First-time filmmaker Amy Grill's 2009 documentary Speaking in Code is a character-driven vérité exploration of the techno music subculture; conceived, created, and self-financed with her then husband David Day, a struggling techno promoter and DJ in Boston. Grill spent two years following a loose cadre of DJs, producers, and promoters attempting to balance their obsession for music with the demands of their personal lives.

Speaking in Code isn't intended to be a history of techno, but Grill does provide just enough background for the outsider to contextualize the character-driven stories she's interested in: a fusion of European electronica and African-American dance music, techno emerged in Detroit and Chicago in the late '80s. Ironically, techno failed to tak...Read the entire review

Western cinephiles first took note of Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa in 1951 when Rashomon won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. In following years, Kurosawa would earn international accolades for films such as Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (1954), and Kagemusha (1980), and international distribution for all of the nineteen films he directed between 1951 and 1993. However, it is only in recent years that many Americans have had the opportunity to explore much of Kurosawa's pre-Rashomon oeuvre.

Last year, the Criterion Collection released AK 100: 25 Films by Akira Kurosawa, a massive DVD box set providing a retrospective of the filmmaker's career from his first film in 1943 through his last fifty years later, including the four films now re-released in this current box set. But for consumers who already had many of the Criterion Collection's pri...Read the entire review

Terribly Happy (Frygtelig lykkelig), Denmark's official submission to the 2010 Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film, is a black comedy steepped in the neo-noir of the Coen brothers' Blood Simple and David Lynch's Blue Velvet. On probation following a lapse of judgment he'd prefer not to discuss, Copenhagen cop Robert Hansen (Jakob Cedergren) is reassigned to Skarrild, a remote town in barren, bog-infested South Jutland where "everyone knows everything but says nothing." Estranged from his wife and daughter, Robert hopes to pass an uneventful tour of duty as town marshal and then return to Copenhagen, but his attempt to present himself as a professionally-remote, by-the-book lawman comes undone when he's pulled into a complicated domestic dispute between femme fatale Ingelise Buhl (Lene Maria Christensen) and her husband, town bully Jørgen Buhl (Kim Bodnia).

...Read the entire review

Greek filmmaker Costa Ferris's 1983 feature Rembetiko is one part national epic, one part populist melodrama, and one part musical showcase. Through a highly-fictionalized biography of folk singer Marika Ninou (1922-1957), Rembetiko follows the fortunes of Greece from the evacuation of more than a million resident Greeks from Asia Minor in 1922 following the nation's defeat in the Greko-Turkish War, through the Axis occupation in World War II, and the subsequent civil war.

Marika (played as an adult by Sotiria Leonardou) is the daughter of itinerant musicians who fled to the slums of mainland Greece from Asia Minor following the Greko-Turkish War. While still a young girl, she sees her drunken father pimp her mother and then kill her when she falls for her...Read the entire review

The inaugural release of the independent DVD distributor A Million Movies a Minute (AMMAM), a micro-label professedly dedicated to short documentaries, was last year's After the War: Life Post-Yogoslavia, an uneven collection of nine shorts about the titular subject which was damned by poor video and audio quality. Taking a lesson from that one, AMMAM's second release, Animating Reality: A Collection of Short Documentaries, offers far better video and audio quality through the content remains just as uneven.

A trickle of documentaries utilizing animation to supplement or replace traditional film and video has become a torrent since the release of the critically-acclaimed feature-length animated documentary Waltz with Bashir in 2008. Material that once would have been confined to rad...Read the entire review

Survivors, a British television series which ran for twelve episodes from November 2008 to February 2010, is a post-apocalyptic action-adventure yarn about a misfit group who band together when civilization collapses. Survivors shares its name with a prior television series which ran from 1975-1977, and a 1976 novel, all of which were created by science fiction novelist and screenwriter Terry Nation, who is perhaps best known for his work on the seminal British sci-fi television series Doctor Who.

