius is effectively painted as the victim of institutional neglect.

Pulling its unusual subject matter from the tongue-in-cheek headlines of local TV news, Off the Rails serves to humanize a person too often made out to be an eccentric curiosity. It’s a solid character study that admirably balances empowerment, hardship, empathy, and advocacy.

Regardless of industry—sports, music, journalism, etc.—a Hall of Fame is the last stop for anyone who has had an impact on, or is a legend within, their field. And what usually accompanies an induction into a Hall of Fame is a retrospective of that person’s life and/or career. Burlesque is no different, and director Rama Rau uses the Burlesque Hall of Fame induction weekend as the backdrop to her new documentary League of Exotique Dancers.

The film looks at the lives and careers of golden-age burlesque dancers, as recounted by the dancers themselves. The women, with sensational names like Gina Bon Bon, Kitten Natividad, and Lovey Goldmine, are as brash, sassy, and unfiltered as one would hope retired burlesque dancers would be. These “titans of tease” are also quite eager to capture one more moment in the spotlight, and they get their chance when asked to perform in front of a live audience as part of the induction weekend. The revisiting of their professional paths and personal perils within their vocation is positioned to offer a unique and thorough perspective on the history of burlesque dancing and the lives of its dancers.

In addition to the women’s tales, there are plenty of greater stories to be told in League of Exotique Dancers, including the history of burlesque (or at least its golden age), the impact—good or bad—the burlesque trade had on women (and not just the women featured here), and in the case of the dancer Toni Elling, how being an African-American burlesque dancer affected her in a racially-charged time in our country.

By the end of the film, none of these larger themes are ever explored. The perspectives of the dancers are certainly unique, but the thoroughness of their stories is the film’s ultimate weakness. This doesn’t happen in spite of the fact Rau has the shared experiences of these dancers in front of her, it happens because of it. Rather than pluck stories from each dancer’s life and use them to build any kind of greater narrative, Rau offers a hailstorm of experiences presented in such a staccato fashion that the film leaves the impression that each of the dancers filled out the same questionnaire and filmed their answers.

A few ladies talk about bad relationships. A few ladies talk about addiction. A few ladies talk about their current professions, and so on. It’s an attempt to tell history by way of list-making, and it fails to resonate. To its benefit, League of Exotique Dancers offers a terrific collection of vintage imagery, including still photos, old reels, etc., but these become nothing more than slideshow images accompanying a collection of verbal bullet points. There’s a story to be told about the golden age of burlesque. This film isn’t that story.

Deep in the wilderness of northern British Columbia beats the heart of the Tahltan people. They’re a First Nations tribe, surrounded by breathtaking snow-capped mountains and sharing space with various beasts they’ve called neighbors for thousands of years. The glorious expanse is seemingly timeless, largely unspoiled by deforestation and man-made structures. But as the Tahltan people struggle to retain their language and keep up native traditions in the 21^st century, a new threat to their land and way of life looms. Companies wanting to mine the area for its copper and gold set up shop, and their plans put the health of the land at stake.

Director Nettie Wild weaves a dazzling tapestry with KONELĪNE: our land beautiful. More formally experimental than the average documentary, the film doesn’t attack the environmental issues through any one perspective. In fact, there isn’t much of anything here that qualifies as an “attack” at all. The approach is far more meditative. A multitude of voices overlap, sharing feelings and personal histories while Wild showcases the region through expressive cinematography and editing. What this method produces is a lyrical ode to a bountiful and diverse landscape, along with the human beings who make it their home.

For all the beauty of KONELĪNE’s visuals, it’s the human subjects who make up the bedrock of the film. A series of vignette-like sequences are threaded throughout, giving the audience some quality time with the lifestyle and viewpoints of Tahltan natives and foreigners alike. Wild follows local fishermen as they cast their nets, a woman guiding hunters on horseback through steep mountain ranges, and a man with a dogsled who speaks with pride about running the same trails his ancestors followed. She speaks with a driller who chronicles the area’s geological history, and turns her camera on a pair of conflicted Tahltan mining employees who say that, in their impoverished state, they can’t afford to turn down the jobs.

This is only a sampling of the subjects that take the spotlight. The doc’s colorful tableau of experiences brings the viewer close to the realities of living in the region, and Wild appears to take pleasure in documenting the nitty-gritties of everyday work, showing a narrow focus on the work each person does with their hands. Horseshoes are fashioned and fastened to scuffed hooves, transition lines are painstakingly set up by a small crew, and fish are carefully cleaned at homemade butchering stations by the riverbank—all of this captured with a strong attention to detail. For fans of Werner Herzog, some of these scenes may feel reminiscent of his film Happy People: A Year in the Taiga in their fascination with the earthly qualities of independent living.

The film cannot be discussed without addressing its handling of the environment. The remote countryside is lensed with the same attention to detail as the people, but the land conveys the added weight of something formidable and pure. Wide shots capture postcard-ready vistas, and well-placed close-ups—such as one of hailstones falling on butterfly wings—express a measure of fragility. As one of the interviewees notes, it’s a land “with a personality.” Aided by a soundscape that mixes twinkling bells with wind gusts and rhythmic tribal drums, Wild demonstrates how that personality transfers to the spirit of the people who live off the land.

KONELĪNE: our land beautiful is a serenely delivered tribute to the Tahltan people and the earth they’re tied to. The themes here echo environmentalism, but the film moves more like a poem than a preachy assault on corporate greed. This is transportive, ethereal documentary filmmaking that is well-worth experiencing on the biggest screen possible.

“It’s a once-only chance to make the dead live again.” So states William Grimes, former book and restaurant critic, and current obituary writer, for the New York Times, in director Vanessa Gould’s marvelous documentary Obit. While the quote perfectly captures the essence of what real obituary writing is about, the film goes deeper than that, offering a lesson in history, a glimpse behind the scenes at the New York Times, a course in journalism, and a clinic in succinct writing.

It’s a tricky story to tell, as it combines a morbid subject with an activity—writing—that doesn’t necessarily make for compelling viewing. Gould understands this and rises to the challenge by approaching her subject from several angles. The backbone of the film is the linear thread: the anatomy of an obituary, from a fact-finding phone interview with a decedent’s widow first thing in the morning, to discussions on narrative approach in the afternoon, to filing the piece just under deadline in the evening.

Routinely stepping away from this so as not to get lost in function, Gould features a collection of deftly edited discussions with the NYT’s obit writing and editorial staff. Each discussion is fascinating, but none more so than those with Jeff Roth, the gloriously eccentric man in charge of “The Morgue,” where the newspaper’s history, and by extension the history of everyone who has ever been mentioned in the paper, is stored and catalogued. These discussions offer terrific anecdotal insight into the perception of obituaries and, more importantly, their history. This is where Gould’s film takes off.

A highlight reel of dazzling breadth, consisting of memories, news clips, and even video footage, spotlights one of the most interesting facets of obituaries: who gets one. Unlike your local paper, the NYT doesn’t publish everyone’s obit; someone has to have had a measurable impact to warrant one.

And it isn’t just celebrities, world leaders, or titans of industry who are considered to have had an impact. Included in this collection are the inventor of the Slinky, the pilot of the Enola Gay, an exotic dancer with ties to Jack Ruby, and the last surviving plaintiff from Brown v Board of Education, to name only a few. Every story is as amazing as the one before it and after, and if the anatomy of an obit is the backbone of the film, these highlight reels are the alluring soft parts.

With Obit, Vanessa Gould proves something I’ve said for years: pound-for-pound…or perhaps word-for-word is more apt…there is no better writing, and no better storytelling, in any national daily newspaper than there is in the obituary section. Obits are more than resumés of the deceased; obits are everyone’s last chance at life.

What if men no longer served any purpose on Earth? That’s more or less the hook of the mockumentary No Men Beyond This Point, which presents an alternate universe where, in the 1950s, women suddenly gained the ability to reproduce asexually (it’s called parthenogenesis, as one of the talking heads explains). As the years went on, and the population of women kept increasing (since they’re reproducing asexually they only use the X chromosomes, meaning no more males being born), men eventually became of no use. No Men Beyond This Point starts in the present day, where the documentary crew follows 37-year-old Andrew Myers (Patrick Gilmore), now the youngest man in the world.

Writer/director/editor Mark Sawers uses a standard documentary approach to his absurd subject matter, employing talking head interviews, archival footage and black-and-white re-enactments, among plenty of other old tricks found in any average middlebrow doc made today. The familiar and banal approach works here because of its pairing with a fantasy/sci-fi concept, and the way Sawers focuses on some of the more nuanced changes that would come from the switch in dominant gender roles makes it easy to go along with his dystopian (or utopian, depending on how you look at it) vision.

Aside from playing out his big “What if?” scenario through social and political contexts, Sawers also focuses on Myers and his situation as the youngest man in the world. With the World Governing Council—a new body of government running the planet—sending men off to sanctuaries across the world to live out their remaining days, Myers manages to get a job as a servant for partners Terra (Tara Pratt) and Iris (Kristine Cofsky). Eventually, Andrew and Iris being showing an attraction for each other, and Sawers uses their flirtations to delve into the messier aspects of his universe.

It’s when No Men Beyond This Point starts exploring sex that the mockumentary begins to falter a bit. Especially giving a rather bland attempt at poking holes in the idea of how women would handle being in power. Earlier on, when Sawers highlights how the stubbornness of men in power ultimately led to their downfall, the idea works. But once women take charge and rule in a reactionary way towards men, essentially trying to speed up their extinction, Sawers portrays their rule as a conservative, sex-shaming authority, where women are not allowed to speak about their feelings of attraction whatsoever. It gives off an implication that women are inherently repressive when it comes to sexuality, a point that some people may take offense to. And with gender and sexuality turning into prominent issues recently, there’s something a little old hat about Sawers’ film operating within the same standards that are being constantly challenged today.

But still, anyone who tries to tackle gender is bound to get into a sticky situation of some sort, and for the most part No Men Beyond This Point is enjoyable despite its issues. It may be a little too deadpan for its own good, but even when the laughs aren’t there it’s fascinating to see just how much Sawers has thought out his idea of a world where women rule everything. I can’t say that No Men Beyond This Point lives up to the mockumentaries of the likes of Christopher Guest (and I’m sure some people will grow tired of Sawers’ premise pretty fast), but I can’t deny that I wasn’t entertained for the most part.

This review was originally published on September 14, 2015, as part of our coverage of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.

Many documentaries, no matter how good they might be, either follow a traditional structure or achieve the same general narrative goal along a nonlinear path. Even a doc like Listen To Me Marlon, which presents Marlon Brando’s personal audio recordings in such a fashion that the actor posthumously “builds” his life story, is essentially a clever telling of a nonlinear tale. But a new documentary from Swiss writer/director Nicolas Steiner, Above and Below, eschews traditional structures and even clever devices, embracing documentation on film in the most literal of senses.

The film examines the daily existences of five people living on what society would be generous to deem its “fringe.” Cindy and Rick are a couple living in a flood channel beneath the streets of Las Vegas; Lalo, aka The Godfather, lives in the same series of tunnels; Dave is a military veteran living alone in an abandoned bunker in the California desert; and April is a member of the crew at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, living her life simulating exploration on the red planet in the middle of nowhere. These five souls, and their four stories, have more in common than one might think, but the history of that commonality leaves much to be desired.

Above and Below opens like a crackling horror movie. Lalo acts as a tour guide of sorts, leading the viewer into a tunnel as he tells the tale of a family who once lived underground but died during flooding caused by heavy rain; he says the little girl still appears. Lalo’s theatrics, combined with Markus Nestroy’s sumptuous cinematography, is beyond compelling—it’s demanding.

Some technical wizardry continues with wide shots of stunning vastness, paired with great audio, used to frame April’s world as someone preparing to one day colonize Mars (perhaps in the event of the end of Earth). In the desert, Dave takes an acetylene torch to fire ants, crisping them on contact while explaining the pain they cause when they bite, as if he feels compelled to justify his killing. Also using a torch, although as a means to cook dinner, are Cindy and Rick, whose perpetually candlelit underground world has order alongside its chaos.

It’s all so riveting, and yet something isn’t quite right.

Still, Steiner continues to impress by finding connections between and among his subjects that forever link them. Some are superficial, like April playing ping-pong with a crew member, compared to Dave sitting alone in his bunker and bouncing a ping-pong ball off the wall to pass the time, compared to dozens of ping-pong balls flowing through drainage as if en route to Rick and Cindy (while aesthetically pleasing, this bit reeks of being contrived). Others are not so superficial: April and Dave are both military veterans with harrowing experiences, while Cindy and Dave have children and grandchildren in the “real world” they don’t see because they have lost touch with their families.

There is also contrast, not only between those who live above the surface versus those who live below it (thus the title), but also between people’s faith, the creature comforts they have access to, and the degree of solitude in which they live.

But as the film continues, that not-quite-right feeling takes shape. And I use the term “continues” specifically because there is no real progression to be found here. Despite a runtime that’s just shy of two hours, very little happens beyond the observational. It’s quite maddening, really. On one hand, and to Steiner’s credit, there is no opportunity to pass judgment on these people beyond basic moral thumbs-up/thumbs-down consideration, because there is no context available to use as a frame around current behavior. For example, Cindy goes trick-or-treating on Halloween so she and Rick have candy. She’s petite enough to pass for teen-sized, and with a full mask hiding her age and an over-exaggerated squeaky voice belying it, she scores big. Is it wrong? In spirit, sure; trick-or-treating is for kids. But how wrong is it? There’s no way to tell because there isn’t enough revealed about Cindy to make that call.

Therein lies the other hand: with no traditional backstory to these people, and only tidbits of information randomly presented, there is nothing to invest in emotionally. Yes, some sympathy is garnered for April because of her parental situation, and one can’t help but feel sorry for how Cindy or Dave are detached from their children and grandchildren, but without more context, these stories are nothing more than bits of discussions overheard at a café or in an elevator. For two hours.

This sterile, arm’s-length view is a glimpse at lives and not into them, and that is a big distinction. The viewer gets to see Steiner’s subjects, but the viewer never really gets the chance to look at them. Above and Below has artistic merit, but it begs for more from its viewer than it is willing to offer in return. Told without narration or title cards, the film is the epitome of observation, and Steiner tries hard to have it both ways. He offers subjects who might be worthy of sympathy, but never delivers on anything sympathetic, instead remaining all-observant. By the end of the film, the viewer is left wondering if there is something more compelling to look at.

Few documentaries open as dramatically as Omo Child: The River and the Bush. Headlights pierce the dead of night somewhere in Southwest Ethiopia, a jeep pulls up at a settlement, and a man in Western-style clothing gets out. He is led into the darkness to another man, dressed in tribal gear, who is cradling a tiny baby. “He found her in the bush.” someone explains. “Is she alive?” someone else asks. The answer is obvious.

John Rowe’s gripping documentary introduces us to the Kara tribe of the Omo valley. They live off the land in a remote part of the country, their elders strikingly decorating their bodies with white markings. Like many indigenous tribes living in isolated parts of the world, the Kara are a deeply superstitious people, and believe that children can be born with a curse that will threaten their very existence. For generations, these cursed Mingi children have been killed by the women of the tribe, by strangulation, drowning, or leaving them in the bush for wild animals to take care of.

Our protagonist is Lale Labuko, a well-spoken and pleasant-featured young tribesman. His father stood up against the village elders to send him for some new fangled “education”, only recently introduced to the tribe by visiting missionaries. On his return, Lale discovered the truth about the taboo Mingi killings, which claimed his two older sisters as victims. He set out to save Mingi children from certain death by adopting them as his own, bringing them up far away from his ancestral home, and eventually challenging the Kara elders to bringing the barbaric tradition to an end.

Rowe and his intrepid crew filmed over a period of five years, and the documentary works best when dealing with the rhythms of tribal life. He has a real photographer’s eye for both the landscape and the people, and his images are particularly eloquent when focusing on the hard-worn faces of the elders and their women folk, many of whom have lost children to the Mingi curse.

The director is less confident dealing with narrative and the pacing of Omo Child drags because of it. This could be because our modern-day expectations of documentary filmmaking, and the material at Rowe’s disposal in such a challenging shooting location. So many documentaries today are a montage of footage from various sources, from CCTV to smartphones, giving them a sense of urgency and spontaneity that old skool documentaries rarely had. Perhaps by necessity, Rowe has to rely on straight up testimony to tell the tale. There’s plenty of gorgeous landscape shots interspersed with talking heads giving their account. The endless talking heads have the effect of slowing a riveting tale down, and perhaps a more experienced filmmaker may have found ways to show rather than tell. The result sometimes feels a bit National Geographicky.

Still, the retro style of the filmmaking doesn’t hamper the overall punch of the documentary. This is the story of one man who had the courage to challenge the accepted wisdom of his society, dealing with death threats and succeeding in bringing about a change. The film won the Ethos Jury Prize at this year’s Social Impact Media Awards.

Rowe sensibly allows the elders to voice some opinion. They are wistful about the modernization of their culture. One woman tells how traditionally the tribe would wear animal skins, but the kids just want to wear Western attire. Despite their resistance to the modern world, traces of modernity are found—some elders sport bucket hats like those favoured by Oasis and Ocean Colour Scene in their Britpop heyday; guns look even more brutal and deadly when handled by a half-naked tribesman.

