Produced and Directed by Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon Released by Magnolia Pictures USA. 87 min. Rated R The interminable presidential campaign cycle is here again, prompting us all to bemoan the degradation of our national political discourse and wonder just how and why it got so dumb. With this election shaping up to be […]
Directed by Nicolas Rossier Produced by Tami Woronoff and Naashon Zalk South Africa/USA 75 min. Not rated Nelson Mandela is likely one of the most famous and admired figures of the 20th century. His story is well-known. After 27 years as a political prisoner, he became the first democratically elected president of South Africa. He […]
Produced & Directed by Andew Napier Released by Oscillosope Laboratories USA. 82 min. Not rated Mad as Hell profiles liberal talk show host Cenk Uygur, whose online news show, The Young Turks, seeks to shake up news coverage and reveal the corrupt business of politics. No one is exempt from Uygur’s glaring gaze: not George […]
Directed by Carlos Agulló and Mandy Jacobson Produced by Jacobson Written by Stephen W. Smith Released by Trinity South Africa. 82 min. Not rated It’s easy to forget what an embarrassment on the global stage South Africa’s apartheid regime was, not least because of how far into the modern era it extended, officially ending only […]
This year, the Tribeca Film Festival gave awards to pointed portraits of political engagement. These documentaries raise thoughtful and tangled issues about how the very personal becomes political. Point and Shoot A shy OCD-beset young guy, Matt VanDyke, left his mother’s Baltimore basement and his girlfriend for a North African-to-Middle Eastern odyssey, and plunged into […]
Directed by Jafar Panahi and Kambozia Partovi Edited, Written, and Produced by Panahi Released by Variance Films Farsi with English subtitles Iran. 106 min. Not Rated With Kambozia Partovi, Maryam Moghadam, Hadi Saeedi, and Panahi Closed Curtain starts out looking like an allegory in some future post-apocalyptic society. But the repression in Iran today emphatically […]
Produced & Directed by Riley Morton Released by First Run Features USA. 86 min. Not rated Evergreen: The Road to Legalization is an in-depth film documenting all of the difficulties and nuances activists faced on the road to passing I-502, a piece of legislation in Washington State legalizing small amounts of marijuana. It is a […]
Written and Directed by Carl Deal and Tia Lessin Produced by Deal, Lessin, and Gillian Caldwell Released by Variance Films USA. 86 min. Not Rated Wouldn’t it be timely for a documentary to closely investigate the ramifications of the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, which lifted restrictions on political […]
Directed by Andreas Johnsen Produced by Katrine A. Sahlstrom Released by International Film Circuit English and Mandarin with English subtitles Denmark. 89 min. Not Rated Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case overlaps and then follows-up Alison Klayman’s Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (2012). But it stands alone as an intimate portrait of a stubborn artist inspired to […]