Director:  Davis Guggenheim, Watched in:  Theater Rating:  4/5.     Director Davis Guggenheim admits at the beginning of his sad and haunting film, Waiting For Superman, that he drives his own daughters to a private school every morning, passing by three public schools that are nearer to his home. His guilt over a decision he once promised himself he would not make has driven him to make this movie, a vivid and intimate examination of the crisis confronting education in America. Guggenheim tells the stories of 5 young students in California, New York and Washington D.C., all with eager minds but meager [...]

Director:  Spike Lee, Watched on:  HBO, Rating:  5/5.     In his four-hour long post-Hurricane Katrina documentary, When the Levees Broke, Spike Lee and his team of filmmakers throw a wide net over all the neighborhoods of New Orleans, interviewing residents who fled Katrina, musicians who returned, politicians who passed the buck, journalists who wrote impassioned indictments of failed policy. At first, the movie feels overloaded with talking heads, too many faces, too many names, too many stories. But soon a pattern emerges. What Lee is doing with this film is telling the story of a diaspora, a great forced emigration of [...]

Directors:  Heidi Ewing, Rachel Grady, Watched on:  DVD, Rating:  3/5.     In Jesus Camp, filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady were granted unprecedented access to a group of kids who practice a form of evangelical religion so deeply fundamental that it would be admirable if it weren’t so frightening. The pre-teens in this Oscar nominated doc are Pentecostal Charismatics—they live, breathe, cry, sing, and speak in tongues for Jesus. Their leader at the Kids on Fire summer camp, located in the ironically named Devil’s Lake, North Dakota, is a passionate general in an army they believe is led by George Bush, [...]

Director:  Mark Levinson, Watched in: Theater, Rating:  1.5/5.     Judging by the packed house at an opening night screening of the new documentary Particle Fever, the movie seems to have a sizable niche audience. Telling the story of the Large Hadron Collider, an immense and expensive science experiment going on in a vast underground bunker in Switzerland, the movie is certain to thrill physicists, scientists, astronomers, philosophy majors, math geeks, nerds, braniacs and other lovable eggheads who see vast mysteries and thrilling possibilities in dense, convoluted equations. If you’re like me, however, whose last encounter with arithmetic was 10th grade geometry, [...]

Director:  Brian Knappenberger, Watched in: Theater, Rating:  4/5.   The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz documents the sad tale of the information activist and brilliant computer programmer who committed suicide in early 2013. The movie presents damning evidence of death by intimidation, perpetrated by the United States government against one of its own citizens, orchestrated by a paranoid national security apparatus and an overzealous Federal prosecutor. The Internet’s Own Boy will leave you angry, suspicious, even shocked; it is both a searing work of protest and rage, and a deeply moving portrait of a gifted, likeable young [...]

Director:  Charles Ferguson, Watched on:  DVD, Rating:  5/5.     It is very provincial of me to say this, but Seattle may be one of the few cities in the country where audiences still applaud at the end of a film they enjoyed, and it is probably the only city where an audience will applaud at the end of a documentary. But Inside Job is that kind of film. The movie is a clear, detailed and thorough examination of the head-in-the-sand politics and back room criminal activity that created the financial mess of 2008.  The film was produced, written and directed [...]

Director:  Andrew Rossi, Watched in:  Theater, Rating:  3/5.     Page One: Inside The New York Times peeks its head in the doorway of the venerable newspaper’s building, peers around a few corners, and shuffles its feet in a couple of offices. It is not a gritty, in-the-trenches, behind-the-scenes expose on the day-to-day running of the most famous newspaper in the world, a subject more suited to a reality TV series than a 90-minute independent documentary. Given that, the movie’s title, or titles, are misleading. Page One: Inside the New York Times is not about the battle of various managing editors to [...]

Director: Sarah Polley, Watched in:  Theater Rating:  3.5/5.     In the documentary Stories We Tell, director Sarah Polley invites us into her cinematic scrapbook of home movies and family interviews with a playful, warm embrace. The film is both a memoir about her mother and a meta-commentary on the process of making a movie about memory. Beginning with a disarming montage of relatives settling down on chairs and couches for interviews, admitting their shyness and asking Polley if anyone really should care about their family history, the movie immediately establishes a non-threatening atmosphere of trust and familiarity. The story being [...]

Director:  Davis Guggenheim, Watched in:  Theater, Rating:  4/5.     There are actually two inconvenient truths in An Inconvenient Truth. The first truth is stark and unavoidable: the devastating effects of global warming are accelerating even faster than we want to believe, so fast that in 50 years floods may kill millions of people around the world and create millions more refugees, while corrupt politicians are more concerned with starting wars based on lies, securing the profits of General Motors and Haliburton, and making the United States safe from gay weddings. The second truth is more subtle, and to the easily distracted [...]

Director: Haskell Wexler, Watched on:  DVD, Rating:  5/5.     In Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool, set during Chicago’s 1968 Democratic convention, vibrates with the intensity of watching history happen before our eye. Wexler, already an established veteran director of photography for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, In The Heat of the Night, and The Thomas Crown Affair, grafted the fictitious story of a news cameraman’s tentative love affair into his real-time street footage of the convention and ensuing protests, creating a one-of-a-kind film that is both politically astute and cinematically playful. Wexler was a master with the long lens. He was [...]