The most shocking testimony is from an older woman who unapologetically admits to murdering twelve children without any remorse. Rowe encourages some empathy with the elder’s feelings—Omo Child is also a portrait of a community in transition, and treats their deep-rooted superstitions with respect.

Ritualized infanticide may be shocking to our sensibilities, but the film allows you to understand that to the elder’s sensibilities it would seem crazy not to kill these children when a curse is potentially hanging over the community. As Lale’s crusade gathers pace, one elder talks about letting the Mingi kids live with the air of incredulity some Westerners adopt when speaking about Political Correctness Gone Mad.

Despite the harrowing subject matter, Omo Child is an uplifting film. It enthusiastically demonstrates how one person can make a huge difference, and Lale Labuko’s fearless endeavours make it easy to overlook that Omo Child sometimes resembles an extended showreel for his organization. Beyond his exceptional work saving children’s lives in Ethiopia, his story also offers some hope to us all in our era of fear and intolerance.

I’m hard-pressed to think of the last time something of historical significance happened and there wasn’t a camera around to record the event. I don’t mean a news camera; I mean the kind of camera anyone might have in their pocket at any given moment. The advent of video technology on mobile phones has created a culture where anything that happens can be recorded at a moment’s notice and distributed globally via social media. It’s not hard to recall the days when personal video cameras weren’t as readily available, or when they were the stuff of home movies, weddings, corporate training videos, and sex tapes. It wasn’t too long before that, though, video cameras weren’t even an option for personal use. Here Come the Videofreex, a documentary from co-directors Jon Nealon and Jenny Raskin, looks at the genesis of video cameras for personal use, and how two early owners of video equipment started something of a media revolution.

The film opens with a harrowing scene: a present-day team of gloved experts pores over boxes of videotapes that have fallen victim to mold. In some cases, spooled tape is sticking to itself, creating a sense of urgency that must be restrained for the safety of the tape. This brief scene is followed by title cards that offer all the prologue the documentary needs:

In 1968, Sony introduced the CV-2400 PortaPak, the first portable video camera. For the first time, it was possible to record picture and sound and play it back right away.

The story moves to 1969, when David Cort and Parry Teasdale, strangers who both acquired video cameras, met by chance at Woodstock, where both were more interested in filming everything going on except the music. A friendship was forged, a partnership began, and a name was coined. Before long, the duo would recruit eight others, land a gig with CBS, lose that gig with CBS, and go on to record seminal moments and legendary figures in US history.

Here Come the Videofreex, presented chronologically for the most part, is really a tale of two histories. The first history is that of the group itself. In addition to Cort and Teasdale, members included Skip Blumberg, Nancy Cain, Bart Friedman, Davidson Gigliotti, Chuck Kennedy, Mary Curtis Ratcliff, Carol Vontobel, and Ann Woodward. Each person had their own specialty, from editing to accounting, and each was treated as an equal member (that said, like any team, this one had its all-stars and its role-players, and those designations are implied here).

The second history is what the group recorded. Moments of modern US history where the Videofreex were present include discussions with Abbie Hoffman during the Trial of the Chicago Eight, an interview with soon-to-be-slain Black Panther Fred Hampton, a Women’s Strike for Equality, Anti-War Protests, and the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami. This treasure-trove of footage is not just history in the making, it’s history in the raw. In today’s media, between our cameras-are-everywhere existence and the slick packaging we are used to being fed from news outlets and websites, it’s easy to forget what it feels like to organically witness history because we’re so busy consuming what we’re being fed. This film is a great reminder of that feeling. The footage, presented in its original 4:3 aspect ratio, is slick in its native, almost sterile, black-and-white images. It’s also very effective that the present-day interviews with the talking-head surviving members of the Videofreex, while in color, are also in presented in 4:3.

But what the film is flush with in terms of footage, it lacks in engaging narrative. While there is plenty of history to be had, it all has a museum piece feel to it, as if the film isn’t really teaching anything, but rather putting everything on display to be admired. It’s history being shown, not history being shared. The filmmakers also seem to be so enamored by the footage they have, they think any footage is good footage. Nealon and Raskin use many clips that are nothing more than the Videofreex recording themselves and/or each other. It’s cute at first, but soon that footage takes on the feel of any other home videos found in most households in the 1980s.

As their tale winds to a close, the Videofreex again find themselves ahead of the new media curve. Fed up with New York and their inability to distribute their content, they move to a large farmhouse in the Catskills. It’s there that they curry favor with the suspicious locals by creating what will eventually be known as Cable Access Television. They even fancy themselves pirates of the airwaves, and while technically they are, it’s not as sexy as it sounds. The locals eat it up, but to watch the locals create and record cable access programming tests the patience more than actually watching cable access programming.

Here Come the Videofreex succeeds in telling a tale of how a two-person partnership became a ten-person collective, and how their efforts simultaneously made history and made them historians. The film also shows how anyone rolling video today, whether by camera or cameraphone, stands on the shoulders of that collective. It’s an important documentary about an important point in the timeline of American media and technology, even though its presentation struggles to connect with the viewer.

Here Come the Videofreex opens April 6th at The Royal Cinema in Toronto, Ontario.

With a rumbly belly and a slight twitch above my right eyebrow (which I assume was related to an acute nutritional deficiency stemming from my decision that morning to sleep in rather than eat breakfast before rushing out the door), I stare and drool like a famished dog at the assortment of hot, meaty, aromatic tacos laid out before me in the bright, virtually empty dining room of San Francisco’s back-alley taco spot, Cala.

Beef tongue. Pork. Mushroom and kale. Soft-boiled egg. Chile verde. The smells are intense, deep, and fresh, seducing me as they waft up and tickle my nose. It’s too much to take. I’m itching to wrap my fingers around those steamy tortillas and stuff slow-brasied goodness into my goddamn face. But I don’t dare lift a finger.

In just a few minutes, Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold will be huddling up with me (and two food writers) around the Mexico City-inspired dishes to eat and talk about City of Gold, Laura Gabbert’s documentary about Gold’s career, philosophy, and the city he loves, Los Angeles. After a short wait (that, due to my rabid hunger, feels agonizingly long), the mustachioed man of the hour walks in, we shake hands, and we eat. It’s gloriously tasty. Slowly but surely, in between bites, our conversation gets underway.

The film, shot over several years in and around the myriad neighborhoods of L.A., is equally touristic and philosophical, celebrating the unexplored corners and food stops of the city through the lens of Gold’s approach to culinary discovery. It premiered at Sundance last year, just weeks after Gold dropped the food critic anonymity game and began showing his face openly, to both readers and restauranteurs alike, citing the ubiquity of social media as the main factor in the decision. The film marks the first deep public look into Gold’s life and passion and is an inspiring, engaging piece of food-world filmmaking.

City of Gold is playing in select cities now.

Did Laura have complete creative control over the film?
I was allowed to tell her if something was unusually stupid, but that actually didn’t really happen. It’s not like I had final cut.

Were you in the editing room?
I didn’t go into the editing room. I didn’t really see anything until there was, like, a rough cut about two weeks before Sundance.

I imagine people would think something was up when you were being followed around by cameras during filming.
Yes and no. They were all restaurants I’d been to a million times. The ground rule was that [Laura] wasn’t allowed to film me reviewing anything. For most of the places we’d film in, a bunch of white people with film cameras wasn’t that much weirder than a bunch of white people without film cameras. My approach is sort of the opposite of what I call the “chamber of commerce” approach, where you go in, have a hearty handshake with the owner and he or she explains what the cuisine is about and what marvels your tongue is supposed to experience. Or the ones that are super food porn-y and they’re in the kitchen and it’s like, bang bang bang fireball, then perfectly plated thing. Then you have them do the, “Mmmm…” There’s none of that in this [movie]. It’s as far from the Food Network aesthetic as you could possibly get, probably.

It captures Los Angeles really well.
Thank you. That was the main thing we were trying to do, look at the city the same way I do. I’ve [seen] Laura’s first movie, Sunset Stories,  which is about this odd, beautiful friendship between two 90-year-old women in an old age home in Hollywood. You just can’t watch that movie without getting a little verklempt. She’s good at the verklempt. I was fearing that [City of Gold] would be too sentimental, but I was happy, because it didn’t seem to be that sentimental at all. There were a couple things, especially when they talk to the restaurant owners…which I have to say, I had nothing to do with. It happened almost by accident. They were going into the restaurants with me, we were shooting the food, then they’d go back the next day to shoot b-roll in the kitchen. They did that documentary thing, where you talk to the cooks and the people who run the restaurant on camera. It turned out to be some of the most interesting stuff.

I’ve always sort of ranted about how so many people define Los Angeles by flying into town, being put up in the Beverly Wilshire hotel and writing about what they can get to in ten minutes in their rental car. That’s fine, in a way, but there’s so much more.

Your work’s had a tremendous impact on so many people in that city. You’ve been writing about food now for thirty years. I’m sure you’ve seen a shift over the years in how people search for food, young people finding the kinds of places you like on their own. Is that heartening to see?
Yeah, it’s good. Food has become almost tribal, in a way that wouldn’t be thinkable ten years ago. People are on Team Vegan, or Team Omnivore, or Team Nose-To-Tail, or they refuse to eat any Mexican food that isn’t in some really inconvenient suburb. Or they’re localvores and everything needs to come from within a fifty-mile radius. Sometimes they coincide. I think it’s funny that the nose-to-tail people and the vegans have so much in common. They both have as their goal eating as few animals as possible. You go to people in bars and they’ll talk to you about homemade dinners until you just want to melt into a puddle and float down the drain. You have people who raise chickens in their backyard and they compete to see who has the yellowest eggs. It’s cool. It’s creative.

What’s the biggest misconception about your career?
Maybe that I spend my entire life talking about taco stands. I do, but I’m the critic for the L.A. Times. I’ve got a lot of turf to cover. I write about more of that than anybody else in my position, but it’s not the only thing I do. When somebody doesn’t like the review I’ve given their restaurant, they’ll always snipe about the taco thing. Then again, there are twelve million people of Mexican origin in the L.A. metro area—that’s a lot of freaking people! That’s bigger than any city in Mexico except for Mexico City. It’s bigger than Guadalajara. If you’re not taking the Mexican community seriously, then what are you taking seriously? What is more important than that?

You and Laura started this project years ago. I imagine it took some time to build trust between you two before the project could really get going.
We sort of met a weird way. A friend asked me to donate a “dinner with a critic” to her kid’s school’s silent auction. Laura bid on it and we went to dinner. She brought up the idea and I said no. She’d keep bringing it up, and the next year my kid ended up going to school with her kid, so I ended up being in the same drop-off line. It’s much harder to say no to somebody you see every day. And, obviously, the anonymity thing was more for the readers’ sake than for what was actually going on inside the restaurants.

It’s like, you go in [the restaurant] and it’s less being anonymous than that you’re not noticing them noticing you pretending not to notice them…It got to be a distraction. There’s a point at which, if there were people who don’t recognize a critic and if the chef can make a difference—which I will say he cannot—then it’s giving the advantage to people who have superior warning systems. All I can do is reserve under weird names and show up late so I don’t get jumped ahead in the line. Service doesn’t really get better, it just gets more nervous. They ask you how you’re doing every 45 seconds instead of every five minutes, which is not really an improvement.

“I don’t need permission to do good things.” states Pastor Gennadiy Mokhnenko halfway through Steve Hoover’s absorbing, unsettling sophomore feature Almost Holy (originally titled Crocodile Gennadiy). Mokhnenko wears the collar of a clergyman, but he also devotes himself to vigilante activities, scooping drug-addicted kids off the streets of his hometown, Mariupol, Ukraine, and forcing them into rehabilitation. He’s a charismatic, outsized presence, and his self-assurance in making that statement provides the documentary with its tricky moral quandary.

Hoover’s crew follows Mokhnenko on his nocturnal raids of gruesome shooting galleries around the city. The Pastor’s nickname “Pastor Crocodile” comes from an old Soviet-era children’s show, where a friendly crocodile goes about righting wrongs and battling an evil witch. Some of the kids Mokhnenko encounters with track marks on their arms are as young as ten-years-old. These kids have fallen through the cracks of society and belong to broken families with parents who themselves are junkies or alcoholics. Simply put, there’s no-one around to help them. There’s no state scheme to aid their plight, and the police are shockingly apathetic. The situation creates a space for someone like the Pastor, operating in grey areas of the law. Once in his care, he adopts some of them, and under his patronage, many will go on to lead healthy, normal lives. Others will leave or escape back to the “freedom” of the streets.

Hoover weaves together footage to create a portrait of this self-styled saviour. Hoover eschews a straight narrative by using a fragmented series of vignettes, skipping back and forth through time. With the aid of cinematographer John Pope and utilizing a discordant score of industrial ambience, Hoover creates an atmosphere of hallucinatory dissociation, presenting the Ukraine as a post-Communist dystopia. News footage and soundbites chronicling the country’s troubled recent history put the events in some context, Mokhnenko’s rescued souls representing smaller, more personal dramas set against a backdrop of national identity crisis.

Mokhnenko is a person of boundless energy and self-confidence. He has set up 40 rehabilitation centres under the banner “Pilgrim Republic”. Mokhnenko describes feeling like Superman when he first saved someone’s life, working as a firefighter in his younger years. It’s interesting that he reaches for the Man of Steel comparison, when his methods are closer to those of Batman. Dressed all in black, with a long coat flapping round him like a cape and an oversized crucifix on his chest like an emblem, he’s a self-modelled dark knight, as comfortable roughing up sex offenders as he is making insinuating threats to pharmacies supplying under-the-counter drugs to kids.

Hoover presents many of the episodes in stark verite style, showing the harrowing reality of the drug addict’s surroundings. One especially squalid encounter involves a mentally ill, deaf and dumb woman kept in a shed by an older man, who routinely sexually abuses her. Distraught and discombobulated, the woman can’t even remember or articulate what became of her baby, a mystery that Pastor Crocodile later resolves. As self-cast judge and jury in the cases Mokhnenko involves himself in, he decides that she should be taken into psychiatric care, and cooks up a bogus statement to make sure the hospital accepts her admission.

While Hoover describes the film as a portrait, the most significant problem with Almost Holy is a lack of perspective. It becomes obvious that the director is enamoured by Mokhnenko’s outsized personality when he treats him like a movie star, filming him swim in slow motion and working out at the gym. At times it feels a little like hero-worship, showing the Pastor as an inspirational speaker, a badass on the streets, a political firebrand, and a father to his extended family of lost boys.

On the flip side, Hoover often lights the pastor from behind or obscures his face with shadow, making him look like a gangster. Hoover acknowledges the shady side of the pastor’s activities, without offering any opinion of his own. These conflicted directorial choices make it a little difficult to decide what the Hoover’s actual stance is, and testimonies from other people in the story would give us a more rounded portrait of the man. Is the pastor motivated by fame, power and self-interest, as his critics suggest, or moved to help these people by a genuine sense of altruism? Is he playing tough for the cameras, or his he toning down his methods because a camera is present? What do his rescuee’s really feel about the pastor’s methods, once their past the shock of being virtually abducted by him?

“I don’t need permission to do good things.” Pastor Crocodile states, and in his environment that statement is at least partially true. It seems that he has transcended the law and is doing whatever he feels is best. The difficulty is that in doing his good deeds, he takes the voiceless from one dire situation and puts them in another where once again their feelings or opinions are disregarded. The question hanging over the whole piece is this—Gennadiy Mokhnenko is saving these people from themselves with his questionable methods, but should he? In many cases shown here, he’s rescuing them against their will.

Almost Holy is a handsomely shot documentary (though not surprisingly considering Terrence Malick as an executive producer) and some segments are as well-crafted as a prestige fiction film. With a charismatic and enigmatic central figure like the Pastor Crocodile, it should go down well with discerning arthouse audiences, and offers plenty to debate.

There are many stories a filmmaker could tell about the lives of Palestinians under occupation. Despite the news stories we may hear in the press, in the Western world we are so entirely disconnected from their life experiences that any insight is not only helpful but necessary. We need to hear their voices and, at the very least, witness their experiences, even if many of these are beyond our understanding. Speed Sisters provides such an educational insight without compromising its identity as a wholesome celebration of its subjects, a testament to both the subjects and to director/producer Amber Fares.

A Lebanese-Canadian woman who was raised in Northern Alberta, Fares travelled to the Middle East to better understand her heritage; it was this journey that led her to Palestine’s Speed Sisters, the first all-women race car driving team in the Middle East. We are introduced to five women, each with different backgrounds, different talents, and most importantly, different reasons for racing. One of the biggest strengths of this documentary is that it allows each of these women to accurately represent themselves—they are not forced into boxes or censored to fit the personality we might believe a female racer should have. They also have varying financial situations, which only serves to emphasise their single common trait: a dedication to racing. This is reinforced by the decision to include scenes from the women’s daily lives and interviews with their families. One of the most promising racers, Marah, is made all the more sympathetic through childhood stories and words of support by Khaled, her father and biggest fan.

Naturally, as explained by their manager Maysoon, the running of a female racing team in a country under occupation is not without its difficulties. While many of the local men state they are now used to seeing the women race, on the track there are still some clear prejudices to be tolerated; Maysoon herself admits to frequently diminishing her authority in order to make other men feel in charge. Because of a lack of provided training grounds, the team must train next to an Israeli detention site, which comes with its own hazards. This is all without even mentioning the multiple Israeli checkpoints the drivers must frequently pass through, and only a few of them have passes to do so. None of these women are willing to let this hold them back, however, and find their own ways to pursue their dreams. Mona, who races mostly for the fun of it, doesn’t want to let her personal life fall by the wayside. Noor, the wild drifter with the personality (and hair) to match, learns new techniques and pushes herself at every race. But Betty, who is determined to be the fastest woman on the track while maintaining her femininity off it, turns out to be Marah’s biggest competition within the group.

