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‘Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger’ reinforces a stirring mob mentality

Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger Written and directed by Joe Berlinger USA, 2014 The city of Boston was indeed his perverse playground for criminal terror and destruction. The reign of the powerful and ruthless Irish mob boss and gang leader James “Whitey” Bulger that fearfully oversaw his native Southie section and …

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‘The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz’ does effectively compute in triumph and tragedy

Sometimes there is a heavy price to pay for being a vocalized genius. In the case of the late computer programming prodigy and internet innovator in Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz the brilliance and the burden of a young man’s crusade for basic justice in computer-sharing information and technology reached a tragic ending. However, the triumph in Swartz’s shortened twenty-six years of existence is celebrated and remembered in the aftermath of this gifted online political activist whose shocking suicide quieted a vibrant voice in the cause for the power of freely attaining knowledge no matter how sensitive its revelation may be at large.

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“Ivory Tower” gets good grades for its school of thought in the critical cost of learning

Ivory Tower Written and directed by Andrew Rossi USA, 2014 Filmmaker Andrew Rossi’s documentary Ivory Tower certainly brings a whole new meaning to the phrase “higher education” as audiences will get a matriculating lesson in the cost of learning and the massive debt it has impacted on the nation’s struggling students and their parents that have to …

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AFI Fest 2014: ‘Felt’ shows the jarring effects of rape culture

It’s a rare discovery when a film can materialize the internal terror that women experience on a daily basis so disturbingly close to reality. Blurring the lines of documentary and narrative storytelling, Felt truly is a film that demands to be felt. It accomplishes its goal by penetrating the deepest, most harrowing aspects of trauma to tell one of the most powerful and jarring stories about the female experience and rape culture ever put on screen.

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AFI Fest 2014: ‘Happy Valley’ is a riveting examination of hero worship and institutional scapegoating

Happy Valley is the very definition of a documentary whose parts are greater than their sum. At every turn, the viewer can sense a much greater film that could have been, tantalizing possibility lurking in the margins. The Penn State sex abuse scandal and its aftermath suggest so many things (not many of them terribly flattering) about American culture, specifically its football and college culture. But a lot of these themes are more gleaned by the viewer from what they see in the film than they are actively explored by the film proper.

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AFI Fest 2014: ‘The Iron Ministry’ is a sensory tour of a society in microcosm

The first few minutes of The Iron Ministry are a black screen overlaid with the sound of train machinery. The darkness goes on long enough that some patrons were muttering over whether or not the picture was being projected correctly. Gradually, however, images come into view, though hazy and out of focus; hard to identify. The gears and bellows of the train pulsate and throb. They don’t look mechanical. It looks like the workings of grey, diseased organs. The first sign of human activity is a closeup of cigarette butts sloshing in a water-filled nook. And then people themselves finally enter the picture, mites living in the larger host body of the train.

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‘Citizenfour’ seethes with paranoia and anger

Citizenfour A Documentary Directed by Laura Poitras Germany/USA, 2014   Citizenfour functions not only as a great primer on the Edward Snowden NSA case, but also as a straight espionage-thriller.  While at times self-aggrandizing and frustratingly vague, Laura Poitras’ documentary is never less than fascinating, frightening and infuriating.  This is a must see for political …

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FNC 2014: ‘Evolution of a Criminal’

Evolution of a Criminal is Darius Clark Monroe’s first film. Produced by Spike Lee, who happened was Darius’ film teacher, it won the Special Jury Prize at the Dallas International Film Festival. A recent graduate from the NYU Film School, as we learn at the end of his film, Darius undergoes the original project of documenting his own life, and what happened to him, which not your ordinary teenage years. In 1997, at 16 year old, Darius Clark Monroe robbed a Bank of America and stole a huge amount of money along with two accomplices and friends. Following that, in what his prosecutors called a “lucky” sentence he spent 5 years in prison to be released only at 22, thus spending among the most formative years of his life in jail.

