Sini Anderson's the The Punk Singer is many things. It's a music documentary. It is, at least in part, a chronicle of a scene/movement. It's a biography of a person. And it's also, most surprisingly, a message movie. Not surprising in that part of the message furthers the work its subject began more than twenty years ago, but surprising for all the added meaning the mission has taken on since.

The punk singer in question is Kathleen Hanna, former frontperson of the bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, current leader of the Julie Ruin. Hanna inspired a generation of women to form bands and own their voices in other ways via her Riot Grrl manifesto. She was friends with Sonic Youth and Kurt Cobain, and is responsible for the phrase "smells like teen spirit." In her career, sh...Read the entire review

Writer/director Adam Leon makes a splash with his debut, Gimme the Loot, a verité drama about two young graffiti artists in New York City trying to raise the cash to pull off the tagger equivalent of a big score. Scribble partners Sofia (Tashiana Washington) and Malcolm (Ty Hickson) are tired of small-time spray-paint squabbles and so set their sights on the ultimate location to scrawl their handles: the big apple that pops up whenever one of the New York Mets hits a home run. The only problem is, they need tools and access, neither of which will come cheap.

Gimme the Loot follows these two petty hoodlums over two days as they try to dig up $500 to pay a guy who knows a thing or two about getting to their goal. Malcolm slings weed and falls for one of his clien...Read the entire review

Well-respected British filmmaker Ken Loach (Kes) returns to Scotland for his latest feature, The Angels' Share, a sublime and genuinely heartwarming drama about a quartet of criminal misfits who make an appeal to whatever heaven they believe in to change their lives.

In particular, the script by longtime Loach collaborator Paul Laverty (The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Even the Rain) focuses on Robbie (first-timer Paul Brannigan), a petty thug granted one last chance by an understanding judge. Since Robbie's girlfriend (Siobhan Reilly) i...Read the entire review

The opening titles of David France's powerful new documentary How to Survive a Plague set the scene as follows: "Year six of the AIDS epidemic. Greenwich Village, New York. The epicenter." That's just a few words, but they're carefully chosen--they convey information, yes, but also the urgency of the moment. People were dying, by the hundreds, and were being ignored by a government that would not speak the disease's name, much less make a priority of finding a cure. In New York City, a group of activists decided that they weren't having it, and that's how ACT UP was born.

How to Survive a Plague is an effective and evocative hybrid of history and experience, aiming both to parachute the viewer into the middle of the action and to place it in a context. The grou...Read the entire review

There's a good chance that much of the audience for Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry will know a great deal more about artist/activist Ai Weiwei than this viewer did, and they will certainly find much to latch onto. But there is always something of a question about whether a lack of familiarity with a documentary's subject is a hindrance, and in this case, the answer couldn't be clearer: moviegoers unaware of Weiwei will find this up-close portrait of his life and work fascinating, ballsy, and more than a little scary. A big bear of a man with a cool demeanor and a pronounced distaste for authority, he's a movie star in waiting; I'm amazed it took someone this long to make if official.

Director Alison Klayman logged considerable time with the artist over the past several years,...Read the entire review

Bobby Liebling, the heavy metal almost-star at the center of Don Argott and Demian Fenton's documentary Last Days Here, cuts a tragic figure right away, in the picture's opening moments. Going through a bag of vintage paisley shirts and tight pants that he's never worn ("I was saving them for when I got big"), he is clearly out of his mind on drugs--not just high at that moment (though he certainly is), but burned out from decades of use. Later in the film, he confirms as much, clicking off the stats without hesitation or figuring: he's been doing drugs for 44 years, heroin for 39, crack for 22. Bobby Liebling, by anyone's medical standards, should be dead.

The notion of mortality casts a long shadow over Last Days Here. This is a man who seems one fix away fro...Read the entire review

Joshua Marston's first feature, Maria Full of Grace, was the story of a Colombian girl who works as a drug mule. It was shot in subtitled Spanish, in spite of the fact that writer/director Marston hails from Beverly Hills. After it met with worldwide acclaim, robust box office, and awards recognition, one might think that the earnest filmmaker would choose to take it easy the next time around, to make something a little more accessible or blatantly commercial. One would be wrong. His new picture, The Forgiveness of Blood, takes place in northern Albania, and (as with his previous effort) it's not one of those films where the location is arbitrary, where Hollywood storytelling conventions are honored, or where everyone somehow mysteriously speaks English. It's a gri...Read the entire review

Reviewed at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival

His name is Romeo. Hers, improbably, is Juliette. "So we're doomed to a terrible fate?" he asks, when they first meet. Well, perhaps. We can only presume so, since that meeting is a memory that Juliette (Valérie Donzelli) calls up while her child is going for a CAT scan. The juxtaposition is jarring, the way we're transitioned from the buzzing of the medical equipment to the sounds of punk music, from the brightly-lit hospital to a dim house party, from a worn mother to a young, single beauty. She has been through some things, and that's what Declaration of War is about.

