Director:  Crystal Moselle, Watched in:  Theater Rating:  2.5/5.   The Wolfpack, a Sundance-award winning documentary, offers viewers the kind of beguiling story usually reserved for novels or memoirs. The six New York brothers featured in the film, who grow into their teen years and beyond during the course of the movie, have hardly ever ventured outside the walls of their cramped Lower East Side apartment. Virtually imprisoned by a domineering father and their beloved but passive mother, they engage with the world by reenacting scenes from their favorite movies. The fact that they’ve matured into relatively likeable, capable, intelligent young [...]

Director:  Frank Pavich, Watched at:  True/False Film Festival, Rating:  3.5/5.     I missed Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo when it first showed up on midnight movie screens in the ‘70s. A decade ago during the Chicago Underground Film Festival, the director was in attendance to introduce a special screening of the film. It struck me while finally getting a chance to see El Topo that it could be viewed as either a surrealist masterpiece or a load of shit, depending on whatever drug you ingested that night. I happened to be straight, and also distracted by the botched screening of my own [...]

Director:  Amir Bar-Lev, Watched at:  True/False Film Festival, Rating:  4.5/5.   Happy Valley is filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev’s dissection of the aftermath of the Jerry Sandusky-Penn State scandal. Arriving on the scene after Sandusky, an assistant football coach to the legendary Joe Paterno, was sentenced to prison on more than forty counts of child sexual abuse, Bar-Lev turns his camera on the university, the surrounding neighborhood, the media and the culture of college football. What I assumed to be a title dreamed up by the director turns out to be the colloquial name of the area where the university resides. It’s an [...]

Director: Rachel Boynton, Watched at: True/False Film Festival, Rating:  2/5.     Sometimes what a documentary needs is a good old-fashioned narrator. Rachel Boynton’s Big Men is so crowded with places, names, facts and faces you need a spreadsheet to sort it all out, especially since the director is reluctant to give in to the prosaic option of employing a simple voice-over to help guide us along. It’s become something of a non-fiction filmmaker’s badge of honor to make their films without the aid of an omniscient storyteller, but I’m not sure whether this is due to smugness or an inability to [...]

Directors:  Tracy Droz Tragos, Andrew Droz Palermo, Watched at:  True/False Film Festival, Rating:  2.5/5.     There is no doubt the filmmakers behind the documentary Rich Hill clearly intended their movie to be a sympathetic portrait of three young men living life in the margins. Andrew, Appachey and Harley are all teenagers from the titular Missouri town, a less-than-bucolic and all-too familiar zone of strip malls, vacant downtown streets, grinding poverty and vanishing opportunities. The movie’s directors (and cousins), Tracy Droz Tragos and Andrew Droz Palermo, have their own family roots in the area, which made it easier to engage with their [...]

Director:  Margaret Brown, Watched on:  Netflix, Rating:  2.5/5.   The “invisible” in Margaret Brown’s documentary The Great Invisible, refers to both the damage done to the lives and landscape of the Gulf Coast following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (the largest in U.S. history), and the free pass awarded to BP in the years after the disaster. Sure, they paid billions of dollars in fines and fees to clean up the spill, but the amount will add up to a drop in their endless bucket of oil profits. The company continues to drill new offshore wells, hidden from view and unscathed [...]

Director:  Frederick Wiseman, Watched on:  DVD, Rating:  2/5.     The easy joke to make with National Gallery, Frederick Wiseman’s latest documentary, which is set inside the venerable London art museum, is that it’s about as exciting as watching paint dry. The film will live up to that description for many viewers or, to be more exact, for many of the very few viewers who will actually see the film. Wiseman is not only famous for the demanding length of his documentaries, most running three hours or more, but also for the difficulty in finding them. They usually play for a week [...]

Directors:  Stephanie Spray, Pacho Velez, Watched on:  DVD, Rating:  4.5/5.     Manakamana is the name of a sacred Hindu temple in central Nepal. It is perched atop a mountain reached by a modern cable car which whisks pilgrims and tourists a mile and a half up and down the hillside, cutting what used to be a three-day trek down to a 10-minute trip both ways. Manakamana is also the name of a documentary which captures this journey eleven times in eleven shots, each lasting the length of the ride, each viewed from the same locked down medium shot, the camera gazing [...]

Director:  Michael Moore, Watched in: Theater, Rating:  4/5.     I’ve always believed that regardless of what you think of Michael Moore’s politics, skills or style as a filmmaker, he is beyond a doubt a man who loves his country. With Capitalism: A Love Story, he has made yet another one of his signature takedowns of the hypocrites, greedballs and scumbags who have turned America into an unrecognizable war zone where the Haves thrive on jack booting the Have Nots. It’s the perfect movie to watch at home, since you’ll need to pause several times to rant and retch and shake your [...]

Director: Greg “Freddy” Camalier, Watched on:  DVD, Rating:  3/5.     Muscle Shoals tells the story of two legendary Alabama recording studios located near the banks of the Tennessee River, “a singing river,” as the locals like to say. Music is in the water and the blood of this deeply Southern region, and those elements no doubt helped lay the fertile groundwork for some of the most memorable songs in the American canon of rock, soul and funk.  Aretha Franklin, Percy Sledge, the Rolling Stones, Wilson Pickett, Clarence Carter, the Allman Brothers and Jimmy Cliff made the pilgrimage to Muscle Shoals, [...]