Director:  David France, Watched on: Cable On-demand, Rating:  4.5/5.     How To Survive A Plague sounds like the title of a post-apocalyptic adventure picture.  For the gay and bisexual men who lived through the AIDS epidemic, a private apocalypse is exactly what faced each and every one of them throughout the long, frightening days that made up much of the ‘80s and early ‘90s. This film, a ragged and startling account of what amounted to a collective cry for help and recognition by a population ignored, abandoned and left to die, is indeed a must-see for any group or subculture [...]

Director:  Gonzalo Arijon, Watched on:  DVD, Rating:  4.5/5.     Documentary gatekeepers—the distributors and film festival programmers who get to decide what docs are worthy of their audiences—will tell you that the most important quality they look for in a film is access, meaning the access the filmmakers have to elements of their story no one else has. This all too often leads to a sacrifice of craft and artistry for the sake of the more sensational aspects of subject matter, but in the case of the excellent documentary, Stranded:  I Have Come From A Plane That Crashed on the Mountains, the [...]

Director: Malik Bendjelloul, Watched in:  Theater, Rating:  4/5.     Where-are-they-now tales of celebrities making it big before a fast slide to oblivion are always hard to resist, but the makers of the new documentary Searching For Sugarman had a bigger problem. Their subject, a singer-songwriter from the early ‘70s going by the name Rodriguez, never even had a sustained music career, let alone a hit, and he was all but unknown in the United States. Somewhere it is written everyone’s musical cachet must begin or end in America, but Cape Town, South Africa never read that memo. Thanks to a bootleg [...]

Director:  Barbara Kopple, Watched on:  DVD, Rating:  5/5.   Harlan County USA, director Barbara Kopple’s account of a miner’s strikes in Harlan County, Kentucky in 1973, won the Oscar for Best Documentary in 1976. It remains a classic example of third person, observational, immersive documentary filmmaking. Kopple and her crew spent more than a year covering the coal miners’ strike against the Brookside Mine of the Eastover Mining Company when the company refused to negotiate a new contract with the recently unionized miners.  What ensued wass an elemental stand-off between the hard-scrabble working men and women of the hollers of Appalachia [...]

Director:  Alex Gibney, Watched in:  Theater, Rating:  2.5/5.     Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson, gets the “life” part of its title down on film. The other half, the work part, you’ll have to find out yourself.  Read Hells Angels or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or The Great Shark Hunt to discover what made Thompson a maverick journalist. You you won’t get much of a sense of it from the movie. Gonzo is a lively, fast-paced, mostly enjoyable tour of the signposts that marked the manic myth of Thompson’s life:  the early days riding with the Angels; [...]

Director:  Jeff Feuerzieg, Watched on:  DVD, Rating:   4.5/5.   The Devil and Daniel Johnston is a riveting documentary about a man who descends into mental illness at the same time he acquires a cult following for his primitive artistic achievements.  His fans embrace his childlike songs sung and strummed on a guitar and recorded to audio cassettes, and trendy Soho art galleries sell his colorful comic book drawings to collectors. While at the same time, his parents and friends have him committed, again and again, for violent assaults and dangerous flights from responsibility. Daniel Johnston, while still very much alive, but very [...]

Director:  Eugene Jarecki, Watched on:  DVD, Rating:  3/5.     My hope for Why We Fight is that it will reach all of the homes and especially the high schools that house the future cannon fodder for George Bush’s imperialist army. Perhaps this film and the others like it—An Inconvenient Truth, The Road to Guantanamo, Robert Greenwald’s Moveon.org marketed drive-by documentaries—will end up making a difference after all.  I hope so, because the feeling one gets watching Why We Fight is a great and desperate anger, followed by depression, and then hopelessness. A fun time at the movies it’s not.  But the [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]