She and Romeo (Jérémie Elkaïm) fall in love, as we can see from the young-lovers-fro...Read the entire review

In 2001, Texas teenagers Jason Burkett and Michael Perry were arrested after engaging in a shootout with police officers. They were charged with the murder of three people: Sandra Stotler, a mother, her sixteen-year-old-son Adam, and his friend Jeremy Richardson. The only motive for their violent crime was that they wanted the older woman's red Camaro. They shot her in her garage to get her keys, and killed her child--their friend--to get the remote control to open the gate back into the family's protected community.

Internationally acclaimed director Werner Herzog (Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Bad Lieutena...Read the entire review

Things may have changed since I was in school, but my only recollection of any civil rights leader ever being discussed at length in American history classes is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. There were brief mentions of Malcolm X and Cesar Chavez, and we also learned who Rosa Parks was, but any more meaningful profile of more aggressive political leaders was nowhere to be found. While I have, of course, gathered additional knowledge over the years, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 is still a revelation, a documentary that both educates and informs, but also entertains.

Though credited to director Göran Olsson, The Black Power Mixtape is more of a collaborative effort spreading back more than forty years. The footage used to construct the documentary is taken fro...Read the entire review

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 is an appropriately and honestly titled film--it is not, it should be stressed, a comprehensive documentary of the Black Power movement, nor does it aim to be. It instead a sort of hybrid of found footage and audio commentary, a pastiche/montage assembled from available pieces, going for an overall mood and feel rather than definitive reportage. The footage that comprises it was shot in the titular years by Swedish television crews, who were intrigued by the anti-war and civil rights movements, and made several voyages to the States, their reporters more open and less jaded than their American counterparts. The footage aired and then went into their archives, where it was recently discovered by Swedish filmmaker Goran Olsson.

What he ...Read the entire review

The Series
If Hoosiers, Friday Night Lights and Fargo all decided to have a documentary baby together, it would probably look something like Nimrod Nation, an eight-episode, four-hour series that originally aired on The Sundance Channel in 2007.

Set in Watersmeet--a small, snowy town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan--the series chronicles the 2005-06 season of the Nimrods, the boys basketball team at Watersmeet Township School that won the district, regional and U.P. Class 'D' championship the year before. But the series is only partly about basketball, focusing just as much on life in a town seemingly frozen in time-...Read the entire review

Robert Redford's Sundance Channel plunged into environmental programming in a big way in April, 2007. Since then, most Tuesday nights, beginning at 9 p.m., the Sundance Channel airs a block of environmental programming consisting of a reoccurring 30-minute program followed by a feature-length documentary. The first television series to air in the 30-minute slot was the 13-episode first season of Big Ideas for a Small Planet. The series was renewed in 2008 and is currently airing in the same time slot.

Big Ideas for a Small Planet is unabashedly optimistic. Each episode focuses on a particular aspect of American daily life, and highlights businesses, designers, and activists focused on reducing environmental harms through individual consumer actions. The series presumes an audience that is convinced of the need for change. Accordingly, little time is spent outlining the problem o...Read the entire review

The Movie

Take the goofy tone and affection for the characters of Romy & Michelle's High School Reunion and plant it right down in the trailer park soil of Southern Georgia, populate the thing with adorably colorful kooks (as played by a roster of gifted performers,) and make sure you don't dumb the thing down or pander to the lowest common denominator - and you might just end up with a movie like Southern Belles. It might have cost 1/10th of what Meet the Fockers did (and it might end up grossing 1/50th of that wretched flick's haul) but Southern Belles is an exceedingly well-crafted, warm-hearted and winning little farce.

Belle (Anna Faris) and Bell (Laura Breckenridge) are a pair of sweet-natured and naive Georgia peaches. One's fighting a dead-end job within the seventh circle of retail hell; the other's battling the advances of a dead-end hayseed boyfrien...Read the entire review

You're only famous for fifteen minutes.
Make every second count.

