Film
Kumare: How a Nice Kid From Jersey Became a Fake Guru
Prepare to have your assumptions pitched out the window by this tense, surprisingly probing satirical documentary—not just about…
Mark Holcomb
Film
Samsara: Lovely Images; Pity About the Movie
Whether it strikes you as a profound, perspective-shifting spiritual travelogue, or the cinematic equivalent of a forgettable New…
Film
Searching for Sugar Man: A Forgotten Musician Receives His Due
Fluid, open-ended documentaries that demand more of an audience than foregone assent or fleeting bouts of passive outrage…
Film
The Last Ride: Another Myth Is Added to Hank Williams’ Mythology
Country-music devotees will either love or hate this speculative account of the last three days in the life…
Film
Sleepless Night: A Taut French Crime Flick
Ingeniously simple yet deceptively intricate, this French police thriller abounds in post-Woo/Tarantino action tropes: the usual galloping gun…
Film
5 Broken Cameras: More Bad News From Palestine
Startlingly intimate and direct, this first-person doc by Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi requires multiple viewings for anyone…
Film
Payback: Margaret Atwood Warns of Environmental Doom
With its novel approach and wider-than- usual scope, this riff on Margaret Atwood’s 2008 book-length essay, Payback: Debt…
Film
Lost Bohemia: Artists Are Evicted From a House of Culture
Gotham’s contradictory dedication to both bohemianism and unchecked greed is exposed in photographer Josef Astor’s bleak Lost Bohemia.…
Film
Seeking a Friend for the End of the World: Steve Carell and Keira Knightley on a First (and Last) Date
What’s missing from first-time director Lorene Scafaria’s Steve Carell–vehicle misfire is the one element any apocalypse narrative suffocates…
Film
Jean Gentil: Down and Out in Santo Domingo
Although it’s steeped in tragedies both personal and cultural, this contemplative, gorgeously shot documentary/fiction hybrid from husband-and-wife auteurs…
Film
Whores’ Glory: A Sad Global Survey of the Sex Trade
As with meat processing and politics, the day-to-day drama, tedium, and heartbreak of prostitution have little to do…
Film
Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie: The Gospel of Green
Celebrity scientist and PBS fixture David Suzuki arrives late to the global-warming-documentary party with this combination of biography…
Film
Better Than Something: Jay Reatard: Remembering the Late Indie Rocker
Like the longhair with the foghorn falsetto it’s titled after, this unfussy rock-doc profile is shaggy, sophisticated, and…
Film
Thin Ice: Greg Kinnear Goes on a Crime Spree
Working the long con and damn near getting away with it, this kissing cousin to Fargo, Cedar Rapids,…
Film
Norwegian Wood: Not the Murakami Adaptation You Want
Director/screenwriter Tran Anh Hung crams Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood into two and a half hours that offer barely…
Film
Paul Goodman Changed My Life: Rediscovering a Prophet of the ’60s
As bluntly humanist and free-ranging as its subject, this brisk take on the life of poet, sociologist, educator,…
Film
Elite Squad: The Enemy Within: The Brazilian Crime Saga Continues
Packing an entire season’s worth of The Wire‘s dirty cops, self-serving politicians, serpentine plotting, and gruesome, wasteful collateral…
Film
Blackthorn: Sam Shepard as Butch Cassidy
Riffing on how outlaw Butch Cassidy’s life might have gone had he survived in South America, this modest…
Film
The Woman: The Cannibal in the Basement
Pretentious muddle trumps splattery satire in this high-minded indie button-pusher, which is only fleetingly as transgressive as its…
Film
Restless: Again, Gus Van Sant Goes Lurking Among the Teens
Too morbid to be a crowd-pleaser a la Good Will Hunting but nowhere near as confrontationally inscrutable as…