Speed Sisters is everything we would enjoy in a fast-paced racing film, along with the edge of a realistic political commentary and the introspection of a personal adventure. Perhaps its biggest aid in succeeding with such a high standard is its pacing—both Fares and editor Rabab Haj Yahya know exactly when to switch between fast-paced races, establishing shots of Palestinian life, and sit down interviews, never allowing one aspect to dominate too much screen time. Paired with a largely Middle Eastern soundtrack including Palestinian hip-hop and other tracks from the region’s indie music scenes, we are easily drawn into a world of which, in reality, we know nothing of. Yet Fares applies a simple but true formula to this film: when a narrative is so specific it cannot be anything but authentic, it becomes universal.

It would be difficult to improve upon the director’s own words when it comes to this documentary. It provides such a fascinating perspective, and each driver brings her own honest approach to both the track and to life. “Each one in her own way took me on a ride through Palestine that I will never forget,” Fares says. “They taught me to push boundaries, while still respecting your community. They taught me about resistance, about not giving up and what it means to stay true to your dreams despite endless obstacles.” This is exactly what Speed Sisters is about.

With respect to all short filmmakers, documentary short films are the most challenging to execute. Sure, animated shorts may require the added dimension of art, and both animated and live action shorts may require the adoption of a traditional three-act structure in a greatly condensed form. But neither animation nor live action shorts bear any burden of proof. There aren’t facts to present, histories to tell, or cases to make. Documentary shorts have those facets. Documentary shorts also come with mandatory moments that must be made to fit within the condensed narrative, and they do not enjoy the luxury of creative fictional exits. These are challenges greater than any of those faced by other types of short films. This year’s slate of Oscar nominees is no exception to those challenges.

Body Team 12 (directed by David Darg)

For many, if not most, the Ebola virus is something far away, something we only read about in the news. In his impactful and efficient documentary, Darg brings viewers through the screen, drops them into Liberia, and puts them on a harrowing ride-along with the members of Body Team 12. This team, part of the Liberian Red Cross, has the difficult task of removing the bodies of those who have succumbed to the virus. The film pays particular attention to the sole female member of the team, Garmai Sumo. This may be the shortest short of the bunch, but it uses every second of that time to solid effect.

Chau, Beyond the Lines (directed by Courtney Marsh)

The subject of this documentary is Chau, a teenager living at the Lang Hao Binh Agent Orange Camp in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The camp is special in that it caters only to those children who have been born with physical handicaps as a result of Agent Orange used during the Vietnam War. Unlike the other members of the camp, Chau has aspirations to become a professional artist and clothing designer. This means he has to leave the confines of the camp and make it on his own. The ravaging effects of Agent Orange on the collection of children make this film difficult to watch at times, and oddly, once Chau is on his own, the film slows.

Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah (directed by Adam Benzine)

Shoah is generally regarded as the greatest film about the Holocaust ever committed to celluloid. Clocking in at more than 9 hours, Shoah took 12 years to produce, five of which were spent editing the 200+ hours of footage. Benzine’s documentary, a reflective one on the masterpiece, is part history lesson, part film studies course, part behind-the-scenes feature, and part biography of Shoah‘s creator, Claude Lanzmann. While loaded with interesting information, the biggest challenge this Oscar-nominated short faces is doing justice to its subject. To capture anything of substance about or related to a 9-hour epic, and to do so in only 40 minutes, is a tall order. Benzine touches only a little on as many points as possible.

A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness (directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy)

The subject of this unbelievable documentary is a young Pakistani woman who survived an attempted honor killing. This practice is, at least anecdotally according to Obaid-Chinoy’s film, a growing trend in Pakistan and one that Pakistani courts are actually tolerating. The survivor of an attempt and the focal point of this film, Saba Maqsood, made a decision her family took issue with, so her father and uncle took matters into their own hands. Saba survived, creating a dynamic of guilt and forgiveness that doesn’t accompany most instances like these. This documentary is spellbinding from the first frame, capturing Saba’s personal struggles, her family’s defiance, and the complexity’s of a culture that allows such awful behavior.

Last Day of Freedom (directed by Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman)

While each of the nominated docs are personal in their own ways, this film feels more personal that the others, thanks largely in part to how it is presented. Bill is the narrator of the story about his brother, Manny, and the lifelong struggles Manny faced including illiteracy, several tours in Vietnam, PTSD, and finally a date with the executioner for a murder he committed. The fact that Bill narrates gives the film emotional heft, but it’s the animated presentation accompanying the story that serves as a double-edged sword. It offers an engaging visual style, and as effective as it may be, ultimately it’s one artist’s interpretations of another person’s words. Stick around for the closing title cards—they’re chilling.

If I had an Academy vote, I would cast it for A Girl in the River without hesitation. It combines excellent technical execution, a riveting tale, a protagonist to root for, and the most shocking of subject matters, particularly in the 21st century. It also bears the distinction of being the only doc of the five I want to re-watch, which is a good barometer for me.

In 2014, Robert Greene premiered his documentary Actress, about his neighbour and former TV star who, after leaving the entertainment industry to become a stay-at-home mom, tries to get back into acting again. On paper, Actress looked like a story of someone pursuing their passion again and facing the greater obstacles that come with time, but Greene had bigger ideas in mind than a simple portrait of his neighbour’s rebooting of her career. The film explored the conflict between performance and nonfiction, and as Actress’ authenticity came into question, so did the preconceived notion of documentary filmmaking as inherently objective or truthful. Compared to the glut of modern documentaries constructed as passive, information-based experiences, Actress was a difficult—and memorable—piece of “non-fiction.”

In some ways, Kate Plays Christine extends the ideas and themes of Actress, albeit through a more ambitious and provocative lens, traversing through darker subject matter in its quest to confront the thorny issues of ethics and responsibility most documentarians would prefer to ignore. The object of Greene’s fascination is Christine Chubbuck, a news reporter in Sarasota, Florida who hosted the local talk show Suncoast Digest. On a Monday morning in 1974 during a live broadcast, Chubbuck made a statement about her station providing “blood and guts” television before shooting herself in the head with a revolver. Not many people outside of a few Sarasotans caught Chubbuck’s suicide, and any tapes of the incident have long been destroyed, but news of her death made national news, even inspiring screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky to write the script for Network.

Now, with the four-decade anniversary of Chubbuck’s death approaching, Greene enlisted actress Kate Lyn Sheil (Sun Don’t Shine, Green) to play Christine in a film about her death. This gives Kate Plays Christine a set-up that operates like a strange, closed loop; the film documents Sheil preparing for her role, but the film within the film doesn’t actually exist. The only purpose of the Christine Chubbuck “biopic” is for Greene to document Sheil’s preparation, an indirect statement by Greene on how pointless he finds the endeavor of trying to fictionalize this sort of material.

That’s only the start of Greene’s deliberate clashes with what one might expect from a documentary of a tragic figure like Chubbuck, removing any clarity or explanation on what might have driven her to perform such a dramatic act. It’s a radical approach because of Greene’s refusal to provide any sense of solid ground, putting viewers right beside him and Sheil as they try to navigate the situation he’s put themselves in. The film exists within an uncertain present tense, avoiding direct messages or an editing style that suggests some sort of hindsight. It’s that lack of guidance, the feeling of actively engaging ideas and themes on the same level as the filmmakers rather than being dictated to, that can make Kate Plays Christine as exciting as it is frustrating.

Naturally, all of this uncertainty wreaks havoc on Sheil’s ability to prepare and perform for her role. Her goal is to give a performance that’s respectful and accurate in its portrayal of Chubbuck, but Greene stacks the deck against her. Aside from Sheil being unable to find any footage of Chubbuck to study, the film she’s acting in is done in a cheap, melodramatic style with no real connection outside of re-enacting known information about Chubbuck weeks before her death. Greene provides a perfect symbol for Sheil’s frustration when he tries shooting a scene of Christine going for a swim in the ocean, with Sheil’s wig falling off the entire time. It’s one thing for Sheil to look the part, but she will never embody or become Chubbuck.

The ambiguous space Kate Plays Christine occupies, while making it impossible not to have the film rattle around in the brain long after it ends, brings up a nagging question over whether or not Greene’s process shields him from criticism. There are moments where the film can feel aimless or messy, but it’s difficult to criticize an inherently flawed design. Greene himself has said that he wanted Kate Plays Christine to be a film that “almost falls apart as you watch,” and it’s hard not to feel that way during the (seemingly) scattershot final act.

Eventually, the film works towards a conclusion: the filming of Chubbuck’s suicide, which Sheil begins feeling hesitant about as she weighs the moral implications of tackling the role she’s signed on for. It’s in these final minutes, where Sheil begins acting out Chubbuck’s final news broadcast, that Greene acknowledges the corner he’s backed himself into. At this point, taking a moralistic route with filming the death would be hypocritical, but showing it would indulge in the same “blood and guts” entertainment Chubbuck called out before shooting herself. Amazingly, Greene gets himself out of this corner by playing out both scenarios in purposely unsatisfying ways. It’s an ending that will please no one—although the idea of wanting to walk away “pleased” by someone tragically taking their own life sounds a bit strange. Greene’s direction and Sheil’s performance help tackle the complexity of documenting Chubbuck’s life, along with interrogating the accepted methods documentaries use to explore these sorts of tragic profiles. Perhaps it’s best to take a page from Greene’s book and approach the conflicting elements with the kind of acute awareness he uses with his films: creating these kinds of clashes and juxtapositions shouldn’t make for easy viewing, and the fact that Kate Plays Christine remains so difficult to shake off should speak for itself.

Michael Moore (Bowling For Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11) adapts his brash style of documentary filmmaking to a thin, but well-meaning, takedown of American exceptionalism. In Where to Invade Next, the controversial filmmaker goes east, shooting his entire film outside of the United States despite consistently turning his attentions back home. The righteous indignation that’s fueled most of Moore’s work seems replaced by resigned exasperation. More often, he just seems tired of it all. As a result, the humor that once made the documentarian an engaging avatar for liberal outrage lacks its searing edge in Where to Invade Next.

The film sees Moore “invading” European countries—and an African one—to “claim” their policies on behalf of America. Gathering interviews with former government heads, public service workers, and ordinary citizens, Where to Invade Next provides first-hand accounts on the benefits of altruistic policies. He speaks with Italians who get eight weeks of paid vacation, and shows their smiles fade as he explains that Americans are guaranteed none. He takes a tour of French school cafeterias and gawks at the selection of 80 different cheeses in the school chef’s storage. He examines these baffling disparities between The Rest of The World and Us, but does so on a microscopic level that’s unlikely to sway anyone’s mindset. Moore reaffirms leftist ideologies, hardly adding anything to the conversation.

Where to Invade Next reaches for humor that’s simply not there. Moore is a somewhat awkward improvisationalist. His hit to miss rate is close to 50:50, but watching his interviewees awkwardly smile as he stammers through a half-formed punchline grows draining. Reduced to the dad-joke realm of lines like, “You know it’s bad when the French pity you,” Moore lacks the punchy energy to sell his sarcasm. His unfunny cut-aways to a stable of cows or a clip from Talladega Nights slow down the film’s pace. When the documentarian attempts to play the role of pro-American buffoon, you wish he had the concise witticisms of Comedy Central-era Stephen Colbert. Even the clever juxtaposing of anti-terrorism speeches over video of police brutality seems staid and expected from someone like Moore.

The documentarian’s habit of inserting himself into his films inhibits Where to Invade Next’s message from fully resonating. Opening the doc by recounting a make-believe meeting between Moore and the leaders of the American government, joking that he was, “summoned to the Pentagon,” his sophomoric approach feels reductive—a strange tone to set when your film is meant to promote civic engagement. During interviews he prods his guests in obvious ways, repeating his questions with faux bafflement at the responses. It all serves to personalize Moore’s message, but he doesn’t demonstrate the depth of expertise to act as an authority.

Moore likely has knowledge to make a convincing argument, but it—along with almost any statistical data—is not on display in Where to Invade Next. It’s hard to disagree with Moore’s pro-public good sentiments, but his documentary is hardly putting forth the best argument. As if the filmmaker set out to catalog these crazy cool foreign laws he’s heard so much about, Where to Invade Next often lacks the thoroughness to serve as more than an introduction to civic duty.

Originally published on October 3rd, 2015, as part of our New York Film Festival coverage.

Directed and written by newcomer Morgan Knibbe, Those Who Feel the Fire Burning is an unusual and powerful documentary about the lives of immigrants stuck in Europe.

Those Who Feel the Fire Burning opens strongly with a man drowning at sea, having fallen from a boat taking him into a port. This drowning is shown from his perspective, with the darkness slowly filling the screen as he sinks down into the ocean. The ghost of this man then serves as our narrator and guide through the streets of Europe’s coastal towns and ports.

Whilst the narrator wonders philosophically about paradise and the failed hopes and dreams of himself and the others who managed to make it to Europe, the camera glides over and through towns and cities on Europe’s coast, focusing on several immigrants struggling to stay alive. We follow one man filling a pram with iron desperate for money. We also follow a Senegalese man living in an old disused house in dreadful condition, telling his wife on the phone about all the shoes and lipstick he can afford to buy and bring home to her. In particularly distressing scenes we also encounter a woman using an old phone charger tied around her arm to help her inject heroin, along with several immigrants mourning the loss of family members and friends who died at sea trying to get into the port.

Knibbe’s voyeuristic approach compounds the sense of unease, grief and isolation of the immigrants. The camera can get uncomfortably close to its subjects, so we can see the pain in their eyes whilst a relentless haunting soundtrack plays in the background. Knibbe conveys Europe as an unwelcoming world for immigrants as the camera lingers over dark streets filled with tension and police. The world these immigrants have entered is alien, isolating and disorienting. Those Who Feel the Fire Burning is not an easy watch. There is no sense of detachment and distance that would have come from a film with facts and statistics. Knibbe does not give the film any political context. This is not a film inclined to provoke a detailed discussion of the complex geo-political circumstances behind immigration. Instead, Knibbe gives a visceral and emotional portrayal of life as an immigrant. He conveys immigrants as trapped in a nightmarish purgatory, unable to move further on through Europe for a more prosperous life, yet also unable to return home to their families. When the narrator ponders his life as a ghost, of “existing and not existing,” the comparison with immigrants feeling a lack of identity is obvious, and serves to emphasize this point further.

Yet Knibbe is not always subtle, and Those Who Feel the Fire Burning does possess a fault—the film’s narration, which can occasionally be a little simplistic. In one scene the narrator asks “Are you an angel?” as the camera looks upon a little girl, obviously hammering home the heaven and purgatory theme. Knibbe has created such a powerful atmosphere with the cinematography and score alone that Those Who Feel the Fire Burning arguably does not need the voice-over and ghost character in order to elicit an emotional response. This scene feels manufactured, and is clumsy given the rest of the film’s subtlety. Thankfully, these missteps from Knibbe are infrequent. Those Who Feel the Fire Burning is a provocative, hypnotic film that draws you into a frightening world of uncertainty and hopelessness. It is a unique, intelligent film from Knibbe that deserves all the praise it can get.

Originally published on April 24, 2015, as part of our Hot Docs 2015 coverage.

For a documentary about the man behind one of the best, most influential restaurants on our planet, Noma: My Perfect Storm is terribly uninspired. It’s about René Redzepi and his amazing Copenhagen restaurant, Noma, the epicenter for Nordic cuisine that has topped the “World’s 50 Best Restaurants” list four times since 2009. Chef René and his team are relentlessly focused, innovative and dedicated, nearly to a fault, and yet Pierre Deschamps documentary is the complete opposite: rudderless, overwrought and unoriginal.

The focus is squarely on chef Redzepi, his food philosophies, ego, work ethic and accomplishments. It’s a solid underdog story. Redzepi’s vision for Noma was to introduce the world to the first purely Scandanavian restaurant, sourcing ingredients from local farmers and crafting region-specific dishes you’ll only find in their little corner of the world. The irony here is that this Nordic culinary revolutionary is actually an immigrant from Macedonia who regularly faced discrimination for his Muslim background on his journey to the top. The adversity molded Redzepi into a bit of a rebel, a proud outsider who exercises his passion on his terms and cares little what his peers and critics think of him.

The story’s drama comes from a February 2013 norovirus outbreak that affected over 60 of Noma’s patrons, a botch that arguably lost them their top spot on the Best Restaurants list that year. A year later, still reeling from their prior defeat (though they won’t admit it), the Noma team attends the awards ceremony again. Redzepi goes on bitterly about how the ceremony is all arbitrary bullshit anyway, but fast forward a few minutes and he’s a ball of giddy excitement as it’s announced that Noma’s retaken the top spot. It’s intriguing to watch his psychological ups and downs, but the film is never piercing or incisive enough to explore that side of his psyche in a way that’s challenging or revealing.

