Directors: Wim Wenders, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, Watched in:  Theaters, Rating:  3/5.     The casualties of war, oppression, poverty and religious zealotry confront all of us in the photographs of Sebastião Salgado, whose remarkable career is the subject of the documentary The Salt of the Earth. Salgado has witnessed the horrific aftermaths of genocide, the terrible cruelty of famine, the awful exploitation of workers, and he has captured these distinctly human evils with a deep-focused, exquisite eye. His pictures are magnificent and monumental, and usually expensively printed in coffee table books or displayed in art museums. One can find compressed versions on the Internet, but to see them displayed on the big screen of a movie theater is a rare treat. Salgado’s transformation from a young man studying economics to a world-class photographer is a compelling early part of this film. He was drawn to remote pockets of the earth, not only by the indigenous people who lived there but also by their often miserable conditions and the choices they had to make to survive. Perhaps his most famous series was shot in a Brazilian gold mine, where men carried endless sacks of dirt up rickety ladders for hours on end. Salgado reveals that these men were not slaves, but freelancers; intellectuals and students scattered among the laborers, all hoping to strike it rich. But rather than letting capitalism off the hook, his photos of these mudcaked men, shot in luminous black-and-white and framed against a hellish landscape, tell us of the dangerous lengths humans will go [...]

Director: Kevin Macdonald, Watched on: Cable On-Demand, Rating:  1.5/5.     I knew going into Marley, the documentary about the life of the late reggae superstar,  that there was no way this or any film would be able to match the transformative allure and muscular power of the man’s music. So there was already a benefit-of-the-doubt halo around the project that almost demands an uncritical embrace of its approach to the subject matter. But I was not prepared for how conventional and bland Marley is.  Clocking in at 144 minutes, this overstuffed fatty of a documentary carries the heavy gloss of an American Masters hagiography on steroids. Director Kevin Macdonald, who made a memorable but stagey re-enactment doc a few years ago, Touching the Void, before turning to fictional films with The Last King of Scotland and State of Play, movies that carry the aura of serious engagement but are really only spiffy, quasi-topical entertainments, throws up his hands early in Marley, deciding on an academic cut-and-paste structure of talking heads, generic Jamaica b-roll, and all-too-brief snatches of Marley’s music.  It’s the man’s music, if nothing else, that should save a film like this, but Macdonald uses Marley’s vast discography as a background soundtrack to stitch together an unimaginative chronology of his life and times.  Each time we are treated to rare concert footage or an early studio track from Marley’s career, the music quickly recedes, papered over with more interviews or an onscreen text moving us dutifully along to the next phase of his life. It [...]

Director:  James Marsh, Watched in:  Theater, Rating:  4/5.     Man on Wire contains the suspense of a whodunit, the tension of a heist film, and the poetry of a ballet. It tells the story of Phillipe Petit, a Frenchman who could be the greatest high wire walker of all time.  But this is no biography, or hagiography, and there is no built-in competition to provide us with a formulaic climax. Petit’s only competition is with his own notion of failure. As a young man he followed the construction of the Twin Towers in Manhattan, and decided that yes, in 1974, walking a wire strung between them needed to be done, and he needed to do it. Man on Wire breaks this goal down into segments that form the film’s narrative structure: the dream, the preparation, the set-up, the accomplices, the night before, the morning of. One of the most enjoyable aspects of this entertaining film is its breezy asides and delightful detours, the minor character with nicknames and their lets-put-on-a-show approach. Petit and his team were the merry pranksters of vertigo. Director James Marsh has a great eye and a fine sense of how to apply cinematic techniques to documentary filmmaking.  First off, he’s lucky that many of those involved in Petit’s wire walk are still alive and willing to talk; and that there is archival film, still photos, local news clips, and stock footage to work with. But Marsh also uses recreations, shot in a noirish, grainy black-and-white, that helps to ratchet up the sense [...]

