Starred Up

Starred Up opens in a dark anteroom where 16-year-old Eric Love (Jack O'Connell) is being processed into a prison for adults, a status he earned (the Brits call it being "starred up") due to the violence and the frequency of his crimes. O'Connell plays Eric as a near-feral survivor of abuse and neglect; his movements economical and confident, he carries himself like a cat, quick to react to a threat and prone to bursts of ferocity. Soon after arriving, Eric nearly kills a fellow prisoner who's done him no harm and then battles the guards who try to subdue him, creating a standoff by taking one man's penis in his mouth through his pants and threatening to bite it off. Though this preemptive strike is presumably intended to keep the other prisoners at bay, it has the opposite effect, earning Eric the enmity of powerful alpha dogs like one of the guards who runs the prison and the suave prisoner who unofficially runs Eric's unit and doesn't want some crazy kid causing trouble on his turf.

Are You Here

When TV weatherman Steve Dallas (Owen Wilson) asks for his job back after quitting in disgust following years of bad behavior, he’s startled to be welcomed back—and given a promotion. “Jeez, what do you have to do to get fired around here?” he asks.

You might ask the same thing of Matthew Weiner, the writer/director/producer of this rambling, tedious film, which keeps going and going but never gets anywhere. Stumbling from unfunny “comedy,” like an icky, overlong sequence in which Steve kills a chicken, to drama that’s generally either unconvincing or overplayed, Are You Here can’t settle on a tone.

Coldwater

There's a certain kind of fantasy, appealing to teenagers, that involves imagining yourself in a situation harsh enough to justify the alienation and rage flooding your soul. The attraction is the perverse satisfaction of enduring nightmarish scenarios, no matter how high the deck is stacked against you. Coldwater has the feel of one of those fantasies, from its melodramatic mixture of grandiosity and powerlessness to its view of the world as a torture-chamber crucible for an angry young man who has to grow up too fast. So it comes as no surprise that writer-director Vincent Grashaw wrote the film's first draft soon after graduating high school.

The Hundred-Foot Journey

In The Hundred-Foot Journey, the Kadam family—-doe-eyed Hassan (Manish Dayal), a chef who learned all he knows from his mother; his bullheaded father, referred to only as Papa (Om Puri); and Papa's four other children—-leave India when their family restaurant is torched. The fire, a hate crime that incinerates Hassan's mother, is described only as the result of "some election" and quickly dismissed, as there's no place for grief in this upbeat dramedy. Instead, as Hassan tells the family's story to a customs officer, a brisk mix of exposition and flashbacks sets the lightly comic, surface-skimming tone that the film will stick to as the nomadic clan briefly touches down in England, then moves to France.

100 Words On ... Annie Hall

Annie Hall was supposed to be a murder mystery and a psychological anatomy of Alvy Singer, the first of Woody Allen’s alpha neurotics. But when the footage proved lifeless in the editing room, the filmmakers reworked it radically, focusing on Singer’s relationship with Annie Hall (Diane Keaton). The result is one of cinema’s great love stories, a funny, tender tribute to one very specific, goofily lovely woman that also speaks to all the loves we’ve ever lost, thanks to a built-in running commentary (including jokes and asides Singer delivers to the camera) on everything from the nature of love to the perils of living too much in your head.

Written for The L Magazine

A Master Builder

“I would like to tell you a very strange story—I mean, if you’d be willing to listen to it,” title character Halvard Solness (Wallace Shawn) says in A Master Builder, a production headed by Shawn (who wrote the screenplay from his own translation of Henrik Ibsen’s play) and his longtime collaborator Andre Gregory (who adapted it for the stage and plays another of the main roles), with the help of Jonathan Demme, who the two recruited to direct. Halvard’s line, which could easily have come from either of the two old friends’ other films, is spoken early enough to feed our hopes that A Master Builder will follow in the nimble footsteps of My Dinner with Andre and Vanya on 42nd Street, deftly exploring human nature and the nature of language—both the stories we tell and the things we leave unspoken. Unfortunately, this film is as flatfooted as the others are agile.

Land Ho!

The industrial-strength whine of an unseen engine dominates the opening moments of Land Ho! What could it be? A plane getting about to take off for some exotic place? A chainsaw preparing to rip through something--or someone? Nope, it’s a vacuum cleaner, wielded by Mitch (played by Earl Lynn Nelson, co-director Martha Stephens’ second cousin). Mitch, we soon learn, is a recently retired surgeon who’s cleaning up a bit before his favorite ex-brother-in-law, Colin (Paul Eenhoorn) comes over for dinner.