The most upsetting thing about this food doc is that it doesn’t seem to share the same passion for food as its subject. The amazing plates Redzepi and his team design and debate over so meticulously aren’t showcased often or artfully enough, and this gets very frustrating, very fast. When we do see a close-up of one of Noma’s marvelous plates, it’s almost always out of context, with no insight provided into the conceptualization of or inspiration behind the glistening food in front of our eyes. Deschamps doesn’t seem concerned with weaving together food photography and narrative in a meaningful, coherent way, and that hurts the film bad.

Deschamps is so interested Redzepi’s temperament in the kitchen (one scene sees him berating his cooks for confusing lemon thyme with thyme-thyme) that there isn’t much room left for the film to revel in the beauty of the world-renowned chef’s delectable dishes. Periodically, the Noma crew will have these food jam sessions where the cooks will freestyle some brand new dishes and present them to the rest of the team for evaluation; if the dish is good enough, it may eventually end up on the menu in some form. It’s nice to see Redzepi interacting with his team in such a loose, casual, positive environment, complimenting his cooks on their “fucking amazing” creations. But we can’t get a good look at the food! I found myself squinting to catch a glimpse of the experimental dishes the young cooks worked so hard on, but Deschamps never lets us get in close.

It’s easy to get onboard with a character examination about Redzepi—he’s a fascinating guy with a chip on his shoulder and a truly great mind for cuisine. But Noma: My Perfect Storm doesn’t reflect in its form chef Redzepi’s obsession with food, which in this case turns out to be a fatal flaw. The film is too fixated on what’s in his head to truly appreciate what he’s making with his hands.

Former National Geographic contributor Louie Psihoyos made a name for himself as a filmmaker back in 2009 with his Oscar-winning dolphin fishing documentary The Cove. Psihoyos dives further into the water in his latest film Racing Extinction, this time focusing on whales, manta rays, and other animals that are nearing extinction. Using his extensive background in filming wildlife, Psihoyos captures stunning imagery from unique underwater photography and awe-inspiring time lapses to get his message across; mankind is destructive but also the solution.

Racing Extinction starts off with similar stealth tactics used in its predecessor, going undercover with hidden cameras to expose a restaurant illegally serving whale meat. But just as they’re served the forbidden dish, the scene ends. Turns out this opening bit actually back in 2010, ending abruptly with a news clip announcing that the restaurant got shut down from their discovery. Thankfully, there’s a much more thrilling (and longer) covert operation later when they reveal a shark fin processing plant. Watching the filmmakers sneak into this heavily guarded factory is a thrill ride. Especially when a hidden microphone becomes visible and nearly ruins the whole operation. The footage they end up getting of thousands of shark fins drying out on the rooftop is sickening and unforgettable. It’s this kind of guerilla filmmaking which made The Cove so gripping, so it’s unfortunate there wasn’t more of it here.

Alternately, the film shifts gears with a completely different topic (a frequent occurrence in this film). Our attention turns toward carbon dioxide emissions. Because the naked eye can’t see carbon dioxide the crew assembles a car with a fancy camera setup; one regular camera that captures what humans can see, and a special camera that uses a color filter to show carbon dioxide. When they take a spin down a busy street, their cameras detect an extraordinary amount of the greenhouse gas. But there is some irony in this. After all, they are emitting their own carbon dioxide by driving around to film. But Psihoyos intelligently points this out admitting, “The worst thing you can do for the environment is to make a film about it.” But perhaps leaving a carbon footprint and using large amounts of energy resources for creating a film about limiting them is a worthwhile trade-off to educate the public.

Visually speaking, Racing Extinction is an absolute delight. Far too often environmental documentaries result in data overload by stuffing itself with statistics and alarming information. But Psihoyos understands the best way to get a message across in our visual society is to display it. Beyond presenting some nifty infographics and animated sequences (a timeline of the earth represented as a 24-hour clock stands out), Psihoyos heads to the streets (again) to project informational video onto the Empire State building. It’s a brilliant and effective way to get information in front of crowds.

The biggest problem with Racing Extinction is that it tries to cover too much ground, casting a wide net around a range of topics such as our reliance on meat, shark fin soup popularity, emissions of carbon dioxide, underground methane gas, manta ray and whale hunting, and the decreasing plankton population. Because of that, the film feels sporadic. It jumps from one topic to the next often without enough time to develop a full story. Furthermore, nearly everything in the film has already taken place and has been widely reported by news outlets. This makes “the findings” a little less satisfying if you’ve been paying attention to news headlines and with each victory it feels like it’s giving itself a pat on the back.

Though the goal of Racing Extinction is to make the general population aware of the mass extinction going on right now—and for that reason the documentary largely succeeds. It makes very clear that we are our own worst enemy. Humans are to blame for the problems and we’re the ones who need to fix them.

But now that we know of all these problems then the question becomes, how do we prevent extinction? Throughout the film, I wondered if it was going to provide any solutions, or if were merely going to focus on the issues. It’s not until the ending credits that the film provides suggestions to these problems; we could stop buying endangered animal products, eat less meat, or install solar panels on our homes. Thankfully Racing Extinction knows doing all of them is simply not feasible, so it encourages viewers to pick one. The ball is in our court.

Back in 1966, French critic-turned-filmmaker François Truffaut published the book Cinema According to Hitchcock, which was comprised of conversations he had with Alfred Hitchcock about his career. In a new documentary about these famous conversations, Kent Jones establishes the context for the time period when this took place, citing how Hitchcock wasn’t considered a serious artist by the general public. Even up to the release of Psycho, Hitchcock was known more as a light entertainer than a true master of the craft. At times, Hitchcock even wondered if he was stuck doing the same types of films and not experimenting more; he spent most his time cemented in the studio system of Hollywood, using his name to sell films as well as superstar actors like Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant, and James Stewart.

Truffaut set out to fix the misconception of Hitchcock as entertainer first and artist second. He promised to expose Hitchcock’s cinematic greatness to the world through in-depth analysis of his filmography, and the book was a major hit. Not only did it help shape people’s perception of Hitchcock as a serious filmmaker, it became a bible for film buffs. To this day, the book is still considered to be the holy grail for aspiring filmmakers, or anyone interested in frame-by-frame breakdowns of how the Master of Suspense approached film.

Jones interviews an elite group of modern directors including Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, Wes Anderson, Olivier Assayas, Peter Bogdanovich, and Richard Linklater about how influential Hitchcock is to their career. Listening to these auteurs gush over Hitchcock is inspiring—each respects him for their own reasons, but all seem to agree that it’s his ability to frame every shot perfectly that sets him apart.

Hitchcock provides a ton of captivating thoughts on what makes things work in film. He explains how not showing or saying something can make a scene operate better and brilliantly defends the implausible tendencies of his own films, saying “Logic is dull.” But perhaps the most fascinating insight of the entire conversation was listening to Hitchcock describe the importance of manipulating time. He claims the most powerful feature cinema offers is the ability to control time. Fincher echoes this sentiment by describing directing as simply controlling moments that should occur really fast and making them slow, and making moments that should occur really slow and making them fast. It’s true when you think about it. Compressing or expanding moments of time is indeed what makes cinema such a powerful medium for storytelling. The whole segment is a great example of the documentary supplementing a subject covered in the book.

It’s when Hitchcock/Truffaut devotes a large section on praising Vertigo that the film becomes a little off-balance. Jones details how poorly Vertigo did when it was first released, then contrasts it with how much of an impact it has on today’s filmmakers. This ends up being more of a puff piece for the film and Hitchcock instead of allowing the Master of Suspense to explain things himself. Some of the best parts of the film are listening to Hitchcock defend his decisions and talk about what he thought didn’t work (it’s fascinating to hear Hitchcock suggest how he’d fix a scene in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows). But the film often glosses over these moments in favor of celebrating Hitchcock for reasons which are mostly known at this point. And while it’s completely understandable that Hitch would receive the majority of attention, fans of Truffaut may be let down by how little his work is covered.

Truffaut revised the original book in 1985, updating it with conversations he had regarding the final stages of both their careers. With Hitchcock/Truffaut, Jones creates an unofficial third revision; offering additional perspectives from contemporary filmmakers who assure us that Hitchcock is every bit as relevant today as he was back then. However, the film isn’t nearly as essential as the book it’s based off, though it serves as a starting point for those who haven’t read the book and a modest companion piece for those who have.

In the riveting, feverish documentary Democrats, two strong-willed lawyers with vastly different motivations clash heads, wrestling to find common ground in order to usher Zimbabwe from authoritarian rule into a new era of democracy. Over the doc’s three-year filming period, director Camilla Nielsson captured one of the most critical political processes in the country’s history: As a result of Zimbabwe’s botched 2008 elections, long-time dictator Robert Mugabe’s party, ZANU-PF, was forced to coalesce with their rival party, the Movement for Democratic Change, to forge Zimbabwe’s 2013 constitution. Party warfare was inevitable. Tensions were high. Foreheads were sweaty (partly because of the political madness, but mostly due to the fact that Zimbabwean politicians wear heavy suits under the hot African sun).

The messy, fraught negotiations (which led to unrest and violence in the streets), were spearheaded by Paul Mangwana (ZANU-PF), and Douglas Mwonzora (MDC), party-appointed speakers and mobilizers who throughout the arduous drafting process had the weight of a combustible country bearing down on their shoulders. Luckily for Nielsson, she caught a lot of the high-stakes drama on film, gaining unprecedented access into the firestorm. It’s a scary, often wickedly funny experience to watch Mangwana and Mwonzora (it took me a while to get their names straight) try to keep their heads about them during the barrage pressure-cooker scandals and debates. It’s like watching a twisted human experiment on the horrific effects of politics: This is your brain; this is your brain on diplomacy *sizzle*. Any questions?

Democrats is in fact fueled by one major question: How can Mangwana and Mwonzora, co-chairpersons representing two parties with radically different perspectives, work together to write “the second most important book after the Bible?” On a personal level, they’re a stark contrast in temperament: Mwonzora, a seasoned human rights lawyer, is a cool-headed pragmatist and strategist who’s more than a little jaded by the manipulative machinations of the larger political landscape (“a nation of great pretenders”, his assistant calls their countrymen); Mangwana is more of a baby-kisser, a genial campaign leader who transforms Jekyll and Hyde-style into a tantrum-throwing terror when negotiations don’t go his way.

The constitution project seemed all but doomed at the outset, with the two parties poring and tussling over every line of the draft so incessantly the process was postponed for years. The climate was harshest for Mangwana and Mwonzora specifically, whose integrity was constantly scrutinized by the public, the slightest sniff of political foul play by either of them being as good as a death sentence to the Zimbabwean people. They each bit their bullets: Mangwana was accused of conspiring to get a line in the constitution that would effectively oust Mogabe, his party leader; Mwonzora was thrown into prison without food or water for three days on dubious charges.

Hampering the process more than anything was the game of terror and intimidation played by ZANU-PF. Hundreds of public consultations (basically town hall meetings) were conducted across the country to gauge public opinion and steer the constitution-writing process. Evidence emerged that ZANU-PF supporters were being bused into public hearings where the MDC should have shown strong, and that ZANU-PF war veterans were being used to intimidate people into making choices. The footage of the hearings, which too often devolved into violent riots, is breathless.

Nielsson tells her story with clarity, the presentation largely unadorned. There are little to no talking head interviews because her two subjects are never at a loss for words in their natural environment. The production feels tasteful and organic, to the point where you get so wrapped up you forget it’s a production at all. There’s an evolution of respect between Mwonzora and Mangwana that’s slow-going but encouraging and powerful by film’s end. It’s a sign that, with perseverance, empathy, and a boatload of patience, the past can be put aside for the good of a more enlightened future. Hanging over all of that good stuff like a dark cloud, though, is the bitter reality that diplomacy and grassroots mobilizing are often needlessly dangerous affairs that can get innocent people killed.

This review was originally published as part of our coverage for the 2015 San Francisco International Film Festival.

Peggy Guggenheim is a familiar name to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of 20th-century art. Her name is linked with dozens of the century’s most notable artists and writers. She was often directly responsible for discovering them, being the first to show their paintings, to buy them, to sell them, to believe in a painter or sculptor. It is safe to say that without her, the shape of 20th-century art would be much, much different. And the story of her life is nearly as fascinating as the long list of artists she helped foster and flourish. But the new documentary of her life, Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland, for all its encyclopedic knowledge of her life, never really seems to discover the woman at its core.

More than anything else, what makes Peggy Guggenheim so interesting is that it is built around never before released interviews Guggenheim recorded with her authorized biographer Jacqueline Bograd Weld in 1978 and ’79. Hearing Guggenheim candidly recount the many affairs, sexual escapades, and hardships of her life is refreshing and often deeply humorous. And when Guggenheim gets going, discussing a relationship, or the friendly gossips of Jackson Pollack or Samuel Beckett, it’s hard not to be engrossed.

The film gets rolling with a very long and convoluted history of the Guggenheim family. The details are fascinating, especially considering the impact the family would later have on the art world, but although much of the information revolves around the instability in young Peggy’s home, not much is ever done with the facts over the course of the film. Sure, links can quite easily be drawn between certain aspects of Guggenheim’s life and her childhood, but the film doesn’t seem interested in doing any sort of follow up work. Rather, it strives to plod ever forward, carefully tracing the linear progression of Peggy’s life.

In this respect, the film succeeds. Guggenheim’s life was rich with famous encounters, anecdotes, and art (lots and lots of art). Starting in her 20s, Guggenheim became enthralled with art and the artist’s life. She bounced between New York, Paris, and London, shacking up with artists, picking up pointers, and generally living the life that many would dream of. She opened numerous galleries and collected work by a who’s who of 20th-century painters (many of whom were not yet recognized by the establishment, even derided). And as the world fell into the chaos and terror of World War Two, Peggy and her art defected Europe for New York, and fought back against the senselessness of the violence that engulfed the world.

Throughout, Guggenheim casually remarks upon her numerous affairs, often with men (and sometimes women) who would wind up being some of the greatest minds of the 20th. Like many of the expats of her generation, Peggy was sexually liberated, jumping between relationships and marriages, most of which wound up in one of her many books, like her autobiography Out Of This Century. And while some were destructive or could be seen as failures, what comes across in her interviews with Weld is her absolute joy of being free. It’s a refreshing sentiment.

But what becomes clear after a relatively short time, is that besides the new audio clips, Peggy Guggenheim doesn’t seem to want to offer much more to the conversation. It seems content to simply be a biography, peppered with moments of revelatory knowledge, but mostly stuffed with the highlights (and for good reason: there were a lot of them). Which begs the question, what should a documentary about someone do? Fully recount her life? Hone in on a single aspect or time period? And while there is no correct answer, Peggy Guggenheim feels lacking, in need of an unpacking of its titular subject, or an attempt to make something of the facts.

What lifts the doc above simply being a beat by beat notation of Guggenheim’s life is the vivid art, from a smattering of artists, collected throughout. It’s the very same work that often drove Guggenheim, and to see it on the screen while Peggy recounts one of her many intriguing stories is to better understand her, the relationship between herself and art, and the relationship between life and creation. In her direction, Immordino Vreeland puts her clearly immense knowledge of art on display, vividly bringing together (much like Guggenheim) the paintings that helped define the 20th century.

Peggy Guggenheim is undoubtedly a fascinating subject, a woman who helped to shape the artist world as we know it today, introducing many of the century’s greatest artists. But cramming a life like Guggenheim’s into an hour and a half without something central to focus on leaves Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, sharply put together as it is, feeling overstuffed and cursory; an in-depth scratching of the surface.

A documentary that unfurls itself in unexpected directions, David Shapiro’s Missing People starts out as a portrait of two different artists before turning into a mystery and, eventually, a meditation on grief and loss. Shapiro follows Martina Bratan, the eccentric director of an art gallery in New York, who has suffered from insomnia ever since her 14-year-old brother was murdered in the ‘70s. One of her obsessions is collecting the work of Roy Ferdinand, an artist from New Orleans whose paintings inspire Bratan to try and have them donated to a major museum. Travelling from New York to New Orleans, Bratan meets the late Ferdinand’s sisters (he died in 2004) and the meeting inspires her to go back and confront her brother’s grisly death. Hiring a private investigator, Bratan tries to find some closure over her brother, whose case is still unsolved.

Bratan is a captivating figure, and the structure of Shapiro’s film is intriguing in the way it branches out to include Ferdinand’s life before going back inwards to focus on Bratan. But Missing People feels somewhat light in its approach, with Shapiro leaning heavily on his documentary’s narrative rather than delving more into Bratan or the ideas and themes that arise from the subject matter. The involvement of Ferdinand, his work and family also feel a little slight at times, their purpose and involvement feeling like little more than a catalyst for Bratan’s own story. Missing People may disappoint in how little it delves beyond its compelling surface, but Shapiro’s film is still admirable in how much it pulls from Bratan’s experiences.

Unlike most of the music documentaries that have become so popular over the past few years, Mavis! is about a legendary songstress who still walks the earth and is as relevant now as she ever has been. And that’s saying something: Mavis Staples has been recording music and performing to raucous crowds for upwards of 60 years, first with her family in the Chicago-based gospel group Staple Singers in the ’60s and ’70s, and then on her own with a solo career that’s still building momentum today (she won a Grammy for her 2010 album You Are Not Alone, and her 2013 album One True Vine debuted on the Billboard 200 chart at #67, the highest debut of her career).

