Joel Green is diagnosed with terminal brain cancer at the age of 12 months and given just three months to live. His father, Ryan, a professional programmer drawn to video game design, creates a project that serves as a coping mechanism for himself and a memorial to Joel’s life.
They Will Have to Kill Us First tracks the various paths taken by musicians exiled from northern Mali after Islamist Jihadist have taken over.
On January 1, 2014, Colorado became the first state in the nation to make recreational marijuana sales the law of the land. No longer were people required to go through the motions of obtaining bogus prescriptions for medicinal marijuana. Now, healthy people can just walk into a store and buy pot simply because they want […]
Filmed over four years, the new documentary Requiem for the American Dream is the final, definitive long-form presentation of Noam Chomsky’s ideas on the interplay of power, capitalism, and democracy. Chomsky, arguably the foremost public intellectual of modern times, has been critiquing power and promoting democracy and solidarity for more than five decades in countless […]
In the late 1960s, a handful of artists garnered attention for using land as both subject and material. Installation pieces featuring rocks and dirt started cropping up in galleries, and much larger works were created in remote areas of the American Southwest. Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art casts light on this moment in art […]
Spoiler alert: Unlike several of this past year’s other touted musician bio-documentaries—Amy, Janis: Little Blue Girl, and Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck—saxophonist supreme Frank Morgan did not overdose on drugs. Sound of Redemption: The Frank Morgan Story has resonances with the usual Behind the Music tales of success, addiction, recovery, and comeback. However, the strong […]
Censorship always adds the allure of the forbidden to material, and that notoriety seems to be the case with Censored Voices. With rare archival footage, director Mor Loushy illustrates this collection of audio interviews with Israeli veterans of the 1967 Six Day War that were taped almost immediately after Israel captured the West Bank, East […]
After decades of documentaries criticizing the puzzlements of the American way of life—opposition to gun control despite a decades-long mass murder crisis (Bowling for Columbine), abiding lust for capitalism despite catastrophic results for the vast majority (Capitalism: A Love Story), opposing free public healthcare as a basic right comparable to free public education (Sicko)—Michael Moore […]
With a robust showing of documentaries and foreign and American-made films in 2015, there are more than enough to choose from for a top 10 list. The options make for a more spirited end-of-the-year discussion than usual and are also why so many of the awards and nominations that have been announced thus far have […]