That aural punch line is a nice introduction to this deadpan but lively film, which presents everyday situations and encounters with just enough of a twist to focus our attention on them. And you’ve got to savor the small stuff, as Land Ho! gently reminds us, because those seemingly inconsequential moments make up the warp and the weft of our lives.

Human Rights Watch Film Festival 2014: The Supreme Price

The recent kidnapping of hundreds of schoolgirls by the terrorist group Boko Haram highlighted many of the problems that are corroding civil society in Nigeria, including a brutal and growing disregard for women's rights and a government that is as ineffective at protecting its citizens as it is adept at punishing them. Those are the problems that Hafsat Abiola, the heroine of The Supreme Price, is devoting her life to addressing.

100 Words on ... Elena

An homage to the beloved older sister cowriter-director Petra Costa lost when she was 7 years old, Elena is a detailed anatomy of grief—-and a poetic tribute to life, love, and the transformative power of art. Costa combines family video, photos and testimonials from her sister with new footage of herself and New York, the city where she retraces the contours of Elena’s life and explores its effect on her own. Her entrancing, beautiful footage frequently features blurred images, soft colors, slow pans, slow motion, and scenes involving water, which set the stage for her concluding metaphor for the healing power of time: “Little by little, the pain turns to water, becomes memory.”

Written for The L Magazine

The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne

Part of the fun of movies like To Catch a Thief and Ocean's Eleven is identifying with famous actors playing thieves, thrilling at their inventiveness and insouciance. But as The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne reminds us, it's more than just lack of nerve or poor bone structure that keeps most of us from a life of heisting. Doris Payne used that Hollywood trope as a template for her life, remaking herself as a glamorous jewel thief. She plays the part well, fooling countless sales clerks over the years and always looking great—even in her mug shots. There's a backstage-pass kind of thrill in learning just how she ripped off so many high-end jewelry stores, but this somewhat hamfisted doc is strongest when exploring the flip side of that fantasy.

We Are the Best!

A humanist with a rare sensitivity to the inner lives of children, Lukas Moodysson is one of the best living directors of young people, and he’s especially good with girls and young women. As he did in Lilya 4-Ever and Together, he gazes at the young people in We Are the Best! eye to eye even when they are all but invisible to those around them, capturing the awkwardness and innocent sincerity of youth without a trace of condescension or sentimentality. But, like all true humanists, he knows that loving human frailty and finding humor in it are not mutually exclusive. Even as we empathize with the protagonists of We Are the Best! we also laugh at them--and the laughter is energizing, because there’s nothing mean-spirited about it. It’s just another way of acknowledging the humanity we share with three teenage girls in 1982 Stockholm.

100 Words on Rock, Rage & Self-Defense

This documentary by first-time filmmakers feels as rough-edged and sometimes unwieldy as Home Alive, the Seattle collective it documents, which initially made decisions only by consensus (“a gigantic pain in the ass,” says one of the founders). It also relies a bit too much on talking heads. But, as those talking heads point out more than once, violence comes in all kinds of forms, and people—-particularly women—-are victimized by it with numbing regularity. So it’s interesting to hear from a handful of women who just said no to the status quo by founding a cooperative that provides affordable and accessible self-defense training.

Written for The L Magazine

Horses of God

Inspired by five suicide bombings that took place on the same day in Casablanca on May 16, 2003, Nabil Ayouch's Horses of God lets us see how young suicide bombers—-"horses of God," as the man in charge of their mission calls them—-might deserve our pity. When we first meet sensitive Yachine (Abdelhakim Rachid), his charismatic big brother Hamid (Abdelilah Rachid), and his vulnerable friend Nabil (Hamza Souidek), they're more or less raising themselves and each other in Sidi Moumen, a slum just outside Casablanca.

More Than the Rainbow

The photographers featured throughout Dan Wechsler's More than the Rainbow are a pretty scruffy, competitive bunch, sometimes supportive of one another, but often critical too-—and not just of its main subject, New York City street photog Matt Weber. Julio Mitchell, for instance, says he doesn't find most of Cartier-Bresson's moments decisive—-just trivial. "Maybe that's why he's so popular," he sniffs. Their jostling opinions make for some interesting exchanges, as a handful of photographers, plus a few critics and other tastemakers, talk about things like the merits of film versus digital and the importance of finding one's voice. Most people are interviewed one-on-one by the filmmaker, but segments are edited deftly together to make the film feel like a good conversation, moving seamlessly from one topic to the next with the unselfconscious ease of a good dinner party.