The film earns the exclamation point in its title by matching the spirited energy of Staples, celebrating to the high heavens that we’ve been so blessed as to have her share her gift with the rest of us. Her voice makes the earth rumble and makes the soul shake. She’s is pure magic, whether she’s singing the gospel songs from her early days, the activist anthems she belted in the ’70s, the folk music she learned from Bob Dylan himself, her eclectic Prince collaborations, or the heartfelt soul ballads off of her most recent albums. The film’s enthusiasm for Staples and her music never feels overembellished because, frankly, the lady deserves more praise than any one film could muster.

Director Jessica Edwards follows the chronology of Staples’ career starting with the formation of the Staple Singers by her musical maven of a father, warmly referred to by all of the movie’s beaming interviewees (and the rest of the world) as “Pops.” The group gained legendary status, particularly in the gospel community, by moving crowds at church performances and topping the charts with their runaway hit “I’ll Take You There” (a song used in every ’70s flashback in every civil rights movie ever). When you hear that classic first line—“I know a place….”—you know you’re taking a trip back in time. Staples recalls hearing the single on the radio for the first time and pulling the car over to the side of the road. “I had a fit,” she says with a warm grin. “I never thought I’d say I got tired of hearing my own self on the radio but…it was all over the place.”

Seeing Staples perform onstage is pure, blissful insanity. Her audiences erupt in a state of near hysteria as her voice crackles and explodes with energy, and as her bandmates explain, she never wants to stop singing. “When she starts going and people start yelling from the audience,” one of her background singers explains, “she will sing all night!” Edwards shows a sizable amount of amazing live concert footage, which is really the only one could ever paint the full picture of Staples as an artist.

Jumping at the chance to gush about their hero Mavis Staples on camera are a gaggle of music greats, including Bonnie Raitt, Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy, Steve Cropper and the late Levon Helm, who’s seen sharing an uplifting jam session with Staples before his death in 2012. Bob Dylan and Prince also have strong presences in the film due to their influence on Staples’ sound (she also throws in quickly that she had an opportunity to “smooch” Mr. Dylan, who apparently had eyes for her for years).

Watching Staples recall the ups and downs of her life and career is to watch a woman fall in love with her memories. Two things are crystal clear: Staples has more love in her than she can contain (she releases it by singing it out to the world and swinging her arms around in the air) and she loves no one more than her father. Before he died, the Staple Singers reunited after a long recording hiatus to create an album centered on him. It wasn’t released as planned, but Staples handed over the songs to Tweedy, the producer of her two latest albums. In an invaluable piece of footage, Tweedy plays her a remastered version of one of Pops’ tracks, reducing her to tears. She and Tweedy share a tight embrace, a small but enormously emotional moment that cements Mavis! as something very, very special.

Documentarian Frederick Wiseman is 85 years old. An odd stat to begin a review with, granted, but In Jackson Heights is no ordinary documentary and in thinking about it, my knee-jerk reaction is to start with something personal. With age comes experience, understanding, and a widened scope of the world around you. For all the exceptional documentaries Wiseman has been making since the ’60s, there is a weighted atmosphere in his latest one that could easily mark it as his magnum opus precisely because of all the things that come with age. Bear in mind that it’s not easy to write ‘easily’ when it comes to Wiseman, especially with the man’s latest works—the riveting At Berkley (2013) and majestic National Gallery (2014)—ranking among the best of his prolific career. But In Jackson Heights is kaleidoscopic in a most humanitarian and intimate sense; it’s the observance of beautiful forms in culture and everyday life. In this case: a bustling neighborhood in Queens, New York, one of the most culturally diverse areas in the whole world, proudly speaking 167 languages as a community. It’s the Tower of Babel converging on Roosevelt Avenue, with Wiseman’s camera observing, documenting, and eternally reflecting, and with the viewer vicariously experiencing a gamut of life’s pleasures and pains.

The documentary is an ode to the bonds of community, where the villain is an off-screen American capitalist system, and the victims are small businesses, the LGBT enclaves, and the illegal immigrants striving for the same humanitarian means of life afforded by their American neighbors. The heroes are found in the young people who create community organizations to fight the thwarted system of the BID (Business Improvement District), or those brave enough to speak up, share their stories, and forge bonds. Wiseman takes us into a commemoration gathering for a murdered Latino member of the LGBT community, Muslim prayer halls, Holocaust remembrance ceremonies in synagogues, tattoo parlors, concert halls, and gay clubs. We listen in on a conference call where bureaucratic jargon bungles the matter of redistricting schools (not to mention the implications that has on the children and the parents). We listen how a 98-year-old woman justifies her sour mood to a group of friends, in one of the many scenes that test your tear ducts (which have already been weakened earlier by a woman’s spontaneous encounter with a Christian group on the streets earlier on).

In Jackson Heights runs for over three hours, but you’re so immersed into the people’s stories, that it literally feels like half an hour. Musical interludes, from street performers and open-air concerts, punctuate the mood like a chorus in a Greek tragedy, imbibing the whole experience with a surplus of emotion and an embarrassment of cultural richness. At times, it’s the silent and bloody behind-the-scenes look at how halal meat is processed that glues us in. In others, it’s Joe’s birthday, an upstanding member of the Jackson Heights community who gets a heartfelt birthday speech from councilman Daniel Dromm. Most of all, it’s the soul-crushing stories from the trans people, illegal immigrants, and small business owners that will bulldoze you into silent submission. But, then, peeping into a classroom of would-be yellow cab drivers will have you grinning from ear to ear.

There’s hardly a misplaced frame, so formally balanced and meticulously crafted is In Jackson Heights. Exterior shots of the vibrant and colorful neighborhood are juxtaposed beautifully with the interior locales. Moments of contemplation nicely sway between long conversational stretches. And for all of life’s trials and tribulations witnessed through stories of discrimination and inhumanity spelled between the lines of fine print, there is plenty of kindness from strangers and reassuring and laugh-out-loud moments of grace and joy. If there’s one thing I feel lacking, it’s that Wiseman could’ve kept his camera a little longer on some people for an even wider spectrum. As such, one gets the impression that In Jackson Heights is a neighborhood where 167 languages are spoken, but mostly Spanish and English is heard.

Harping too much on something like that, however, is biting the hand that feeds. And Frederick Wiseman, with his experience, understanding, and widely empathetic scope, has given us an almost indescribable amount of food-for-thought. Calling In Jackson Heights important would be the biggest understatement of the year, for the greatest thing about getting so immersed with the conversations and quotidian glimpses are the little jolts (usually in the form of goose-bumps) reminding you that this is real life you’re watching. Who needs talking heads and central conflicts? Not this doc. You feel unequivocally more connected to the person next to you, and even the stranger you’ll pass by on the street the next day. And isn’t that what it’s all about?

Widely regarded as “the father of African cinema” (though he himself declined the moniker with contempt) Ousmane Sembene made waves where other filmmakers made ripples, altering the landscape of African culture and its worldwide perception via nine politically inflammatory, groundbreaking films he directed over his 38-year career. Single-minded and passionate (and decidedly stubborn and arrogant), Sembene changed the world by setting fire to injustices and stereotypes that dehumanized he and his people, though his raging crusade left his loved ones scorched as well.

Sembene’s accomplishments, influence, philosophies and moral shortcomings are examined thoroughly and artfully in Sembene!, Jason Silverman and Samba Gadjigo‘s new documentary chronicling the Senegalese icon’s unremitting fight against ignorance throughout his controversy-laden career (Sembene died in 2007 at the age of 84). Gadjigo, an educator and longtime partner and disciple of Sembene’s, narrates much of the film, conjuring memories of his late friend starting with a late-life correspondence in which Sembene gifted Gadjigo with a key to his seaside home. Camera in tow, the co-director enters the house in the present day, revealing a rotting treasury of the late director’s possessions—books, photo albums and film canisters wasting away in piles that leave Gadjigo staggered at how the man’s legacy has gone abandoned.

The son of a fisherman, Sembene served in WWII and earned a living as a dock worker in his early years. When a back injury forced him to lie belly down on a bed for months, he immersed himself in literature and became a self-made novelist. Outraged that black people had no voice in cinema, he studied film in Moscow and set out to make his own films, films concerned solely with the experiences of the sub-Saharan African people.

Without precedent and without an African film industry in place to finance his work, Sembene re-defined his destiny by using resourcefulness to build his projects from the ground up. His films gave the world its first glimpse African life through African eyes, challenging his international audiences to dispel perpetuated stereotypes about black people (his stirring drama Black Girl, following an African maid’s life on the French Riviera, was a New Wave-inspired eye-opener), though he applied the same level of scrutiny to his own government, urging his countrymen to abandon sick, antiquated traditions in the name of progress and revised notions of justice. Moolaade, his final film, is a devastating indictment on African female genital mutilation that raised awareness of the horrific practice internationally. His films were infamously banned both internationally and domestically on several occasions, though the bans arguably backfired and spread his message further and faster than his detractors could have ever predicted.

Silverman and Gadjigo provide an academic retrospective on Sembene’s work via select film clips and archival behind-the-scenes footage as well as painting a more personal, often unflattering picture of the man. His son Alain is interviewed, outlining just how big of an absentee his father really was, and his streak of unfaithfulness to his wife is briefly brought to bear. Sembene’s willingness to finish his films at any cost breached ethical boundaries regularly, from the time he intercepted funds meant for upcoming filmmakers to the frightening incident in which he subjected a little girl to emotional torture to make a scene feel more authentic. The best interviewee is Bouboucar Boris Diop, one of the younger filmmakers swindled at the hands of Sembene. He can’t deny his deep admiration for the late trailblazer, but there’s more than a smattering of residual resentment and bitterness to his testimony.

Sembene! is too dry and formal to be lovable, but it makes its point emphatically, paying tribute to a filmmaker whose pugnaciousness was both a gift and a curse. The complex, dark corners of Sembene’s life aren’t explored enough, which is ironic for a movie about an artist seeking nothing less than the whole truth. One can only wonder if Sembene would approve of Silverman and Gadjigo’s reluctance on this front.

There’s something about basements that is inherently ominous, mysterious, and—in a way—dangerous. Generally a section of a person’s home that is off-limits to those who do not live there, basements are used to house almost anything, especially anything considered taboo. Director Ulrich Seidl’s documentary In the Basement ventures into these private quarters to discover that sometimes our imagination is stranger than reality.

A pre-credits still-shot finds a man meticulously watching his pet python stalk its prey inside of a large tank. Seidl holds the shot for an uncomfortable amount of time, given that it is completely obvious what’s about to happen. As soon as the reptilian beast strikes, the title card appears, preparing viewers for a creepy journey into the underbelly of the average person’s home. Maintaining the structure of still shots of middle-aged to elderly folks sitting in their basements—sometimes in complete silence, sometimes blabbering about their interests—Seidl stays constant, which sadly ends up being the biggest downfall of the film. The unflinching stillness of the onscreen imagery becomes increasingly dull as In the Basement progresses, especially during the scenes that are bereft of dialogue. Entire sequences pass without anything particularly entertaining, informative, or otherwise worth watching occurring, and the results are downright boring. Seidl always seems on the verge of redeeming himself by showcasing another quirky character with a peculiar basement, but the moments between lack the craziness the film’s opening sequence promised.

Unfortunately, what Seidl seems to discover through his journey is that the things most people keep in their basements are mundane, uninteresting, and not especially effective subjects for a documentary. Perhaps there are people in the world who find things like shooting ranges, workout equipment, and mounted animals to be completely shocking, but these subjects are too vanilla to hold the attention of the average filmgoer. Thankfully, there are a few outliers in the film whose basements truly are unsettling. Most notably is an elderly woman who keeps realistic dolls in boxes and coddles them as if they were her own, live children. Her behavior is sincere which makes the entire sequence truly unnerving. It’s like something out of a horror film but makes a long monologue about a man’s hunting trophies seem all the more dull in comparison. Perhaps it is Seidl’s intention to provide a strong contrast from person to person, but it doesn’t work in upping the film’s overall entertainment value. It’s unclear what the filmmaker is trying to say here—if anything at all. There’s no substantial resolution; merely evidence that different people have different things in their basement.

After a long scene listening to an elderly man discuss his love of playing music—and even suffering through some of his brass instrumentals—the camera follows him deeper into his basement, where he proudly displays a collection of frightening memorabilia. It’s a stunning reveal that comes out of nowhere and leaves a lasting impression as a result. These are the kinds of moments that make In the Basement worth watching, and it’s a shame that there aren’t more of them during the film’s 85-minute running time.

One of the final moments of In the Basement shows a man who could feasibly pass as George “The Animal” Steele’s doppelgänger being subjected to some form of genital torture by a dominatrix. It’s an unpleasant scene that goes on for far too long. That really sums up the film as a whole. Some of the discoveries are truly bizarre, and undeniably captivating at first glance, but after hanging onto them for minutes at a time, the attraction is simply lost. In the Basement is filled with fascinating characters, but it never comes together cohesively, and in the end, would’ve probably worked better as a series of documentary shorts than a feature film.

With the amount of middlebrow, “journalistic” documentaries putting information first that come out of the woodwork every year to score some trophies, it’s easy to laud a documentary for being nothing more than an alternative. Praising a documentary can sometimes amount to doing a hypothetical comparison with a “bad” version of the same thing, pointing out what it doesn’t do rather than what it actually does; no talking heads, no overbearing score, no reliance on animations, no bad re-enactments, and other usual suspects when watching nonfiction. But this can be a lazy and reductive way to evaluate a film, undermining its actual achievements. A film like Laurent Bécue-Renard’s Of Men and War can easily make people fall into this trap, given its apolitical approach to a political topic. Using a vérité style that naturally brings Frederick Wiseman’s films to mind, Bécue-Renard’s film is initially surprising in how it places emotions—along with the act of confronting emotions—at the forefront. And by doing so, Bécue-Renard creates a powerful glimpse at the struggles of dealing with PTSD.

Bécue-Renard spent over six years filming Of Men and War, starting off by gaining access to The Pathway Home, a therapy centre in California that helps soldiers suffering from PTSD. This included filming the home’s intense group therapy sessions, where veterans (mostly from Iraq and/or Afghanistan) graphically describe their horrors from war that still haunt them. These sequences dominate the film with how harrowing and disturbing descriptions of death and destruction. The stories they tell tend to have a cinematic quality in the way they describe them, but it’s the graphic, realistic details that stick with them. One soldier talks about noticing a young man as a potential threat and taking him out, then sheds tears as he remembers part of the man’s brain falling on his boot as the body was getting put into a body bag. He remembers the body’s eye—the only one remaining—staring at him. While he fights through his tears, it’s apparent that he’s also holding back pure anger at the same time.

What’s interesting about these sequences, and why their impact is so strong, is the way Bécue-Renard films his subjects to highlight the despair of their situation. The soldiers sit around a table with the group therapist moderating the session, but Bécue-Renard sits behind the therapist. The therapist’s face is rarely shown, with the camera honing in on close-ups of the soldiers instead. The composition of the therapy scenes only heightens the isolation of these men, emphasizing their feelings of suffering in solitude. When Bécue-Renard cuts away to a reaction shot it’s only to the other soldiers in the room, the only other people in the room who can have empathy or an understanding of what everyone else is going through. Bécue-Renard’s direction shows off how impossible it is for viewers to be able to fully comprehend these soldiers’ pain while observing them with a distance that feels both justified and respectful.

Beyond the therapy sessions, scenes of the soldiers back home trying to live their daily lives add moments of levity and anxiety, depending on how well they’re handling a social or familial situation (when one soldier and his wife try to be friendly with another couple at a bar, it’s crushing to see how hard he’s trying to just act sociable). Bécue-Renard only focuses on the soldiers who have wives and/or children when he takes his camera away from The Pathway Home, a choice that feels deliberate in showcasing how high the stakes are for some of the subjects. Placed next to the therapy sessions, the scenes of what can sometimes look like basic family life take on a new context, framing every action or interaction as a constant struggle. Yet Of Men and War, while unflinching in its observation of the hardships that come with trying to deal with and potentially move on from intense trauma, provides a hopeful (and realistic) outlook. It shows the power and necessity of openness and communication with the healing process, and how the simple act of trying to better oneself is sometimes all it takes to make it happen.

Lifelong baseball lover Eugene Corr’s inspiring documentary  how  follows the lives of an inner city youth baseball team in Oakland, Calif. and their coach, Roscoe Bryant. As a way to provide hope and mentorship to the children in his violent neighborhood of Ghost Town, Bryant founded the Oakland Royals team in 2005. Over in Havana, Cuba, another coach, Nicolas Reyes, has been grooming a team of his own. The two coaches organize a game between the two teams to take place in Cuba and worlds collide as the American youths learn to adapt to Cuban culture. Close friendships are made and life lessons are learned, though Corr’s film also covers the long, hard road coach Roscoa had to getting his team to Cuba.

I spoke to Eugene and Roscoe in San Francisco, where they were promoting the film and its screening tonight at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland. For more info on how to watch and support the film, visit ghosttowntohavana.com

Richmond is a Bay Area city that hasn’t gotten almost any big screen time before. I like that you delve a little bit into its history. I had no idea.
Eugene: There’s such a rich history and we just barely touch on it. There’s another film right now, Romeo Is Bleeding, that drills down even deeper into the history of Richmond. But there is a rich history with my father and the baseball team he coached for many years.

Talk about the transformation of Richmond from the ’50s to the ’80s.
Eugene: When I was a kid in the ’50s and into the ’60s, even into the ’70s, Richmond and Oakland were still booming industrial centers. They were labor towns, they were tough towns. I was a factory worker, forklift driver, steel worker, auto worker, crane operator. Around ’73 was when the city was really starting to decline, and I transitioned into film. Most people in the Bay Area don’t know the history of Richmond. It wasn’t like the Bay Area of today.

