Director:  Lauren Greenfield, Watched in:  Theater, Rating:  3/5.     The rich are different than you and me.  For one thing, they have more money.  For another, they don’t seem to know what to do with it. In the new documentary, The Queen of Versailles, we get to watch a filthy rich couple prance then stumble through the wreckage of the economic recession without ever really coming to terms with the grotesque side effects of greed.   Their false compassion for the less fortunate, their switch from shopping sprees at Saks to shopping sprees at Wal-Mart, their firing of a few expendables from their platoon of nannies, these are their ideas of sacrifice. What makes The Queen of Versailles fascinating is the attempt by the filmmakers to tease out our sympathies for people we find appalling. David and Jackie Siegel live in Orlando in a vast McMansion that is bursting at the seams with 8 kids, several poodles, an army of helpers, rooms full of disposable possessions and walls plastered with gawdy vanity portraits. When the film’s director, Lauren Greenfield, got wind of the Siegel’s plans to build a new crib, a 90,000 square-foot replica of the palace at Versailles, which would make it the largest house in the country, she convinced the couple to let her make a movie about wealth and consumerism in America. Jackie Siegel, with her huge manufactured breasts and skin-tight designer shorts, siezes the role of star and tour guide. She unapologetically leads Greenfield and her crew on an entertaining cruise through her daily [...]

Director:  Charles Ferguson, Watched in:  Theater, Rating:  4.5/5.     No End in Sight may seem like any other big-screen documentary, one of the rare few that is allowed to play in theaters before it is launched into the infinite online universe. The movie is polished to a professional sheen, narrated with a somber but commanding presence by Campbell Scott, with interviews lighted in deep, rich colors that suggest a hefty budget. But unlike the assembly-lined facile professionalism of an Alex Gibney film, there is a heightened and intensely sober intelligence at work. The movie presents little new general information. It is now common knowledge, unless you live under a Bush-Cheney bumper sticker, that the Bush administration committed a series of grevious errors in the first few months of the Iraq war that virtually guaranteed the mess we are now in. The power of No End in Sight lies not necessarily in its recitation of these errors—although they are mind-boggling—but in the way the director of the film has managed to bring together, in one place, a veritable battering ram of expert opinion vilifying nearly every decision this administration made in the early days of the war. The men and women interviewed here were hired by Bush’s team because they knew what they were doing—people with years of foreign policy training, people who knew how to establish communication and chains of command in countries we were occupying, military strategists with decades of experience in other wars—and yet, and yet...nearly every important decision they were paid to make was [...]

Director:  Sarah Burns and David McMahon, Ken Burns, Watched in: Theater Rating:  4.5/5.     The Central Park Five, directed by Ken Burns, his daughter Sarah Burns and her husband, David McMahon, is many things: an historical record of New York in the late ‘80s when it was gripped by fear and racism; a true crime thriller, recounted with incisive journalistic scrutiny; and an emotionally wrenching personal story of five boys whose lives were shattered by a heinous miscarriage of justice.  It is both extremely well-crafted and intimately moving, a testimony to the power of patient, attentive storytelling. How many of us remember the story of the Central Park jogger?  A young, white, Wall Street working woman who went out for an evening run in the park, and was brutally raped and beaten and left for dead in the brush. How many of us remember the five black and mixed-race teenagers arrested, convicted and jailed for the crime? The story claimed front-page space in newspapers nationwide. The party line was this: the teens were members of a so-called “wolf pack” of thugs, roaming the parks and streets of the world’s most famous city, engaging in something called “wilding”, savage and random attacks on defenseless, innocent people. The awful story of their rampage confirmed the image of New York as a crime-ridden metropolis, overrun by menacing black gangs high on crack. In the ensuing weeks, the police, the press and even mayor Ed Koch signed, sealed and delivered the fate of the Central Park Five before their trial began. [...]