The premise of Survivors is that a super-virulent flu virus wipes out 99% of the world's population in a matter of days. Civilization collapses as essential government services such as police and utilities, as well as ordinary commercial distribution systems, fail for lack of manpower. For the few survivors who were naturally immune from the virus, the post-apocalyptic world...Read the entire review

The Czech New Wave classic Diamonds of the Night (Démanty noci, 1964) is a study in minimalism. Though based on a conventional novella written by Holocaust survivor Arnošt Lustig, first-time filmmaker Jan Němec stripped the screenplay down to the bone. Excised are the protagonists' backstories save for a few repeated snippets of wordless images. Gone also is nearly all the dialogue. What remains is a story of two nameless, nearly wordless, young concentration camp escapees on the run, chased by the authorities and a posse of old men.

With no more than twenty lines of dialogue retained, the viewer is compelled to intuit the story almost entirely through visual cues. The film begins with the protagonists, two teenage boys, sprinting up a wooded hill w...Read the entire review

In writer/director Wong Kar-Wai's melancholy homosexual-romance Happy Together (Chun gwong cha sit, 1997), Ho Po-wing (Leslie Cheung) and Lai Yiu-fai (Tony Leung Chui-Wai) fly from their native Hong Kong looking for distraction to balm their troubled relationship. The couple comes to ground in Argentina. On a road in the Argentine outback, somewhere between Buenos Aires and the impossibly-beautiful Iguazu Falls, things fall apart. Their heap of a car won't go, but Ho does.

Sometime later, Lai is working as a doorman at a marginal tango bar in Buenos Aires trying to earn enough money to return to Hong Kong, when Ho, now a hustler, arrives...Read the entire review

A cornerstone of English theater and literature for four hundred years, William Shakespeare's Hamlet has for the past century been a touchstone of cinema, and more recently, television. Though this seminal revenge tragedy has been staged or adapted for the screen no less than seventy times, the material is so deep and rich a font as to supply a steady stream of new films and teleplays, whether rigorously faithful or fancifully interpretive. This 2009 production, created for British television by the Royal Shakespeare Company, is among the best.

Fresh from staging the play for theater audiences in 2008, director Gregory Doran and his cast, led by David Tennant (in the titular role) and Patrick Stewart (doing double duty as Claudius and the ghost of Hamlet's father), adapted their production for television. Though filmed on location in a de-consecrated Catholic church, the production purposef...Read the entire review

There's no end to the stream of politically-liberal documentaries detailing sad tales of human misery and global catastrophes in the offing. As a rule, these documentaries spend most of their runtime expounding on the problem de juor before halfheartedly rushing through a laundry list of possible remedies. Not so with One Peace at a Time (2009), Turk Pipkin's follow-up to Nobelity (2006).

In Nobelity, Pipkin sat down with Nobel Prize winners to discuss the means of tackling chronic global problems. Now in One Peace at a Time, Pipkin features non-profit organizations at the forefront of these efforts to fulfill basic human needs for clean water, food, education, medical care, a sustainable livelihood, and care for orphaned children. Pipkin pitches for viewers to make a difference by contributing resources either to these organizations or others like them, while...Read the entire review

With nearly 2000 yoga-related titles available on DVD, consumers are empowered to easily select a product that matches their fitness level, and complexity and style preferences. While some consumers may prefer rather no-nonsense yoga instruction from the likes of Karen Voight (e.g., Yoga Power), others favor instructors that blend new-age spiritualism, and/or eastern mysticism into their yoga instruction. Among the better known yogi in this later camp is Shiva Rea.

With more than a dozen DVD releases to date, including the best-selling title Yoga Shakti (2004), the California native and the self-described mystic, has distinguished herself as a guru of Vinyasa Flow; a yoga practice which emphasizes fluid motion synchronized with breath. Rea's latest DVD release, Daily FlowRead the entire review

Sarah Fisher's documentary about Buddhist teacher and ex-addict Noah Levine, Meditate and Destroy, answers a question I've long had. As a longtime non-believer in a god or gods who answer prayers, I've frequently wondered where atheist and agnostic alcoholics and drug addicts could turn for help overcoming their addictions when so much of the treatment available in the United States relies on the principles of the 12-step program. You see, six of those 12 steps explicitly involve acknowledging a higher power, confiding in God one's woes, and praying for divine assistance. While well-heeled addicts can turn to secular psychotherapy or other treatment options, where can working-class teens and young-adults turn for encouragement, I wondered; enter Noah Levine.