In those days, baseball was king. From Richmond to Oakland, so many great baseball players came from there—Curt Flood, Vada Pinson, Frank Robinson. They were great ballplayers, Hall of Fame ballplayers. Frank Robinson was the first black manager. They transformed the face of the game. There’s a whole East Bay history here that, with the decline of industry, faded away. I don’t know how many teams Oakland has now, but they used to have scores of youth baseball teams. Levels of participation for inner-city kids back then were much greater than they are now.

Oakland and San Francisco have been going through some pretty drastic transformations over the past few years.
Roscoe: I’m not happy with the changes. West Oakland has become gentrification central. I’ve seen a lot of long-term residents leave the community. There’s a housing crisis right now, and nobody’s really making a lot of noise about it. Out goes the old and in comes the new. In the last ten years, I’ve seen my neighborhood change dramatically. Houses that couldn’t be sold before because they’re in a drug zone are going like hotcakes right now. Ten years ago, the dogs in our neighborhood were pit bulls—now you see a lot of chihuahuas. [laughs] A lot of families that have been there for generations are leaving now. It’s breaking my heart.

Like is said in the movie, Roscoe’s work may not create a lot of jobs, but it gives people hope, which to me is more important than anything during this city transformation.
Roscoe: I enjoy what I do. I really enjoy working with these kids. Sometimes when I’m working I don’t realize that I’m giving these kids hope and building them into better human beings. I just enjoy it. We have our ups and downs—some days you just shake your head, others your heart explodes with joy. I had a kid who went 0-80 the entire season. He couldn’t hit nothin’. We get into our first playoff game, we’re down one run, there are two outs, and guess who comes to bat? Every kid on the team, the parents, they all went, “Oh no!” People started putting stuff in their bags, ready to leave. The kid gets a double, and we win the game. I live for this. He’ll carry that one occasion for the rest of his life.

Eugene: So many of the kids have been surrounded by death and hardship and enormous losses. That kid is never going to remember the 0-80. He’s going to remember that one double.

There were two moments in the movie that sort of stopped my heart. One was when Roscoe talks about a bullet getting lodged in his son’s mattress.
Roscoe: Shootings in my neighborhood were very common. Most of the houses had gotten shot up, but they never shot us up. The bullet in the mattress came from a shooting a block away. It traveled a whole block, came through my house, whizzed by my daughter’s head. If my son had been standing up, the bullet would have got him. It whizzed over his head and lodged into the mattress. We’re not gang bangers. We’re not involved in any drug trade, none of that. We just live in this community. It taught me how quickly our lives can be taken. You don’t have to be in the game to be a victim of it. I’m just glad nothing happened. We got rid of that mattress after we filmed that scene.

Eugene: His house got shot up half a dozen times while we were shooting. Just bullets flying in the neighborhood. His car got hit, the front of his house got hit.

Roscoe: It happens so much, you just put it in the back of your mind.

The second moment that got me is when you’re talking to one of the boys, Chris, a couple of years after the Cuba game. He’s getting straight A’s, and he says he’s doing it for his little sister to be a good role model. That’s amazing to me because it shows that Roscoe is molding these kids to be mentors themselves.
Eugene: That’s a deep bond he feels toward his little sister. I love it. He was a victim of all this stuff, and you see him begin to take agency and control his life. He’s doing good things.

Roscoe: I saw him just recently. He’ll come down to Ghost Town every now and then. It’s beautiful to watch Chris grow. You can see when some of these kids, because of the way they’re growing up, are going down that same road. I’m glad Chris played baseball for me, but I’m also glad his mom moved him out of Ghost Town. He was definitely on-track to be gang banging or following the steps of others he knew. He was definitely going down that path. To watch him grow and be this mentor to his sister meant a lot to me too. Me and Chris knocked heads a couple times, but he’s a wonderful kid.

Baseball coaches, in addition to the kids’ mentors and parents, are really ushering these boys into manhood via this sport everyone loves so much.
Eugene: I think baseball is a slow game, and to learn it requires a relationship with a coach. If it’s a good, positive coach like Roscoe who encourages effort, the kid learns that, if he keeps trying, he gets better. Roscoe’s strong and respected, which I think is essential to these kids. Not anybody could be a coach to these kids. It’s valuable that he’s somebody from the neighborhood who can relate. But baseball is such a joyous game. It’s not over in 60 minutes. There’s a promise of immortality—if you keep hitting, you could play forever. There’s an open-ended nature to it that’s quite beautiful.

Roscoe: I think baseball sets kids up for life. It gives them so many life skills. It’s a slow game, so you need to learn patience and perseverance. You also need social skills. If you want to be productive, you have to get along with each other. Baseball’s also a game of failure. If you hit three out of ten times, that’s a 300 hitter, which actually makes you a stud. But you failed the other seven times. I can’t go to my job and do three out of ten things well. [laughs] I won’t have a job much longer. Baseball teaches you to keep trying, how to deal with failure.

In 2013, I saw the very engaging documentary Plimpton!, based on the legendary literary journalist George Plimpton, who put himself right in the middle of his stories, like the time he joined an NFL team and told the story in a way no outsider could. But director Ryan Mullins’ documentary on Ghanese journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas takes this sort of immersive journalism up a few notches on the stakes ladder. Anas works directly with police in placing himself undercover, where he infiltrates prostituion rings, illegal abortion clinics, and religious cults all for the sake of getting the information out to the people and spurring on social change. His methodologies are controversial—not many journalists place themselves in dangerous situations each time they write—but no one can argue with the power of his stories. He’s like a real-life Clark Kent, except we actually occasionally get to see him write a story.

The filmmakers were clearly going for this larger-than-life superhero angle when focusing their lens on Anas, who takes on a series of “missions” through a mixture of formal recording during the planning stages and hidden cameras while undercover. This persona is built up with street interviews (“He can vanish at any time! He can fly!”) and a dramatic montage at the film’s onset, where he gets a prestigious nod of approval from TED Talks, where he’s shown giving a speech, and President Barack Obama, who mentions him in a speech of his own.

But the film isn’t quite as exciting as the hype.

None of the missions feel terribly dangerous. And, no, I’m not criticizing a lack of violence, but the film’s tone, which at times doesn’t seem in line with the gravity of the situation. The opening scene, where Anas and detectives capture a man who’s raped more than 12 children, seems bizarrely light. Anas is first shown in a van on a cellphone reveling with someone, “I’m got him. Yeeeeessss. Exciting!” To be followed by actually taunting the captured man in the van. “The kids used to say, ‘One day you’ll be arrested,’” he says, smugly. “This is the Day.” It really kind of rubbed me the wrong way. If you’re going for a superhero comparison, you need to balance it out with a little humility: Batman never sat in the back of the Batmobile talking about how cool the catch was. When we follow this scene with a visit to a school where he’s retelling his capers like a teen remembering his glory days on the high school football team, I almost gave up on this film for good.

Don’t get me wrong; I blame the somewhat cocky tone entirely on the film’s editing. Anas’ award-winning journalism is impressive. The missions, which we get to see from start to end, seem well-planned and carefully executed. And, most importantly, Anas is dealing with some very serious human-rights violations, saving lives and putting away very despicable men. He deserves to be the subject of a documentary. I think the well-meaning steps to build up the hype of “Anas, the unstoppable” just lost their footing a little. But, somehow, even with the superhero comparisons, we’re confronted with some surprisingly slow passages. The same mission planning I just commended actually makes up the bulk of the documentary, and when interwoven with additional interviews, sometimes it’s easy to forget what mission we’re planning for next. To compound the issue, the conversations aren’t always easy to follow due to the thick accents of interviewees.

But that’s nitpicking. The true problem here is that no one has a face. A visit to Anas’ hometown doesn’t reveal more about the mystery man other than the fact that he used to sell chameleons as a kid—an appropriate metaphor for a man who is constantly adapting to new situations. But it’s hardly revelatory. Every human being has motivations and weaknesses. We never penetrate the surface of Anas, the man. We also don’t get to know any of the criminals beyond their charges on paper. The undercover footage we watch alongside Anas doesn’t capture the actual ringleaders often, let alone their crimes. Instead, we get a lot of shaky footage of large groups of people and the outdoors, with the occasional brief one-on-one interview. As a result, each arrest feels a bit rushed: crime and capture, without those moments to feel invested in between.

We do get to spend more time on the last mission, a religious cult guilty of a slew of sex crime violations, and the payoff here works for the very reason I’m describing: We finally get a human face when filmmakers track down a 13-year-old girl and her mother. When she tells her story of being sexually assaulted by men who claimed she was possessed, her mother’s face turns from grief to shame when the girl says her mother also believed she was possessed.

This girl’s five-minute appearance steals the show. We needed a dozen more of these moments. These are the people Anas’ stories are truly aimed at illuminating. The film focuses too much on the James Bond elements. Sure it’s hard, even impossible, to get the stories from these people living in isolated conditions and who have been brainwashed and traumatized. But actually relaying those stories is probably why Anas’s stories are engaging—and why this documentary ultimately falls short.

Originally published as part of our Hot Docs 2015 coverage.

I have a rule to make no concerted effort to familiarize myself with the source material of a film before watching it. While there can be value in comparing a film to its source material, in the end, a film should be judged based on its own merits, not as a derivative of something else. Other than watching previous installments of a film franchise before settling into the current chapter (because sequels, at times, can require their predecessors be considered for things like familiarity of greater story/character arcs), I rarely make an exception to this rule. But for Stephen Winter’s Jason and Shirley, a bio-docu-drama fabricating stories from behind the scenes of a famous interview, I made such an exception.

The first two title cards combine to establish the past:

“On December 3, 1966, Oscar-winning filmmaker Shirley Clarke invited Jason Holliday, a black, middle-aged man to her Chelsea Hotel penthouse in New York City. She filmed him telling colorful stories from his turbulent life for 12 hours. This footage became ‘Portrait of Jason’ (1967), a groundbreaking documentary hailed worldwide for its unflinching look at race, sexuality, and the nature of truth.”

What follows for the next 79 minutes is a wholly fictionalized story of what went on behind the scenes during that 12-hour marathon filming session.

While those title cards are accurate, particularly the “unflinching look” statement, they don’t begin to capture the might of Jason’s 105-minute on-camera performance. And it is a performance, at least at first, until it becomes something heavier, something deeper and more impactful, something that brings Jason to tears. That’s when it becomes real. From behind the camera, Shirley directs the hell out of Jason, with a combination of alcohol and marijuana mixed with verbal interaction that ranges from coaxing to goading, even when Jason is obviously exhausted and (at times) ready to leave. Also goading him from offscreen is Carl Lee, a theater actor, frequent collaborator with Shirley, and friend of Jason. It is riveting filmmaking, something simultaneously mesmerizing and almost completely unbelievable, yet something that surely requires multiple viewings to truly take it all in.

And now I’ve spent a paragraph in a review of one film to explain another film, which simply shouldn’t be necessary. This is the first problem with Jason and Shirley—it requires existing knowledge of its subject to be understood, even on a basic level. Watching this film without having seen the source material turns this film into a pointless presentation.

Assuming you have seen the original, in Jason and Shirley, Jason is played by co-screenwriter Jack Waters mostly as an impersonation of the real Jason Holliday, who was quite the character, and Waters is fine. (Had I not seen the original, though, I doubt I would have believed such a “character” could exist in real life. Had YouTube existed in the 1960s, he would have been a star.) He’s presented here as clamoring for fame and fortune, a vibe I got watching the original. Shirley is played by fellow co-screenwriter Sarah Schulman, and her acting task a little more challenging than Waters’.

As written, Shirley is a heartless manipulator, constantly searching for ways to get Jason to turn off the Jason Character and speak to her camera as the Jason Person. She’s something of a Dr. Frankenstein in this sense, using the promise of notoriety to lure Jason in front of her camera, which creates a (showbiz) monster she later struggles to control. And she tries hard to control him, using the substances she already has in her arsenal, calling down the thunder for stronger stuff, and using sensitive points from Jason’s past to get a reaction from him (his relationship with his father, his incarceration, the time he was raped). Shirley even goes so far as to tell Carl (Orran Farmer, the real acting standout of the film) that she wants to “break” Jason. She might be a director, but she is written and portrayed here as an enemy interrogator using life-threatening manipulation to get what she wants out of her subject.

It’s no wonder the estate of Shirley Clarke neither authorized nor endorsed this film—a fact stated in a title card buried deep in the closing credits, a long time after many viewers will have stopped paying attention.

This is the second, more serious problem with the film: it’s fictional status means the filmmakers could have done anything they wanted to, and this is what they chose to film—a fabricated and unflattering characterization of a real person disguised as a documentary about the making of her film. The fact that the filmmakers could have put in the time and effort to assemble an actual documentary but instead chose to create this from scratch puts a taint on the film that can’t be ignored. Yes, they protect themselves with that late title card about the Clarke estate, along with another buried card that states, “This film is a work of fiction and is not intended to be a true or exact account of actual people or events,” but that doesn’t mean they were responsible, only cautious.

The filming style is practically an afterthought at this point, although it is still worth mentioning. It’s shot in 4:3 on what looks like VHS, complete with random discoloration and tracking issues, all of which makes for interesting stylistic choices considering the film takes place in 1966. It’s also filmed from multiple cameras and angles and never are the characters aware of their presence. Despite this odd, time-fractured feel, the presentation style is fun, harkening back to the days when tech prices dropped so amateur “filmmakers” could tell their own stories and circulate the tapes.

Jason and Shirley is a poorly-conceived, poorly-executed drama posing as a documentary. It’s a work of fiction that flaunts itself in front of the truth on which it’s based, a truth it never seeks to honor or expand upon, only pivot from for its own gain. With its found-footage feel and VHS veneer, Jason and Shirley is, at best, incomprehensible without first knowing Portrait of Jason, and at worst it’s a tabloid drama. Overall, it is not a film to be judged on its own merits, but rather a frivolous companion piece better relegated to the extras section of a DVD release.

After I came down from the McKellen high that had overtaken my body for a good couple of days, I got back into movie-watching mode and watched a pair of very different documentaries MVFF had to offer. The first was a film I had a deep personal investment in, Kent Jones’ Hitchcock/Truffaut, based on the eminently popular interview book of the same name. The subject matter of An Act of Love struck a chord with me as well, dealing with the controversial Methodist Church trials surrounding Rev. Frank Schaefer’s officiation of his gay son’s wedding. Although I had emotional (and dare I say, religious) ties to both films, only one rang true on a cinematic level.

Master Meets Grandmaster

Occupying the bookshelves of most serious movie lovers, “Hitchcock/Truffaut” is indeed one of my prized possessions. It’s a print version of a week-long, in-depth exchange about the filmmaking process Francois Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock shared in 1962 that’s influenced virtually every prominent filmmaker since the book’s release. The documentary based on the book, directed by Kent Jones, couples archival photos and audio from the interview and does its best to make us feel like we’re sat in the room with Hitch, Truffaut and their translator. It is a pleasure to hear the legendary filmmakers’ voices and laugh along as they share laughs with each other, and the insights Truffaut mines out of his hero are as enlightening today as ever. A highlight is a moment of master/pupil critique in which Hitchcock suggests a pivotal scene in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows would have been better played had the characters not said a word. To hear these two talk so candidly and in such detail about their craft is as big a thrill on-screen as it is on paper, and as a cinematic extension of the book, Hitchcock/Truffaut lives up to its name. Jones also interviews several big names in the industry (Peter Bogdanovich, Wes Anderson, David Fincher, and Richard Linklater to name just a few) about the genius of Hitchcock, and their words of adulation are terrific, extra perspectives on Hitchcock’s work that you won’t find in the printed version.

Love in a Loveless Place

Following the defrocking by the United Methodist Church of minister Frank Schaefer after officiating his gay son’s wedding, An Act of Love provides a thorough outlining of the political maneuverings, biblical technicalities, and emotional traumas that stemmed from the controversy (which wasn’t limited to Schaefer’s case). The divide in the church created by a fundamental disagreement about gay marriage and the personal stories surrounding it are heartbreaking and inspirational, but the presentation of these stories by director Scott Sheppard is decidedly uncinematic, with talking-head interviews and archival footage strung together in an unsurprising, textbook way. A greater sense of narrative propulsion and shape would have made the film a more engaging watch, though there are a few pleasant departures, like a scene in which Schaefer and his wife return to their old apartment in Germany and laugh about an old indoor palm tree they decorated with Christmas ornaments one year, to the confusion of his mother. The movie’s not flawed in any major way, and its subjects, while not especially charismatic, are impassioned across the board.

We’re back with another packed show as we welcome filmmaker Evgeny Afineefsky to talk about his documentary Winter On Fire. Bernard and Zach go over the standouts of the still-rolling 53rd New York Film Festival as well as talk about this past summer’s disappointing string of summer blockbusters. The boys also discuss actors whose movies they’ll watch no matter what and share their Indie Picks of the Week.