The One I Love

The One I Love, which played at this year's Tribeca Film Festival, is a likeable falling-out-of-love story with a clever but somewhat underdeveloped premise. Ethan (Mark Duplass) and Sophie (Elisabeth Moss) are trying to salvage their marriage, though all the talk just seems to be making things worse. Then their therapist (Ted Danson) sends them to an idyllic retreat in Ojai, where the grounds are gorgeous, the weather is sunny, and Sophie and Ethan have a beautiful main house and a guest house all to themselves. At first, the place seems to be rejuvenating their relationship, but they soon realize that all the fun they thought they were having together actually wasn't with one another; it was with two other people who look and act almost exactly like they do, only a little better.

Human Capital

Paolo Virzì's Human Capital, which played at this year's Tribeca Film Festival, gives the tired trope of cutting between overlapping stories a welcome shot of adrenaline, using it not just to compare and contrast tangentially related stories, but to show how people caught up in their private dramas can overlook or misinterpret the people around them—especially those who have less power, whether because of their gender, their class, their age, or some combination of the three.

The German Doctor

"He thought I was a perfect specimen—except for my height," says Lilith (Florencia Bado) in voiceover, describing the reaction of the eponymous character (Alex Brendemühl) when he first encountered her as a beautiful 12-year-old whose stunted growth made her look much younger. The doctor's assessment is a fitting introduction to this film, in which things always feel off balance even as the plot points click all too neatly into place.

Getting Down and Dirty: Q&A with the Director of Manos Sucias

Manos Sucias, which screened at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, is the story of two young men from Buenaventura, an impoverished town on Columbia’s Pacific coast, who pair up to take a fishing boat on a perilous drug run for a ruthless drug lord. I talked to director Josef Kubota Wladyka for The L Magazine about the film and the true stories it was based on.

Every time someone in your movie talks about moving to Bogota, someone else reminds them that there are no black people there. Do Afro-Colombians tend to be pretty invisible in most parts of Colombia? And if so, is that part of what made you want to tell this story?
Yes, definitely. I believe Afro-Latinos in South America in general haven’t been well represented in film, especially in Colombia.

If you travel to Buenaventura, it doesn’t take long to see that it’s a place that’s been sort of forgotten by the government. It’s the richest port city in Colombia—it has the most imports and exports—but the people who live there don’t participate in that economy. It’s under siege by a lot of things, especially narco-trafficking.

Gueros

Director Alonso Ruiz Palacios is aware enough of his place in Mexican cinema's new wave to include a couple of jarringly meta references in his otherwise fourth-wall-preserving debut film, Güeros, first popping into the frame to ask one of the actors what he thinks of the screenplay and then giving another character a speech about "fucking Mexican movies." But if most of the art films to come out of Mexico over the last couple decades "grab a bunch of beggars," as the character who complains about Mexican cinema goes on to say, to score points about social justice or the disintegration of the social fabric, Güeros follows in the footsteps of movies like Y Tu Mamá También and Duck Season. The film's social commentary unspools quietly in the background while the narrative focuses on the ennui, free-floating anxiety, and inchoate longing for meaning experienced by two or three privileged young people from the middle- to upper-middle classes.

100 Words on... Trouble in Paradise

One of the sleekest, slyest and most sneakily subversive of the many brilliant rom-coms that tumbled out of Hollywood in the ‘30s, this Lubitsch classic is a sinuous cascade of silkily delivered double entendres. Gaston (Herbert Marshall) and Lily (Miriam Hopkins), a match made in paradise, may be thieves, but then so is the patrician board chair of the company whose owner, Mme Colet (Kay Francis), becomes first their target, then Lily’s rival as Gaston falls for the stately but down-to-earth beauty. “If you behave like a gentleman,” Lily promises Gaston, as she leaves him with Mme Colet for the evening, “I’ll break your neck!”

Written for The L Magazine

The Unknown Known

At the end of The Unknown Known, director Errol Morris asks his subject, Donald Rumsfeld, why he agreed to be interviewed. But it’s easy to imagine why Rummy bit down on the bait he devours with such evident pleasure, making what he clearly sees as an irrefutable case in his own defense. The more interesting question is: what did Morris hope to achieve in giving him that platform?

Call it the fog of Rumsfeld.