Before you know it, they're the skeleton of a family unit...but a family unit nonethe...Read the entire review

In 10 Words or Less
A twisted legal story starting at the bloody bottom stair

Reviewer's Bias*
Loves: Forensic science, true-life drama
Likes:
Dislikes:
Hates: Liars, blood

The Show
If you know who Michael Peterson is or know what happened with his wife on December 9, 2001, then you know what "The Staircase" is about. You still might be interested in the eight-episode miniseries, but you probably know how the story ends. Those who weren't paying attention to the North Carolina courtroom where the Peterson case played out are in for a real treat: a true-life murder case that has more twists and turns than the best Grisham novel, with a truly unique perspective.

In the Peterson case, Michael Peterson called 91...Read the entire review

In 10 Words or Less
A young man, a mental disorder and--UHHHHH!

The Movie
No, this is not a porno film, nor is it a film about porn. Instead, the love in the title is, in fact, love, the dirty is actual dirt, and the filthy is filthy language. For once, truth in advertising actually works.

This is the story of Mark (Michael Sheen, Underworld) a man who should be very happy, with a beautiful wife and a good job as an architect. Unfortunately, he has two other things not everyone has, and that's Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Tourette's syndrome. Having just one of these mental problems is enough to make a person's life a struggle. Having two makes it a near impossibility, as Mark quickly learns. They are, after all, the reasons he loses it all, as th...Read the entire review

In 10 Words or Less
A man, a woman, a boy, a mess

The Movie
I think there's an old Greek proverb, that says "Never invite a man into your house, if you have a hottie living there." Those Greeks were way ahead of their time. The advice echos true today, as it did back then, as evidenced by this film's plot. If you bring a virule young man into your marriage, get him all liquored up with your hot-to-trot wife, and then take a nap, you're asking for trouble.

Such is the problem faced by David (Simon Baker, "The Guardian"), as his wife Elaine (Frances O'Connor, A.I.) takes up with a lonely neighborhood teen named Chet (Gregory Smith, "Everwood"). Chet's a smooth one, even if his life at school isn't exactly great, and he catches onto Elaine's vibes, helping...Read the entire review

Taking a gritty detective story and turning it on its ear, rookie writer/director Jamie Rafn crafted something affecting and surprising, while tweaking a genre we're all more than familiar with. Rafn, faced with a miniscule budget did what lots of low-budget filmmakers can't seem to manage: He cut the distractions down to a minimum and just built a taut, simple film around a story told in half-light. Not much dialog, not many flourishes, just spare locations, acting, and lean filmmaking.

Soho Square is the story of a detective (Anthony Biggs) assigned to track down a serial killer leaving his female victims burnt to a crisp in public places. His investigation staggers along as the detective morbidly boozes his nights away. The film slowly unravels the source of his malaise with the kind of patience that leaves the audience running through a series of emotions.

The set-up is pretty...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Can suicide be laughed at? The film Wilbur (Wants to Kill Himself) injects humor into the subject, yet the results are much more poignant than funny.

The Story:
Wilbur (Jamie Sives) is trying to kill himself. In any way he can imagine. Hanging, drowning, electrocution…it just never works out. His mother died when he was young, his father has just passed away, and he and his caring brother Harbour (Adrian Rawins) have inherited a bankrupt bookstore. Harbour takes Wilbur in and watches over him, thinking he just needs a girlfriend to get over this whole suicide thing. Plenty of women are interested, especially the nurse where he goes for therapy—until he's kicked out for bringing the other patients down. He and the nurse get involved in a whole lot of sensual ear licking. But his real attraction is to the hospital cleaner, Alice (Shirley Henderson). Unfortunate...Read the entire review

Much of the goodwill built up by the experimental and truly risky Tanner '88 is dissipated in this well-intentioned return to the form. The original minseries blurred the line between reality and fiction by positing its own candidate, Michael Murphy's Jack Tanner, as a Democratic longshot. Filmed during the primary season, director Robert Altman's crew followed "Tanner" around from one state to the next, often mingling with real candidates and personalities and raising some fascinating questions about American politics - the "fake" candidate was as credible as some of the real ones. Tanner's daughter Alex took a break from college to accompany her father, giving us another perspective on the chaotic campaign trail.

Shot during last year's Presidential campaign, Tanner on TannerRead the entire review

In 10 Words or Less
A journey into the heart of a man's darkness

The Movie
It's the rare film that has a character that speaks for everyone in the audience, but Rick certainly does. As Rick (Bill Pullman) berates Michelle (Sandra Oh, "Arli$$"), getting her name and ethnicity wrong during a job interview, she becomes an instant recipient of the viewer's sympathy. But when he takes his abuse a step further, Michelle unleashes a furious, but measured condemnation of her tormentor, cursing his existence. By saying what everyone would like to say to an arrogant businessman, she becomes the hero, and sets the film's plot in motion.