Topics

• Indie Picks of the Week (2:13)
• NYFF (6:46)
• Summer Blockbuster Rage (27:36)
• Actors We Follow (43:53)
• Evgeny Afineefsky (55:02)

WTI Articles Referenced in the Podcast

Carol NYFF Review
Microbe & Gasoline NYFF Review
The Walk Review

Once one gets past Laurie Anderson’s peculiar narration, replete with Shatner Pauses, one will find much to munch on in the experimental artist’s dreamy documentary, Heart of a Dog. The mind might even wrap itself around the notion of oneness itself. Drinking in Anderson’s process as a well of sweet, captivating connectivity can spark thoughts on what makes us who we are, the most philosophical question of all. “Where is the brilliant philosophy?” repeats one of the stroboscopic title cards, along with a line that had a profound effect on me the moment I read it: “I had promised my heart so many things I had never delivered. It lived inside me now, suspicious and small.” Relate to the power of Anderson’s poetry, and you’ll start thinking the answer to that first question is being projected right in your face.

Anderson weaves her thoughts together like a person in deep thought, and unpacking her digressions is like Christmas come early for dreamers, dog lovers, and artists. As the title implies, much of the documentary is Anderson’s expression of tender love and inquisitive curiosity about her Rat Terrier, Lolabelle. What she must be thinking about when a hawk flies down towards her. The activities she did when she became blind. It’s an inquisition of a relationship, which in turn grows tangents that connect Homeland Security motto’s with something Wittgenstein might write, the immediate post-9/11 mood in Anderson’s native New York, and her love of Francisco Goya’s ‘The Dog’ from his Black Paintings series. Towering above everything is a sense of closure (not spoiling it!), which steeps the whole project in a tall glass of melancholic tonic.

Anderson has a lot of fun with the aesthetics as well, which makes Heart of a Dog all the more attractive. Superimposing Goya’s “gold void” over a variety of personal images, for example. Or remembering a dear friend who died much too young, with animated hammers hammering in his ears after his brain had already flatlined. It begins with the artist recalling a dream she once had, and ends with a precious memory regained; everything in between is an avant-garde hybrid of style, braided in deeply personal and profoundly pensive reflections. The only obstacle for total immersion is, ironically, Anderson’s own narration. Get past that, though, and you’ll be swimming in the lakes of a riveting, multiplex mind. So refreshing.

2015, if nothing else, will be remembered as the year of the climate change film. Documentaries and narrative features have long been interested in the subject, but never before has there been such a proliferation (the trend, of course, fits neatly in with the zeitgeist of the moment). And while many of these films have been enlightening, engaging affairs, the sheer quantity assures that not all of them can reach the same water mark. Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything is an example of the latter.

Based upon the international bestseller of the same name by Klein, This Changes Everything is a globe hopping, gorgeously rendered call to action docu-essay. The film opens with the unimaginable deformity that is the Alberta tar sands, the world’s largest oil grab to date, the sort of environmental nightmare that’s worthy of an entire movie, rather than just the segment in this doc. There we meet indigenous locals who reside down river and have been suffering from the inevitable spills and leaks. Heartbreakingly, all they want is to simply be allowed to go onto their own lands to asses the extent of the damage, but time and again their access is refused.

Before much is resolved or truly even textured on the Alberta front, This Changes Everything takes us south to Montana where a young couple in the Powder River Basin are attempting to hold onto their goat farm, battling the encroach of oil fields and pipelines, only to have a spill decimate a portion of their land. Also in Montana are members of the Northern Cheyenne tribe who are attempting to rely entirely on renewable energy.

But again the film jumps, first to Greece where a small community is in a fierce and complicated battle with Canadian mining and drilling companies attempting to exploit the economic crisis. Then it jumps to Andhra Pradesh, where villagers are fighting off a proposed coal-fired power plant that will destroy their wetlands.

Each of these massive, engrossing issues are truncated and packed together with an unwieldy and almost disparate narration by Klein that attempts to reimagine the world’s climate crisis as one of “story.” So, while many films are hacking away at the problem, finding smaller stories as a way in, it is intriguing to see an attempt to completely reimagine the root of the issue (without disregarding scientific fact, of course). The idea is alluring at first, but it falls apart almost instantly and becomes an almost childishly simplistic look at a massive global issue. It offers nothing new to the conversation at all, except to say that perhaps climate change is a good thing because it will make us do something radical. Or something like that.

To say the film around the narration is great might be a bit of an overstatement. Lewis doesn’t seem to have much of an eye for tension in the present (though much of the archive footage is impressive). But, somewhere, beneath the painful and obvious narration that never once adds to anything, is a decent film that seeks to highlight the David and Goliath battles that individuals and communities are waging around the world corporations and governments. Klein’s narration muddles almost everything, though. At best she offers up confusing tidbits about narrative and story, and at worst she makes climate change about herself and everything she (wealthy, white) has learned about the human spirit while galavanting through several impoverished nations.

If nothing else, the film is superbly gorgeous. Lensed by Mark O Fearghail, every location is richly textured and vibrantly alive. And the music by David Wall and Adam White is lush, lending an emotional hand to the film when it fails to mine any of the ripe moments it sets up.

This Changes Everything is by no means an unwatchable film. It’s another necessary endeavor, and another attempt to turn an impossible problem into a manageable issue. And despite its flaws it ends on a beautiful note, with a montage of the many courageous marches and rallies all over the world that urge those in power to finally act on climate change.

It only takes a few minutes before (T)ERROR grabs viewers, pulling them right into its riveting story as it unfolds in real-time. What gives (T)ERROR its sense of immediacy and high level of tension is that directors Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe have done something no other filmmakers have done before: they somehow managed to get involved in an FBI counter terrorism operation, following an informant as he goes on a mission for the US government.

The informant is Saeed “Shariff” Torres, a 63-year-old man working as a cook in a school cafeteria. Despite his long working relationship with the FBI, one that gave him 6-figure paychecks, money is hard to come by, and when the government offers him another job he accepts, hoping it will be his last. With Cabral and Sutcliffe in tow, Shariff parts from his young son, heading off to Pittsburgh. A title card informs that, although Cabral and Sutcliffe intend to film Shariff’s investigation, his FBI superiors have no idea of their involvement.

The FBI orders Shariff to investigate Khalifah Al-Akili, a white man who converted to Islam. Shariff’s mission: Find out if Khalifah intends to leave the country to join a terrorist training camp. At this point, with Shariff’s objective laid out, (T)ERROR doesn’t have many places to go. Shariff winds up spending most of his time at his safe house, smoking marijuana to take the edge off while waiting for the right opportunity to get acquainted with Khalifah.

With the present investigation stagnant, Cabral and Sutcliffe venture into Shariff’s past. They learn about his work with the Black Panthers, how he came to work for the FBI, and one of the biggest cases he worked on as an informant. Cabral and Sutcliffe try their best to paint a portrait of Shariff, but their attempts wind up dragging the film down, largely because of their subject’s resistance. Shariff proves to be a tricky subject, as he’s constantly reluctant to speak on camera or answer any questions. He’s simply too unsympathetic and standoffish to invest in, making Cabral and Sutcliffe’s attempts to paint him as a tragic figure periodically effective.

But just when (T)ERROR looks like it’s about to fall into a dull portrait of Shariff, Cabral and Sutcliffe introduce a new element that suddenly kicks things into high gear again (Warning: spoilers from here on out). Without telling Shariff, the two directors set up an interview with Khalifah, who has no idea that the filmmakers interviewing him are simultaneously following the man investigating him. Once Khalifah gets involved with the proceedings, (T)ERROR dives head-first into murky waters, but with a direct purpose. By getting entangled in the case, Cabral and Sutcliffe expose a problem that’s been allowed to go on for too long because of its secrecy.

As Cabral and Sutcliffe begin crosscutting between Shariff and Khalifah, a horrifying truth begins to emerge; Khalifah doesn’t turn out to be a threat, but the FBI continues putting pressure on Shariff to provide “results,” whatever they may be. And when the film uses this story to comment on how this sort of injustice is rampant around the country, it paints a chilling picture. By the end, (T)ERROR turns into a portrait of two men trapped and exploited on both ends of the same system, with Cabral and Sutcliffe expertly extrapolating their subject matter to a broader, more systematic level. If last year’s Citizenfour showed that the government can get whatever they want, (T)ERROR presents a message that might be even more unnerving: the government will always get what it wants, even if it has to make it up.

Originally published as part of our 2015 Hot Docs coverage.

It can’t get more direct than getting to hear the word from the source himself. De Palma features only one interview subject: the Blow Out, Carrie and Scarface (how do you only choose three?!) filmmaker, Brian De Palma. What could have easily been a self-indulgent or rose-tinted retrospective discussion is made fascinating by De Palma’s openness about his aspirations and influences, as well as his willingness to admit to several failures. That forthright demeanor is what might make De Palma accessible to those who don’t even consider themselves De Palma fans in the slightest. It’s also why, for the De Palma championers, this documentary is an ideal look into the director’s collected works. Brian De Palma’s noteworthy career is put into new perspective by the man at its helm.

Filmmakers Noah Baumbach (Greenberg, Frances Ha) and Jake Paltrow (The Good Night, Young Ones) seem like an odd pair to author a portrait on the legendary Brian De Palma; however, the trio of directors frequently have dinner with one another, engaging in conversations apparently not too dissimilar to this one—filmed in Paltrow’s living room. Baumbach & Paltrow jump cut through De Palma’s responses in a way that maintains a speedy pace. The rapid assembly assures that the film never really wastes a moment. They briefly acknowledge the filmmaker’s upbringing before speeding into De Palma’s early career, leaving most of the runtime for diving into his filmography piece by piece. Certain sections go into greater depth than others, although it’s not always the expected films where De Palma decides to go into detail. His work on the aforementioned films as well as The Bonfire of the Vanities, Casualties of War and Home Movies are all given extended sequences in which De Palma gets specific on his vision, then trashes on all subsequent film and TV versions of Carrie.

De Palma has plenty of name-dropping and behind-the-scenes stories to satisfy movie nerds. Some photosets show De Palma dining with friends Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg—there’s even an old home movie of Spielberg calling Lucas from a car phone. Among the most fascinating looks into the production process that De Palma provides is the director’s account of how he became attached to Scarface, before abandoning the film while Sidney Lumet took over, only to return to the director’s chair before filming commenced. When De Palma brings up his inspirations, from personal experiences like watching his doctor father’s surgeries to cultural influences like Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, the movie makes the filmmaker’s artistic ambitions much clearer.

There are points where De Palma’s single subject structure limits its insights. De Palma mostly waves off the accusations of misogyny in his films and chooses to not elaborate on his divorces. Yet, De Palma is willing to address his legacy honestly more than one would assume from a director of his stature. The result is a captivating look through an iconic filmmaker’s work that goes far beyond a simple DVD commentary feature. The documentary sheds enough light on the long list of movies attributed to Mr. De Palma that you’ll want to revisit the ones you’ve seen and finally watch the titles that you’ve put off.

Bill Genovese has spent over 50 years haunted by his sister’s murder. When Kitty Genovese was killed in 1964, her case became widely known when The New York Times reported that 38 neighbors had witnessed the attack and not done anything to intervene. This seemingly impossible negligence is the first of many preconceived notions regarding Bill’s sister’s death that begins to crumble under closer questioning in the documentary The Witness. With an unrelenting determination to figure out exactly who his late sister was and the true circumstances of her murder, Bill embarks on a several year journey with documentarian James Solomon to track down the witnesses of Kitty’s life and death.

The Witness benefits greatly from the true events that it depicts providing several layers of intrigue. At the start, Bill looks to poke holes in the initial New York Times article by speaking with any witness he can track down through the public record. In the process, he discovers failures on the part of the police, as well as new aspects to his sister’s life he had never known. Even Bill Genovese himself is fascinating as a subject, a Vietnam War veteran who lost both of his legs, now often refusing help from those around him. Continually, the documentary delves into tangential chapters devoted to the living family of witnesses or Kitty’s work as a barmaid. Its scattered focus can become frustrating as The Witness leaves its audiences with several loose threads to ponder over—in a situation not entirely different from Bill’s.

While the documentary occasionally suffers from its indistinct presentation, the succession of stunning details keeps the case compelling. Bill’s personal need for closure drives him past the point where almost anyone would give up, yet he confront uncomfortable situations with courageousness. The Witness’ cathartic ending is an appropriately melancholic note for a film so fixated on gruesome material, but finding satisfaction from this documentary relies on how highly you value closure.

Every story told becomes filtered through the lens of its storyteller, and rarely does that implication loom as large as when a son directs a film about his mother. In the case of journalist Jacob Bernstein, his debut documentary Everything Is Copy serves as a semi-reverential tribute to his mom, the late great writer Nora Ephron (When Harry Met Sally…, Sleepless in Seattle), but one with a distinctly personal investment in the narrative. The immediacy of Bernstein’s relationship with the film’s subject is consistently evident. Interview subjects from famous faces like Rosie O’Donnell and Meg Ryan as well as family friends and Bernstein’s father occasionally refer to Ephron as, “your mother,” Jacob appears on screen himself, and much of the movie is devoted to Ephron the person rather than Ephron the essayist and filmmaker. Often, Bernstein appears to be discovering aspects of his mother’s life in time with the film, assembling a general, but intimate look at an icon as remembered by those close to her.

Though many of the featured talking heads in Everything Is Copy are well known, it’s people like Ephron’s sisters and below-the-line crew members from Ephron’s films that provide the most illuminating details on the late author’s life. People fondly recall Ephron’s magnetism; Meryl Streep speaks in awe of the Julie & Julia filmmaker’s unparalleled abilities as a party hostess, bouncing between cooking and conversation. They’re small glimpses into a trailblazer’s story but not the primary focus of Everything Is Copy.

Instead, Bernstein examines the people and relationships that mattered most to Nora. As one of entertainment’s most formative writers of romance and women’s voices, Ephron drew much of her inspiration at times from a turbulent personal life. Specifically, her marriage and eventual separation from Jacob’s father Carl Bernstein. This lead to Ephron’s bestselling book and 1986 film Heartburn, a movie that the documentary covers extensively for its implications on Ephron’s family life. It’s disappointing when the rest of Everything Is Copy skims over the rest of her film career with the breadth of a Wikipedia entry; however, Bernstein chooses to explore the impact that producing Heartburn had on Ephron’s immediate family.

Everything Is Copy skews toward slick convention in its scattershot glimpse at the experiences that helped to define Nora Eprhon’s life. With striking black & white vignettes of famous actresses—Lena Dunham and Reese Witherspoon among them—reading excerpts from Ephron’s best essays to the exquisitely composed shots of Jacob typing away on his laptop, the documentary moves quickly through Ephron’s life story. The approach feels glossy, perhaps even to its own detriment, despite sleek packaging which gives the documentary a sense of having been consciously constructed.

Everything Is Copy is not the wall-to-wall puff piece one might imagine, though it only samples from Ephron’s less favorable habits. The self-centered choices she made and her thin patience—firing many crew members for single mistakes—are acknowledged in passing. Bernstein understandably focuses on his mother’s successes. The documentary contains a highlight reel of a storied career, resembling a kind of visual obituary. For lovers of her work or those with only a passing appreciation for Nora Ephron, Everything Is Copy provides an intimate peek at the writer’s path to celebrity.

Ask a random sampling of movie buffs to name a famous costume designer and the first response will most likely be Edith Head, and rightfully so. With 35 Oscar nominations to her name (eight of which went on to win), Head is synonymous with high-calibre movie fashion. Ask for additional names, and the hardcore film fans will reveal themselves, offering names like Irene Sharaff, Charles LeMaire, and Milena Canonero. Another designer they might mention is Orry-Kelly, son of Australia, winner of Academy Awards, and a man whose story is as fascinating as they come. That story is told to remarkable effect by filmmaker Gillian Armstrong in her documentary, Women He’s Undressed.

The linear bio starts with the boyhood days of Orry George Kelly, the son of a tailor from Kiama, New South Wales, Australia. Those early days reveal two key things that will forever shape Kelly’s career and life: his natural and immense artistic flare, and his homosexuality. Living in a land during a time when the latter was not tolerated, Kelly abandons the banking career he had begun and departs Australia in 1922 to set sail for America. In his early years in New York City, Kelly makes his bones as an artist and costumer for Broadway productions. It’s also during this time he begins a romantic relationship with Archie Leach, a struggling (but unspeakably handsome) actor who eventually goes on to change his name to Cary Grant.

The two make it to Hollywood together, but where their individual careers began to thrive, their relationship died. Cary Grant goes on to be, well, Cary Grant, while Orry-Kelly goes on to costume some of Hollywood’s greatest stars (Bette Davis-calibre) in over 280 films (including a little picture called Casablanca), winning three Oscars in the process.

There is some deft storytelling from Gillian Armstrong in Women He’s Undressed. This isn’t just another biopic about a kid from the middle of nowhere making it big in showbiz, nor is it just some revelation about another unsung Hollywood behind-the-scenes great, nor is it just a name-dropping clip reel of Hollywood history. It’s actually all of these things and more. And it’s dazzling.

Women He’s Undressed might struggle to get out of the gate of his childhood, but during those early minutes of the film, his homosexuality is established. This is key not only because it makes him who he is, but because the position and evolution of the entertainment industry (somewhat Broadway, mostly Hollywood) as it relates to same-sex relationships has considerable consequences. The greater narrative then radiates from Orry-Kelly: he’s gay, others in Hollywood are gay, here is how Hollywood handled gay. (The approach towards his sexual orientation, by the way, is never disrespectful, nor does it ever pander.)