Return to Homs

Talal Derki's Return to Homs is a testament to the power of video to document resistance to corrupt and abusive regimes—in this case, that of Syria's Bashar al-Assad. It's also a witness to the limits of that power.

Buzzard

Who is Marty Jackitansky (Joshua Burge), the title character of writer-director Joel Potrykus's darkly funny Buzzard? His regular phone calls to his mother and the clumsy lies he tells her about how well he's doing ("I don't ever act like that anymore. I'm happy now. Everyone really likes me") make him sound like a mixed-up kid, while his sardonic contempt for rules seems comically heroic at first: As he searches for new ways to rip off the soul-sucking bank where he temps for $9.50 an hour, Buzzard feels like a downscale variation on Office Space—one whose hero doesn't think big enough to come up with a way to make hundreds of thousands (he just skims off $20 here or $50 there).

This is a study of an interesting character—hard to like, harder to dismiss, and impossible to pigeonhole.

Her Brand is Global Connectivity

I talked to Brooklyn-based filmmaker Rachel Boynton, director of Our Brand is Crisis, about her latest film, Big Men, for The L.

Big Men and Our Brand is Crisis are both cautionary tales about global capitalism centered around Americans trying to control major aspects of life in another country -- the presidency of Bolivia in Crisis, and Ghana's newly discovered oil reserves in Big Men. Is that a theme you plan to keep exploring?
When I first got involved in documentary filmmaking, fresh out of college, I had a little more confidence in my own capacity to change the world. I was really interested in the idea of getting Americans to think about how they are related to the rest of the world.

As I have gotten older, my interests changed, I’ve changed, but I’ve remained consistently fascinated by the intersection of different ways of seeing. At the time that I finished Our Brand, oil prices were going though the roof. The price of oil was on everybody’s list. I didn’t have kids yet, and I was at the point in my life when I thought I could take on something kind of epic. The original idea was, I’m going to make a film about the oil business from inside the oil business.

The Lunchbox

I went to The Lunchbox to see Irrfan Khan, that great soul, find his soulmate. Khan’s characters almost never get the girl. In movies like Life of Pi and TV shows like In Treatment, he generally plays a lonely existential hero, a man who feels and knows much more than most of us ever will but has no one to share his stories with. The Lunchbox, a love story in which the lovers don’t share any screen time, turns out to be a subtle variation on that theme.

Bethlehem

The Israel of Bethlehem is a hamster wheel of a world: Everyone keeps running as fast as they can, trying to protect the people they love, but nobody ever makes any progress. It’s also one big, hugely dysfunctional family, a place where everyone—Jews, Arabs and Bedouins—is intimately connected to everyone else, for better or (more often) much, much worse.

Visitors

Like director Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi, Visitors uses lush cinematography, a nonstop Philip Glass score, and generous lashings of slow-motion and time lapse photography to half-seduce, half-hypnotize us into seeing familiar sights with fresh eyes. Ironically, Reggio’s signature style has been so widely copied in ads that it can feel a little tired itself, especially when a subject is shot from below against a sky with time-lapse clouds scudding by. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that this film had something profound to say even when I wasn’t sure what that was.

100 Words On … It Should Happen to You

Even the generally feminist screenwriter Garson Kanin and “women’s director” George Cukor patronize their heroine, Gladys Glover (the great Judy Holliday), a pneumatic child-woman for whom, as her suitor (Jack Lemmon) keeps insisting, happiness lies in giving up her inchoate ambitions to be “part of the crowd.” But a gorgeous young Holliday, grounded yet flighty as a young woman determined to “make a name for myself” in New York, makes this gem sparkle in spite of its flaws.

Fourteen years before Andy Warhol’s “15 minutes” declaration and long before Angelyne or the Kardashians, this likeable rom-com rips into the hunger for fame that is one of the defining manias of our time. Lemmon gives a pretty good speech about why getting famous just for being famous is nuts, but Holliday effortlessly one-ups his smug self-assurance in scenes like the one where the creamily lit Gladys stops a smarmy would-be seducer in his tracks by asking: “You ever think of getting a parrot?”

Written for The L Magazine

My Top 10 for 2013

And here's my own Top 10 list for last year.

Her

100 Words On … A Touch of Sin

Where most films by the great Jia Zhangke unfurl tales of everyday people cast adrift by the massive upheavals in China’s economy and social structure with a languor that almost masks their ferocity, A Touch of Sin burns like a comet.

The L Magazine's Top 20 Movies of 2013

Here's the L's list, which I contributed to...