Director:  Steve James, Watched on: DVD, Rating:  2/5.     The late film critic Roger Ebert would have appreciated seeing the movie made from his memoir, Life Itself, available on both theater screens and television at the same time. He was enthusiastically democratic about movies. He loved exposing everybody to all kinds of films–the silly and the sublime, the blockbusters and the indies–and his enduring legacy was his ability to talk and write intelligently about movies without coming off as pompously intellectual. The popular movie review program he hosted with Gene Siskel, At The Movies, may have dumbed down the critical process for art house snobs, but it showed that smart talk about motion pictures could be exciting, funny, and even enlightening to the great unwashed masses. He helped make it okay to have an opinion about a picture. Life Itself is directed by Steve James, a fellow Chicagoan ever grateful to Ebert for championing his legendary documentary, Hoop Dreams. There is an endearing personal quality to the film that is hard to be churlish about, but the movie is a raging hagiography, with way too much detail about Ebert’s life outside the movies, and way too little of the stuff most people want to see. Excerpts from At the Movies (and its preceding incarnation, Sneak Previews) are so few you wonder if the movie’s producers had trouble getting usage rights. The same is true of actual film clips, which would seem to be the most alluring reason for watching a documentary about a famous movie critic. [...]

Director:  Jason Kornbluth, Watched in: Theater, Rating:  3/5.     Working in the same mode as 2006’s An Inconvenient Truth, director Jason Kornbluth’s Inequality For All expands a series of lectures by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich into a full-length documentary. The subject is not global warming. It’s the widening income gap in America. But like Al Gore’s eye-opening assessment of climate change, Reich’s pronouncements are just as alarming. Both movies could be catalogued within a growing sub-genre of the documentary field labeled “the enlightenment of approaching doom.” Reich is a likeable, self-effacing, humorous and intelligent guide through the brambles of economic misery choking the middle class in this country. He is filmed giving lectures at the University of California at Berkeley, speaking to union organizers, attending conferences, and talking directly to the camera. His personal history is revealed through family photographs and footage of his stint in the Clinton administration, before he was eased out because he couldn’t shut up about the dire prognosis for the American worker in the age of rapid globalization. He has never stopped fighting for the middle class throughout a long career in liberal politics and the private sector. His warmth and compassion helps in transforming the weedy, difficult subject matter of income inequality into a concise and moving assessment of our endangered democracy. He is aided by director Kornbluth’s intimate supporting material. Interviews with struggling parents working two or three jobs, union laborers facing extinction, a rich executive who admits that as a member of the top 1% of income [...]

Director: Werner Herzog, Watched in: Theater, Rating:  2.5/5.     In 1994, three explorers stumbled upon a series of caves in Southern France that contained an amazing array of 30,000 year old drawings: charcoal renderings of lions, bears, rhinos, and horses, expertly etched on smooth, curved walls of stone. The pictures reveal a reverence for nature and motion and the creative spirit in the artists who drew them, the same qualities shared by the 21st century filmmaker, Werner Herzog, who was granted limited but exclusive access to the caves for Cave of Forgotten Dreams, shot in 3D. Working in tight spaces with a small crew, minimal lighting, and restricted access along a single steel boardwalk threaded throughout the caves, Herzog crafts a documentary that is as entertaining as it is loopy and long-winded. One part science project, one part metaphysical inquiry, and several parts tongue-in-cheek ballyhoo, Cave of Forgotten Dreams succeeds in revealing the primitive artistry of our neanderthalic ancestors and inciting our own imaginations to wonder at the unique creative capacity of the human mind, but it also points up the diminishing returns in Herzog’s languorous, rambling approach to documentary filmmaking. Where his excellent film, 2005’s Grizzly Man, grew into an ever more transfixing, horrifying portrait of a man who succumbed to nature’s inherent savagery, his last two documentaries, Encounters At the End of the World and Cave of Forgotten Dreams, are content to wander through their subject matter, stopping now and again for conversations with eccentric characters, or to muse on vague, mystical ideas of our place [...]