Documentaries
If a Tree Falls — Be Thankful Squirrels Can’t Use Lighters
…in the forest and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? This century-old philosophical thought experiment is often conducted to explore the connection between our ...
Hell and Back Again — An Erased Sense of Purpose
Similar to last year’s Restrepo, this year’s Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary, Hell and Back Again, looks at the trials and tribulation within the U.S. conflict in Afghanistan, centering, ...
Into the Abyss — Disordering Order
Warner Herzog’s newest documentary Into the Abyss is less about whether capital punishment should exist and more about why it does. Herzog’s opinion on lethal injection is no mystery. Within ...
You Can Touch Us. We’ve Seen the Steve Jobs Movie
It is difficult to say anything about Steve Jobs that has not already been said. Unless, perhaps, you are Steve Jobs. And you are talking to us from 1995. That’s ...
The Interrupters: A Film about People Who Give a F**k
We open on a large, oak conference table parked in the center of a board room in Chicago. Black and Brown faces huddle around it in a series of stern ...
Inside Job – The Dangers of Greed, Symbols, and Ratings
I can’t help but think that Inside Job won the 2010 Academy Award for Best Documentary on the basis that director Charles Ferguson should have won the Oscar three years ...
Life in a Day – A Movie in a Sentence
(image via AceShowbiz.com) Remember when the internet asked people to turn on their video cameras and record the events of a single day of their lives? Well, 80,000 people really did ...
Burning Man – To Be or Not to Be a Terrorist
(image via Woodland Trust) 1995 offered numerous options for the American kid who preferred outrage over sloth. There were corporate scumbags in America to loathe. There were faceless Communist tyrants ...
Gasland – Drink Bottled Water or Take Your Chances with “Some Bizarre Scientific Experiments”
There’s plenty to be said for Gasland, the Oscar-nominated, 2010 documentary from Josh Fox, who grew up and currently lives on the Marcellus Shale, “the Saudi Arabia of natural gas” ...
Beats, Rhymes, and Life – An Iceberg Ahead
Thanks to True Hollywood Story and Behind the Music, watching music-centered biopics and documentaries is often akin to watching Titanic in that you are relegated to waiting for the boat to crash into an iceberg ...