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FNC 2014: ‘Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau’ + Interview with director David Gregory

Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau Directed by David Gregory USA, 2014 Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau (2014) is a documentary that tells the secret story behind Richard Stanley’s involvement, as the uncredited director and extra, in the cult movie The Island …

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NYFF 2014: Kyle’s 5 Favorite Films and Other Ephemera

Underneath the bass drops and the electronic harmony of the garage music scene of 1990s Paris is melancholy and loneliness. The parties are bursting with verve and energy, but when the music stops, so does that joy. Hansen-Løve’s examination of a young DJ over the course of twenty years is warm and tender, an incredible look at the pros and cons of following your passion, allowing art to be your escape, and the joy of music.

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Cannon Films gets an affectionate profile in ‘Electric Boogaloo’

Australian documentarian Mark Hartley crafts his third vigorous valentine to exploitation cinema, alongside Not Quite Hollywood and Machete Maidens Unleashed!, with Electric Boogaloo, an explosive trawl through the snarling ferocity of Cannon Films before its inevitable bankruptcy in the early 1990s. Whilst the former documentary in the cycle celebrated the boom in Ozploitation cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, and Maidens! took a appreciative scan of the laxly monitored Philippine film factory, this time the viewfinder shifts to the excessive and action packed oeuvre of Israeli movie moguls Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, whose 1979-founded company became an explosive production house in Hollywood during the Reagan-mandated 1980s. Much to the disgust of snooty critics and prestige-minded executives, Cannon (an apt name) forged repeated success due to their box office-incinerating brand of chaotic, cheap and politically dubious action and exploitation films, bringing the grim jaw lines of Chuck Norris, Charles Bronson and Sylvester Stallone to international markets.

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NYFF 2014: ‘Iris’ – The Meh-est Costume for Today

Wearing a dark scarf over her head to shield herself against the bright, Long Island sunlight, Little Edie Beale famously introduced her iconoclastic sense of fashion by calling her outfit “the best costume for today”. In the Maysles brothers’ documentary Grey Gardens, this single clip seems to encapsulate the greatness of that film: performance, style, agelessness. And nearly 40 years later, Albert Maysles returns to a similar, if not the same, kind of subject: Iris Apfel. In Iris, those ideas are explored with a little less than half the vitality that Grey Gardens, but on the plus side it’s a pleasure to watch.

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NYFF 2014: ‘Seymour: An Introduction’ offers a fleeting, intimate look at a beloved teacher

Seymour Bernstein might very well be the sweetest man alive. I’ve never met him, but Seymour: An Introduction, Ethan Hawke’s new documentary that chronicles a recent three-year period of Bernstein’s life, radiates with vibrant life, and creates the feeling that Bernstein is in the room with you. It depicts the man as a soft-spoken, endearing, genuine person who’s as genuinely passionate about life as he is music. He looks with glistening eyes into the camera, his features gentle and faded and the edges of the frame opaque, and talks with us, not at us. There’s something inexplicably beautiful about the way he gazes longingly into the camera, his eyes at once sharp yet soft, comfortably penetrative. He speaks softly, and the room seems to grow quiet around him, adjusting to his volume.

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NYFF 2014: Joshua Oppenheimer’s ‘The Look of Silence’ is a quietly devastating achievement

For those who already have a low opinion of humanity, The Look of Silence will do little to alleviate your misanthropy. It’s a gorgeously-crafted documentary, and it will likely resonate with people of at least decent moral standing, but it depicts humanity at its worst and offers no hope at the end. A unnervingly tranquil depiction of men as monsters, Joshua Oppenheimer’s film attempts to confront the leaders of the 1960s Indonesian Genocide, a one-sided civil war that resulted in the deaths of over one million people. The killers admit to nothing, of course, and the elected officials (“elected”)write off the genocide as “politics.” Children are programmed to think that those who were murdered deserved it: they were communists, Godless heathens, sinners. Victims’ families don’t dare address the decades-long suppression of truth because subversives are still killed in Indonesia today. It’s 2014, and the populace has been lulled into a startling state of delusion. The film, beauteous and depressing in equal measure, feels like a slowly swelling minor chord sustained for 99 minutes, with no crescendo needed.