Twice Born

Like Incendies, Twice Born is the story of a doomed romance and a loving family with secrets so toxic even the family itself doesn’t know them, set against the backdrop of a recent civil war. Also like Incendies, Twice Born is an intermittently powerful but ultimately unconvincing melodrama.

100 Words On ... Little Shop of Horrors

Based on the Broadway musical, not Roger Corman’s rough-edged black-and-white original, Frank Oz’s highly stylized rom-com takes its cue from Alan Menken’s zesty R&B score and Howard Ashman’s witty lyrics and book.

NYFF 2013: Blue is the Warmest Color

After one of their titanic lovemaking sessions, Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) teasingly asks Emma (Léa Seydoux) for a grade. Leah assigns her a 14 (out of 20 on the French grading scale), adding gently that she needs a little more practice. “I’ll give it all I’ve got,” Adèle promises.

That promise is kept in spades, by both character and actress, in Abdellatif Kechiche’s deeply felt coming of age story about a sympathetic young woman’s passage from adolescence to young adulthood and the first love that helps her find her true self. Seydoux is a worthy match for Exarchopoulos as the older and more experienced of the two (Emma is in art school and Adèle in high school when they meet), exuding the cool self-confidence of her character’s haute bourgeois background along with a charismatic artist’s seductive ability to make whoever interests her feel truly seen and understood.

NYFF 2013: The Immigrant

Marion Cotillard is an icon of suffering in James Gray's somber passion play The Immigrant. As he did in Little Odessa, The Yards, and We Own the Night, Gray introduces us to a dysfunctional family and a criminal subculture prone to preying on the weak, going light on narrative twists to focus on the milieu and the interplay between his main characters. But where the best of his work sweeps you up in a tide of emotion and imagery so strong you aren't tripped up by on-the-nose dialogue or underdeveloped characters, The Immigrant leaves a few openings for suspension of disbelief to leak out.

NYFF 2013: Bastards

There is no shortage of title characters in this tale about the destructive power of a deeply dysfunctional family, but if the men inflict most of the violence, the women bear their share of the blame for the damage done. In the Q&A after the press screening, Claire Denis said: “They [women] are victims, for sure, often. But I don’t want a film to give them pity always. I prefer to be fierce with them.” Her story keeps circling back to questions of guilt and personal responsibility, each turn revealing more complications in her characters and their actions.

NYFF 2013: Abuse of Weakness

Like its heroine, Abuse of Weakness wastes no time looking back, eschewing flashbacks of director Maud Schoenberg (Isabelle Huppert) ruling over a set or being courted by critics at Cannes. Instead, we meet Maud as she wakes up from a twitchy sleep to find herself half paralyzed by a stroke. Director Catherine Breillat doesn’t linger long on her recovery, either. We see enough of sterile, near-silent hospital rooms and painful therapy sessions to know it was a long slog, but we’re soon back home with Maud in her high-ceilinged Paris apartment, where the real story begins—and takes place, for the most part, since she can’t get around without help and she’s too proud to ask for much.

NYFF 2013: Inside Llewyn Davis

"An odyssey where the main character doesn't go anywhere," as Ethan Coen put it in the Q&A after the New York Film Festival press screening of the film, Inside Llewyn Davis begins at the Gaslight Café, a fictional Greenwich Village coffeehouse, in 1961. After watching the title character (a mesmerizing Oscar Isaac) perform a soulful interpretation of an old folk song and then get beaten up in an inky back alley, we circle back in time to follow him as he couch-surfs his way around New York, hitches rides to Chicago and back, and visits, you suspect, just about everyone he loves or needs something from: his enraged ex-lover, Jean (Carey Mulligan); his sister (Jeanine Serralles), whose patience is fraying fast; his impossible-to-please father (Stan Carp), who's wasting away in a nursing home; his deceptively abusive, apparently avuncular agent, Mel (Jerry Grayson); and the kind, middle-aged couple (Ethan Phillips and Robin Bartlett) whose comfortably bohemian-ish apartment is the closest thing Llewyn has to a home base.

100 Words on… Come and Get It

Worth seeing for the star-making performance of the great Frances Farmer, who burned out a few years later, Come and Get It starts as a Hawksian portrait of manly “pine monkeys” at work, the captain of industry who leads them (Edward Arnold) and the gutsy woman who loves him (Farmer), complete with thrilling sequences of trees careening downhill and torpedoing into the water as men stand coolly just out of reach.

