It’s believed that thousands of people live below the streets of New York City, inhabiting the shoulders and gullies of the labyrinthine subway. Those pounding the pavement to and from work each day may wonder what impels these denizens to navigate dark, dirty tunnels in lieu of facing the myriad bodies and bills that await them above. […]
Image via Khodorkovsky-movie.com No one ever accused Ronald Reagan of being a genius(*). So when he implored Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” he couldn’t have known what he was asking his Soviet counterpart let loose. Four years after Reagan’s speech, the detritus of Communism littered the path to a post-Soviet Russia. The decade that followed […]
…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 realities and observations. However, If a Tree Falls, the newly Academy Award nominated documentary, contends, the answer to this question is: “No, which is why the aggravated […]
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, for the most part, on the rhetoric of our politicking. Various commanders sit down with Afghan elders and explain that “we’ll pay for [the damage we’ve created],” […]
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 the first ten minutes of the film, he denounces the practice, but doesn’t stoop to demagoguery. Rather, Into the Abyss is a resonating documentary seems to focus […]
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 unintended premise of Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview, which screened this week in select theaters around the country. The story of the project goes like this: […]
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 circles. They are the Interrupters, a group of civilian activists who fight to curb violence on the streets of the Windy City. These men–most of them are […]
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 prior for his debut No End in Sight, a documentary that takes an in depth look at the Bush Administration’s conduct prior to and during the Iraq […]
(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 that last summer. And they shipped 4,500 hours of footage from 192 countries off to director Kevin MacDonald and editor Joe Walker. Over the last year, they […]
(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 in China to defeat. There were political prisoners everywhere to be freed. And there were precious resources of an abused planet to save. It was a time […]