Bringing Archie Leach/Cary Grant into the story might sound scandalous (and it is), but it is also critical to the designer’s tale in that: (a) Leach/Grant is a major love of Orry-Kelly’s life, and (b) the actor is responsible for Orry-Kelly making it to Hollywood. This isn’t just a kiss-and-tell; Leach/Grant has real purpose to who Orry-Kelly is as a person and as a costume designer.

Once the story moves inside Hollywood’s gates, Armstrong really shows what she’s made of as a documentarian.

The Orry-Kelly thread about his homosexuality turns into the fabric of a Hollywood history lesson. Like the same-sex narrative, the Hollywood history narrative radiates from Orry-Kelly, puts context around the time and the business, then returns to put Orry-Kelly into history’s context and vice versa.

The history radiates to the groundbreaking work that Busby Berkley did and then brings it back to Orry-Kelly’s equally impressive costumes for the filmmaker’s pictures. The history radiates to the tawdriness of pre-code films and crosses over to the more subdued post-code films, using Orry-Kelly as a bridge between the two eras and focusing on what he did as a costumer during both eras (including what he got away with, post-code). Then to some of the titans of the times: Bette Davis, Jack Warner, William Randolph Hearst, Marilyn Monroe—and his relationships with all of them. And of course, the story then proceeds to Cary Grant. The documentary even finds its way back to Australia from time to time.

By the time the story is over, Orry-Kelly is not just another Hollywood luminary—he’s forever one with that town and its history.

Yet for all its narrative might, some of the storytelling devices employed fall terribly flat. Armstrong opts to cast people to play Orry-Kelly and his mother, and then work them into the story for narration, commentary, even humor. It’s all so silly, especially in the earliest days, which at times are downright cartoonish. I think I get what Armstrong is trying do—inject elements of stage and film into these portions as representations of the two branches of entertainment where Orry-Kelly was at his best. It just feels so gimmicky, and never more so than when the intricate pattern Armstrong weaves suddenly gets disrupted. Also feeling manufactured are quotes from celebrities as voiced by other actors. It’s intrusive and too cute by half, and it’s all to the detriment of the overall product.

It wouldn’t be a documentary without some talking heads, and it’s refreshing to see some living legends who worked with Orry-Kelly offer their thoughts. The most recognizable are critic/historian Leonard Maltin, actress Angela Lansbury, and actress Jane Fonda. (Hearing Fonda confess to what she would have liked to have done to a certain part of Marilyn Monroe’s anatomy is worth the price of admission.) These celebs, and other contributors, are used in excellent measure. Oddly enough, Orry-Kelly himself is only ever seen (via photos) at the end of the film.

Orry-Kelly’s formidable combination of history, skill, attitude, and pizzaz creates a mighty base for Armstrong to build upon, and build she does, using numerous storytelling devices and a whip-smart narrative. Women He’s Undressed isn’t always perfect, but it’s riveting from start to finish.

In 2005, in the small Finnish town of Eurajoki, construction began on the country’s third nuclear reactor, the first to be built by the Western world since the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. The plant, commonly referred to as OL3, was set to join the first two units of the Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant, which were situated just outside of town on a small island in the Gulf of Bothnia. In the early years of the project, the town was ecstatic to have won yet another plant. But in the tiresome and decisive years that followed, as the construction fell further and further behind schedule and the cost soared to unprecedented levels, tension rippled through the close-knit community, and a global conversation about the merits of nuclear power versus high carbon-emitting power plants grew fierce. This is the inherently dramatic and timely story that the tepid and tedious The Return of the Atom attempts to capture.

The new documentary from Mika Taanila and Jussi Eerola picks up in the first days of construction, highlighting the energy and eagerness of the small community. A major contract such as the OL3 means jobs and money for these sorts of towns. It also means proudly supplying up to a fifth of Finland’s power. But despite the overall excitement, some live in great fear of the potential death and environmental disaster next door.

Taanila and Eerola follow a handful of key players in the events of the following eight years. They also attempt to map out what sort of town Eurajoki is. Despite their efforts, however, the community remains a mysterious and elusive place. Instead, The Return Of The Atom shadows several employees and committee members fighting to keep spirits high and cost low, as their project unravels beneath them. A former Olkiluoto engineer named Arto Lauri comes out against the plant, seeing nuclear power as a powder keg that will soon destroy his home and the planet along with it.

The trouble is, for all this perfect setup, not much ever really happens. At least not on film. Construction falls almost immediately behind, and Lauri shows up at town hall meeting after town hall meeting to voice his dissent despite the lack of interest from just about anyone else. And time and again, we watch interviewees stare regretfully into the distance as they struggle to continue pushing the plant’s propaganda. But never do we get close to anyone or any particular piece of this complex puzzle. And never do we truly get a chance to explore, let alone even ask, the dire questions related to nuclear power and the encroach of global warming. What we get instead are what feel like dozens of montages of dizzying construction scenes to the pulse and grind of Pan Sonic’s overly serious score—a score that seems to want to imbue the gravity of the situation that the film itself can never quite articulate.

In fact, it feels almost as though Taanila and Eerola, who shot the film over the course of eight years, were always showing up just after something interesting happened. If only we could have spent more time with Lauri. The growth of his obsession, even in the film’s periphery, is heart wrenching: he refuses to give up but never seems to find anyone who will truly listen. His is a character ripe for study, and The Return Of The Atom misses its chance.

Running an overlong 110 minutes, there is the sense that the film, unsure of what it is truly about, is hoping to pack in so much from so many disparate places, that some sum greater than its parts will emerge. The Return Of The Atom is a pressure cooker of a build. At its core, the film is set up to be some sort of thriller, unfolding over nearly a decade, with the hope that something great will have happened by the end. But there never is any moment of confrontation. Lauri is, in a small way, vindicated, but nothing grand ever comes of the strife surrounding the plant (which is certainly no spoiler). Nor is there ever a moment of catharsis.

Such endeavors for any documentary filmmaker are risky. Taanila and Eerola got in on the ground floor with no idea of what would come of things in Eurajoki. Certainly there would be conflict. Certainly there would be tension. But the question of what else the directors were looking for must be asked. Did they only want to see what would happen? Or did they want to explore the enormous possibilities and immense potential for true disaster (like the one that strikes Fukushima near the film’s close)? The Return Of The Atom is an earnest attempt to record an immensely important and criminally under-discussed moment in the progression of the 21^st century. But it could stand to have been more present for it.

In a time when the punk aesthetic was increasingly resonant in art and pop culture, Icelandic painter Georg Guðni decided to pursue a different style: landscape depiction. He took to the misty plains and craggy highlands of his country, engaging in a kind of quiet, visual dialogue with the vast expanses. These conversations would be mentally tucked away, allowed to expand and stretch as the nature of Guðni’s memory dictated before being carefully spilled out on the canvas. For him, painting was a product of the mind, and through his strikingly minimalist work he was able to elevate the landscape “genre” beyond something stereotypically attributed to amateur “Sunday painters.”

Above all, Horizon is a tribute to Guðni, who passed away at the age of 50 in 2011. Brief descriptions of his early days as an artist fly by, and testimonials to the depth of his craft are provided by interviews with colleagues, professors and art historians, but the film is most interested in exploring the specifics of Guðni’s process and technique. Lucky for the audience, the insights come unfiltered, through the words of the painter himself.

The majority of Horizon is made up of lengthy scenes in Guðni’s studio, where he wanders from past paintings to old sketchbooks, breaking down the methods and philosophies of his artistry. On its face, the directness is a welcome approach, but the film’s monotonous, unbroken passivity and sheer lack of dynamism quickly yields something that is too dry to properly engage with. A handful of visual interludes gorgeously juxtapose Guðni’s work with the settings that inspired it, but even these sequences fail to imbue the film with some kind of cinematic sensibility. They eventually grow tiresome in their slideshow manner and redundant repetition.

Truly, this is a documentary made for hardcore art enthusiasts. The formal and structural elements are bland and Guðni isn’t all that mesmerizing a speaker, so we are left only with a flurry of highly technical discussions on painterly procedure and inspiration. Those who take an interest in such matters will likely be satisfied, but for the rest of the audience, Horizon may prove to be a dull, slightly alienating experience.

The definitive teen film of my generation is John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club (1985). I saw it in the theater on its initial release, I’ve watched it countless times on cable and home video, I’ve introduced it to my kids, I’ve seen it in the theater again on re-release, and I’ve even hosted screenings of it in my local cinema (as recently as May, 2015). There is a quote in that endlessly quotable film that I kept coming back to as I watched Bienvenue à F.L., Geneviève Dulude-De Celles’ first feature film. Carl the Janitor (John Kapelos) says to the lamenting Assistant Principal Richard Vernon (Paul Gleason), “C’mon Vern, the kids haven’t changed. You have.” If there is anything this documentary proves, it’s that quote.

In an effort to do something different and positive, Gabrielle Chaput enlists the students of a Quebec high school to participate in the “Inside Out Project.” The task put forth to the school’s 1,162 students is simple: pair with a randomly assigned student, get to know them (even if just a little bit), and photograph them in front of a background of white with a black-dotted pattern. The resulting photos will then be plastered on the school’s drab exterior, creating a collage of the present day’s student body meant to celebrate them and offer an interesting alternative to the drab grey walls that remind many of the kids of a prison. Documentarian Dulude-De Celles is there to capture the event, and much more.

This is really a tale of three films. The first film—the best film—is populated with teenagers in fairly extreme close-ups discussing directly to the camera, and in what seems to be considerable candor, myriad issues that face them as high schoolers. They discuss cliques and acceptance into groups (or the sad lack thereof). They discuss the pressures teens face—pressures from school and parents and friends and cliques and jobs and romantic interests and the various combinations thereof and so on. They discuss the socioeconomic realities of their lives, mostly defined by their wardrobes. Some students confess, passively, to modifying their behavior so as to be accepted by the masses. Others boast, also passively, to clinging to their individualism, masses be damned.

In this best film, every student’s take is as powerful and riveting as the next because of how honest each is. And it’s not as if these statements and sentiments are necessarily negative; they’re simply statements of fact that, when delivered by today’s teens, ring heavy with truth. They are also devoid of the drama one might expect from a documentary about teens of today. There is no talk of drugs. There is no talk of sex. There is no talk of violence. While it might be easy to criticize a film about teens that lacks these issues, I prefer to view it as a positive that a documentary with teens as its subject can still find compelling matter without resorting to the salacious.

The second film is where the good ends, sadly. In between these video confessionals are examples of what some teens do when they are not in school. One plays guitar and he is shown playing a song. Another is into parkour, and he is shown with his friends scaling gutters and somersaulting on rooftops. Another pair of teens are amateur filmmakers and shoot a film in one of their basements. All of this is fine, and it all illustrates what makes these teens happier than what school can provide. It just grinds the film to a near halt is all, because it’s not interesting in the least. Bienvenue à F.L. is already lean at 74 minutes, but much of it is padded with this kind of filler (honestly, do we need to see all the makeup a prom attendee applies)? There is enough of this filler to make one consider that there wasn’t enough “there” there to keep the interesting parts of the doc the dominating thread.

The third film is pure frustration. A main theme of the ongoing story is the Inside Out Project. It is introduced early, and it treats the viewer to a scene of kids taking pictures of each other for the project. But nothing is ever developed in terms of how these random pairs of kids interact. I’m not one to usually say when a film should have something in it that it doesn’t, but in this case, much was made early about randomizing the pairs—as if two kids from wildly different cliques, kids who might not ever interact, are suddenly forced to collaborate, with the results to be revealed in the film. This never happens, and it’s terribly disappointing.

I cited the quote from The Breakfast Club because as I listened to the kids speak to the camera, I found myself harkening back to my high school days. Despite being part of a graduating class of less than 100 kids, and being part of a high school with less than 400 total students, my triumphs and tragedies and fears and realities were no different than those of these subjects. The same can be said for my teenage daughters. So what Carl the Janitor said holds true: kids don’t change; we do. We grow up and move on, putting high school behind us, and leaving for the coming generations the same general fears and frustrations. The details might differ (my youth was more about Pac-Man than parkour), but the sentiment and the themes remain the same.

Bienvenue à F.L. is one of those films that will mean different things to different generations of people, and yet still mean the same thing to everyone. In the end, though, the collage of experiences, like the collage of pictures taken for the Inside Out Project, is better suited as a living yearbook for the students showcased than it is as a true documentary.

There must be something going on in North Dakota. Jesse Moss’ profile of a small ND town in The Overnighters was one of 2014’s best documentaries, and now another gripping, dramatic documentary has made its way out of North Dakota. Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker’s Welcome to Leith finds an incredibly tense situation playing out in a small ghost town, and both directors somehow manage to capture the whole thing while having complete access to all involved parties. It won’t be surprising if this winds up being one of the year’s most thrilling films.

Leith is the kind of small town that looks like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road come to life. It’s small, located in the middle of nowhere, and has a population of 24. It’s so small that town mayor Ryan Schock doubles as Leith’s school bus driver. Nichols and Walker spend their time introducing several of Leith’s residents before introducing Craig Cobb, a new arrival in town. Cobb swoops into Leith, snapping up a dozen plots of land. Schock and the rest of Leith don’t get too concerned about a stranger suddenly buying up chunks of their city, thinking it might be an investor trying to profit off of the state’s recent oil boom.

Except, as it turns out, Cobb is actually one of America’s most dangerous white supremacists, a vicious hatemonger who terrorizes anyone who tries to stop him. Cobb wants Leith to become a safe haven for white supremacists, and soon enough Cobb’s allies begin moving into his plots of land, ready to start a new life in an all-white utopia. By the time Schock finds out what’s happening, it’s too late. News of Cobb’s takeover spreads like wildfire, and in the film’s most heart-racing scene, Cobb blatantly announces his master plan with Leith at a tense town meeting: he’s going to let his friends move in and vote out everyone in office at the next election, giving him complete control over the city. It’s a moment that feels like it’s from a ridiculous Hollywood thriller, with Cobb fully inhabiting the role of a maniacal villain.

And just like that, the people of Leith suddenly get thrust into a nasty war for the sanctity of their town. Nichols and Walker prefer to step back when they profile the intense back-and-forths between Cobb’s people and Leith’s, letting the drama play out on its own. Their primary job appears to be providing context, with talking heads coming in to explain Cobb’s background, along with going into detail about hate groups across America. The film points out how, after 9/11, people’s eyes turned away from their own country and out into the world for new threats. Since people like Cobb are rarely heard about in the news, it might be hard to think of him as a serious danger, but Nichols and Walker provide several recent, chilling examples of hate crimes to show how people like Cobb have the potential for truly heinous behaviour.

Welcome to Leith doesn’t really delve too deep into some of the topics it brings up, but its transformation of Leith’s storyline into a tense, efficient narrative provides plenty of engrossing material. It would have been nice if Welcome to Leith offered a little more. There’s a scene where a group of people burn down a dilapidated house on one of Cobb’s properties out of anger, and for a brief moment the film flirts with condemning both sides of the story. It’s only a fleeting moment, but it hints that there may be more to Leith than just a damn good story.

A version of this review originally ran as part of our Hot Docs 2015 coverage. 

There’s a shot early on in Mark Lewis’ Invention that I can only describe as exhilarating, but I get the feeling it might not work on everyone in the same way it did for me. The sequence, a single take lasting over 10 minutes, starts as a black-and-white shot on top of a downtown Toronto building overlooking the cityscape. The camera slowly starts panning around in a circle, eventually aiming its sights towards the city’s downtown core (you can see the CN tower peeking out from behind a cloud). Eventually, the camera stops and locks in on a window in another building directly across from it. Suddenly the camera starts flying towards the window, goes through it (the moment the camera enters inside, the film switches to colour), flips upside down, then turns around and proceeds to zoom into the streets below to observe the cars and pedestrians.

I can’t deny that, on a basic level, there’s something I find exciting about watching what looks like a simple shot unexpectedly transform into an incredibly complex one. A pan turns into (I assume) a drone or crane shot, proceeds to do something seemingly impossible, and then redefines the familiar views of the city into something more abstract and mathematical (the window the camera peers through is split into three sections, and Lewis frames it to look like a three-dimensional plane). Lewis, along with cinematographers Martin Testar and Bobby Shore, employ this approach to three areas in different parts of the world: Toronto, São Paolo, and the Louvre in Paris. And aside from the opening and closing, Invention has no soundtrack whatsoever, letting the film play out almost entirely in complete silence (the film has been described as reminiscent of city symphony films of the silent era). The film rests everything on its visuals, and with so many downright dazzling scenes, it’s not hard to get past the silence.

That radical move might make it easy for some to dismiss Invention as more of an art installation (to be fair, part of Invention is made up of shorts Lewis made for the Louvre), but if anything, Invention might be one of the year’s most cinematic films. By stripping things down to the most vital element(s), and by putting all the emphasis on the camera and its movement, Lewis makes Invention a film that’s all about the act of observing and how powerful the camera can be in teaching viewers what and how to observe. This is apparent in the opening shot, where the camera slowly observes a sculpture, and through the way the camera glides and pans over almost every detail, frequently changing the interpretation and appreciation of the art piece. Even more fascinating is how Lewis extends this to the way he observes Toronto and São Paolo, capturing surreal images (primarily one of people walking along a closed down highway) or seemingly mundane parts of a city and, by using the camera’s placement and movement, generates a new, dynamic appreciation of the familiar. And by providing this distilled version of cinema, Invention turns into the sort of film that’s a distinct, powerful work that’s about the unique power of film.