Born in 19...Read the entire review

Women marginalized by patriarchal society is a reoccurring subject in the documentaries of Kim Longinotto. In the prior double-feature DVD release from UK's Second Run label, Divorce Iranian Style / Runaway, Longinotto examined customary and legal inequality imposed on Iranian women in their familial relations with fathers, brothers, and husbands. In Second Run's most recent double-feature DVD release of her work, Gaea Girls / Shinjuku Boys, Longinotto and co-director Jano Williams document Japanese women who dare to step beyond the rigid patriarchal social norms of their homeland.

The hour-long Shinjuku Boys (1995) follows three onnabe (female-to-male transsexuals) who work in a nightclub catering to a female clientele looking for escape from their daily lives of domineering husbands and ...Read the entire review

An axiom often attributed to former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill holds that history is written by the victors. In other words, our collective understanding of the past is shaped by the histories handed down and retold by the groups in power, i.e., the dominate race, gender, religion, nation, ideology, social class, and cultural clique. The vanquished and oppressed are misrepresented, minimized, or simply missing from the victors' histories.

American historian and political activist, professor of political science Howard Zinn (1922-2010) through his popular text book A People's History of the United States has arguably done more than any American academic to correct the record. Having sold more than a million copies since 1980 and widely assigned on college campuses across the United States, A People's History of the United States recounts the struggles of the oppressed i...Read the entire review

Canadian-American filmmaker Astra Taylor's second feature-length documentary takes philosophy out of the classroom and into the streets. According to Taylor, The Examined Life's ideal viewer is a 16-year-old with an open mind who stumbles upon it on TV. Charged with making philosophy accessible, Taylor gives eight philosophers/academics ten minutes each to convey a big idea. To charm her audience and disarm her subjects, she films them in motion as they stroll, row a boat, or ride in a car.

The most recognizable of Taylor's subjects to average viewers is likely Princeton philosopher and social-critic Cornel West who's given pride of place by appearing at the beginning, middle and end of documentary. West sits in the backseat of Taylor's old Saab as she chauffeurs him through the streets of New York. Leaning over the seat, rattling off ideas in furious bursts reminiscent of Charlie Parker...Read the entire review

So much of our daily lives are predictably routine to the point in which we can operate more or less by rote that when we are confronted with unexpected randomness we are startled. Few events are more psychologically jarring than witnessing, or worse yet personally suffering, a lighting strike. While cancer and car wrecks can cause us to question why us and wonder whether there's a meaning or agency behind it, being struck by lightning is the quintessential manifestation of this metaphysical quandary -- is it randomness incarnate or supernatural will?

Canadian documentary filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal has been interested in the intersection between art and philosophy since graduating from Montreal's McGill University with a master's degree in philosophy and theology. Since turni...Read the entire review

While Apichatpong Weerasethakul may never become a household name, it's one that's become well recognized among cinephiles, even if most can't pronounce it. The 39-year-old Thai writer, director, and producer of indie art films, who goes by Joe and is a graduate of the Chicago Art Institute, has completed five feature films and more than two dozen shorts to date. A darling of the festival circuit, Weerasethakul has earned numerous accolades, most notably the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2004 for Tropical Malady (Sud pralad), and Cannes' award for young talent, the Prize Un Certain Regard for Blissfully Yours (Sud senaeha) in 2002.

Blissfully Yours, Weerasethakul's second feature film, was the first to receive a limited theatrical release throughout much of...Read the entire review

Did you know that the largest living organism on earth is a 3.4 square mile fungus in Oregon, or that beneath the earth's landmasses a dense forest of fungus is responsible for decomposing bio-matter, or that mushrooms can clean up oil spills, or that Shitake mushrooms may lower blood pressure, or that Jesus Christ might have been an advanced form of intelligent fungus?

Well the first four are true enough anyway, while the last point is a debatable theory advocated by John Allegro author of The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970). By comparision the late fungophile-philosopher and psychonaut Terence Kemp McKenna's "Stoned Ape" hypothesis of human evolution which holds that mushrooms provided certain proto-humans with an evolutionary edge by increasing visual acuity, fertility, and mental capacity sounds perfectly reasonable. All these facts and theories are but a small part of that availa...Read the entire review