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Fantastic Fest 2014: ‘Electric Boogaloo’ feverishly examines a defunct studio’s cinematic legacy

From the late 70s to the early 90s, Menahem Golan and Yorum Globus, two Israeli cousins, ran the Cannon Films studio. The men produced dozens of mindless exploitation films, from Death Wish 3 to The Last American Virgin. Mark Hartley’s film sets out to define the producers’ legacy, with special emphasis on the men’s unorthodox and eccentric professional conduct. The result is a light, funny documentary that could benefit from the inclusion of more insightful material.

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‘20,000 Days on Earth’ is music to the ears

20,000 Days on Earth Written by Nick Cave, Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard Directed by Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard UK, 2014   You don’t have to be a Nick Cave aficionado to appreciate the brilliant new documentary 20,000 Days on Earth.  In fact, you don’t need to know a single song from his musical …

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Marker’s ‘Level Five’ challenges, provokes and inspires

As visual animals, to a large extent, something doesn’t truly exist until we see it. What, then, do we make of memories, which may seem just as real as any image, but are subject to degradation and bias? They are the ethereal made real; flights of fancy, fact and practical necessity. Level Five, produced in 1997 and recently restored for a limited North American release, finds accomplished film essayist, Chris Marker, questioning the nature of memory in the new digital age. Though his big ideas and haunting visuals never quite coalesce, Marker still provides a fascinating peek into the darkest corners of humanity.

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Pacino’s got nothing on ‘The Dog’

The Dog A documentary directed by Allison Berg & Frank Keraudren USA, 2013 The great advantage of documentaries is their ability to dampen the cinematic white noise and give us a peek into the human condition.  In the fantastic documentary, The Dog, we meet a man whose entire life is predicated upon the fundamental need …

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‘Elena’ proves the power of documentaries

Depression is something that movies never seem to get right. Perhaps it’s to avoid dragging viewers into a hopeless abyss, or sidestepping the painful truth that no one is immune to the despair. Whatever the reason, filmmakers invariably choose to glamourize depression, either by exaggerating it into a hallucinatory freakshow or diminishing it to tortured brooding. The reality—the unrelenting emptiness—is neither easy to portray nor pleasant to acknowledge. Petra Costa accomplishes both by weaving images and sounds from her childhood into a quasi-mystery story that’s determined to find closure, even if the case can never truly be solved.

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Fantasia 2014: ‘The Creep Behind the Camera’ is akin to an ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ episode

After Tim Burton’s Ed Wood was released, Sarah Jessica Parker remarked in interviews that she had just played the worst actress of all time. Delores Fuller, Wood’s ex-wife and would-be starlet, responded, albeit quietly, merely stating, “That hurt” on a Plan 9 From Outer Space DVD. The Creep Behind The Camera, Pete Schuermann’s docu-drama surrounding the making of 1962’s The Creeping Terror, retains as much class and care for its subjects are Parker did for Fuller.

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‘Code Black’ humanizes the political

Sometimes lost in the ideological weeds of health care reform are the unintended emotional consequences on the caregivers themselves. The documentary, Code Black, goes inside Los Angeles County Hospital’s emergency room to give as a frontline view of America’s overburdened health care system. What we see is less a stinging indictment of bureaucratic red tape and more a thoughtful re-assessment of the doctor-patient relationship in modern medicine.

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‘Back Issues: The Hustler Magazine Story’ sells as well as the magazine

Hustler, the notoriously gritty, shameless skin magazine, could easily double as the name of publisher Larry Flynt’s autobiography. For all the editorial prowess and First Amendment arguments he engineered and fought, he is still just a businessman.

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‘Life Itself’ is a touching ode to Roger Ebert and the people he inspired

Life Itself Directed by Steve James USA, 2014 In Roger Ebert’s memoir Life Itself, he dedicates an entire chapter to his love of Steak ‘n Shake. “If I were on death row, my last meal would be from Steak ‘n Shake,” he explains. “If I were to take President Obama and his family to dinner …

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