Rick, a collaboration between Lemony Snicket author Daniel Handler and veteran editor-turned-director Curtiss Clayt...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

Duncan Roy's aka comes with an interesting back story, one you might want to be aware of before you view the film. It's a film that appeared in theaters in an unusual format—which the director calls a "triptych," spreading three frames of overlapping, simultaneous action across the screen (reminiscent of Mike Figgis's Time Code, which used four quadrants). In this "triptych" format, the film received modest festival acclaim. Interestingly, for the DVD, Roy has chosen to present aka in the usual single-frame format, and it's a decision that radically changes the effect of the film—for the worse, in this reviewer's opinion. Fortunately, however, the "triptych" version of aka is available on the disc, in the supplements section, so that you can compare the two formats and marvel over the difference in effect.

Either way you watch the film, i...Read the entire review

"Passion is the quickest to develop, and the quickest to fade. Intimacy develops more slowly, and commitment more gradually still."
- Robert Sternberg

The Movie:

What really makes most good romantic comedies work is the actors. Plots are practically interchangeable in the genre and there aren't many new themes or ideas, either. But if the leads have a good chemistry and the supporting characters are interesting and funny, the film will work.

As the leading male in Seeing Other People, Mohr is fine as Ed, giving enough of an edge to be funny. But there is no question this is Julianne Nicholson's film. She is funny, sweet, charming and filled with this incredible energy. Her performance takes the film from a run-of-the-mill romantic comedy to a truly funny, sometimes touching film.

Ed (Mohr) and Alice (Nicholson) are the kind of couple that s...Read the entire review

The Movie:

"Singer": I sing songs about love.
(Everyone takes a breath)
Picasso: I would give it all up if I could sing songs about love. No more paints or brushes…just the Moonlight, the Junelight and You.
Einstein: People crowding in a smoky cabaret to hear the song stylings of Albert Einstein … appearing nightly with the Kentuckymen. Singing songs as pretty as a summer dress … lover's hand going into lover's hand.

-Steve Martin, "Picasso at the Lapin Agile"

It's hard to imagine anything new to be said about love in the arts. Everyone from Shakespeare to Kevin Smith, from Oscar Wilde to Wim Wenders have contributed to our understanding of love and love lost.

Screenwriters Mark Decena and Timothy Breitbach have not put forward any new ideas in the genre in Dopamine. There's no revelation he...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The faces of Jamal Udin Torabi and Enayatullah aren't the faces presented to America when nightly newscasts tell us about war. America is given the soldiers, the military leaders, the heads of state, but not those of the refugees - not those of the displaced, those who's only crime is being led to war by their leaders.

With In This World, one of four films in the 2003 Sundance Film Series, director Michael Winterbottom shows the struggle of two refugees trying to do what, for most, is an easy task: Get from one place to another. But when no one wants you, it can be a most difficult journey to make.

The story starts in Pakistan, where 16-year old Jamal and Enayatullah are in a refugee camp. They pay a human smuggler a large sum of money to set up the trip to London, say goodbye to their families, pack themselves on a bus and set out for a better life ...Read the entire review

Themovie

Everyone has heard of love triangles; what we have in The OtherSide of the Bed (original title: El otro lado de la cama)is a love quadrangle... with a few other angles thrown in as the filmmoves along. Meet Javier, Sonia, Paula, and Pedro: two sets of bestfriends who happen to also be doing some bed-hopping andboyfriend/girlfriend-swapping, while trying to keep theirindiscretions under wraps and their relationships headed the way theywant... assuming, that is, that any of them can figure out what theyreally want.

So far we have the ingredients for a funny romantic comedy, and TheOther Side of the Bed fits the bill nicely, with clear-cutcharacters who end up in a variety of humorous situations. Wh...Read the entire review

The Hired Hand should be called an 'alternative Western'. It's definitely a product made in the wake of Easy Rider, when clueless studio executives either threw their hands up and gave money to young longhairs to make movies, or were themselves replaced by equally clueless longhaired kids. Light in the story department and directed at a mannered crawl by Peter Fonda, the film no longer seems as unique as it did in 1971, and really only has some interesting acting moments with Verna Bloom to recommend it.

The Sundance Channel's DVD comes with a second disc loaded with extras, including a thorough docu by the surviving principals who made the film.