100 Words on… Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Natural-born feminist (probably thanks to that tiger mom he immortalized in Almost Famous) and lovingly bemused pop culture chronicler Cameron Crowe hit the ground running like Usain Bolt with this script, his first ever.

100 Words On: Singin’ in the Rain

Where The Artist damned the silent film era with fake praise, professing nostalgia for the worst of its sentimental excesses, Singin’ in the Rain brings the early days of talkies to cheerfully raucous life.

100 Words on…. The Power of Nightmares

This is a rare chance to see a powerful film that never aired on American TV or had a standard theatrical run since its BBC debut in 2004. Adam Curtis’s occasionally deadpan, always dead-serious documentary traces the parallel rise of radical Islamists in the Middle East and neoconservative ideologues in the U.S., making the case that each group gained power by fomenting fear of the other to create global mayhem.

100 Words on... The Servant

A glittery-eyed Dirk Bogarde morphs from abject subservience to contemptuous control while James Fox slowly deflates from the unearned confidence of blind privilege to sodden impotence in this intelligent adaptation of a novel about the triumph of an English manservant over his employer. Is this a parable about the collapse of the British ruling class or just a high-class game of cat and mouse—kind of a less gimmicky Sleuth?

SXSW 2013: Getting Back to Abnormal, This Ain't No Mouse Music!, No More Road Trips? Don Jon

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

SXSW 2013: Computer Chess, Swim Little Fish, Loves Her Gun

The fuzzy, shades-of-gray black-and-white of the decades-old Sony video camera that director Andrew Bujalski used to shoot Computer Chess is a worm tunnel through the space-time continuum, shooting us straight to the late ‘70s or early ‘80s. We arrive a computer chess tournament to which teams of artificial intelligence programmers from places like MIT and Stanford have lugged bulky CPUs and monitors. It’s an annual milestone in the race to develop a computer that can beat a human chess master. It is also, as one of the spectators puts it, the beginning of “the end of the world”—and the dawn of the one we inhabit now, in which we take it for granted that computers can do a whole lot of things better than we can.

SXSW 2013: Before Midnight, Mud, The Act of Killing

My friend John Morthland, who programmed panels for the South by Southwest film festival in its infancy, says he could only get panelists from Texas and nearby states in those days. The schedule is crammed with panelists and films from all over now, but SXSW’s programmers still leave plenty of space for native sons and daughters.

Consuming Spirits

Consuming Spirits is what you might get if Ironweed mated with A Prairie Home Companion and had a movie baby. Set in a Rust Belt Appalachian town and told through hand-made animation, mournful American roots music, and literate but plainspoken narration, it’s a sad story marbled with arch observational humor.

The Central Park Five

It’s been a good year for cautionary tales about how easy it is for our criminal justice system to be abused—and abusive. The House I Live In portrays our “war on drugs” as little more than a handy way of sentencing poor and/or black people to economic irrelevance by funneling them into prison. Better This World introduces us to two idealistic young men who came under government observation after protesting a Republican convention and wound up convicted of an act of terrorism cooked up by the FBI informant who testified against them. The gentle subject of If a Tree Falls Bernie, a gentle farce based on a true story, not because they didn’t think he did it but because, for cat’s sake, everybody loves Bernie, and who ever had any use for that mean old Miz Nugent he shot, no doubt for good reason?

But none of these hit as close to home for New Yorkers as The Central Park Five, a documentary about the legal lynching of five teenage boys that followed the rape and near murder of a jogger in northern Central Park in the spring of 1989.

Red Dawn

Like John Milius' 1984 original, from which it never strays far, Dan Bradley’s remake feeds the warrior fantasies of adolescent boys in the waning North American empire with a testosterone-heavy tale of a war much like the ones in Iraq and Vietnam—only with the roles reversed, so we’re the blameless civilians protecting our homes from armed invaders.

A Man Vanishes

When director Shoehei Imamura started this black-and-white docudrama in the mid-1960s, he intended to investigate why tens thousands of people disappeared every year in Japan at the time—and how, as a cop wonders aloud at the start of the film, anyone can slide out of view in such a small, crowded country. But Imamura wound up exploring an even bigger mystery.

Burn

For a few disheartening minutes, grim statistics and drive-by shots of Detroit’s abandoned buildings make this look like another ruin-porn documentary about the stalled-out Motor City. But Burn turns a fresh lens on a subject that already feels a little burned-out, looking at the devastation of Detroit through the eyes of firefighters who put their lives on the line to save it.