Actress, the new documentary by Robert Greene, chronicles a period in the life of Brandy Burre as she attempts to balance motherhood, domestic partnership, and her need to return to an acting career. Burre, who was featured on 15 episodes of The Wire, has taken a break from acting to raise two young children, Henry and Stella, in Beacon, New York with the children’s father, restaurateur Tim Reinke. As her next-door neighbor, Greene realized she might make a good subject. Actress is, like the director’s previous films, Fake It So Real and Kati with an i, shot in cinéma vérité style, but it is still highly stylized MORE . . .

Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky first premiered El Topo in 1970 with midnight screenings at New York’s Elgin Theater. Soon the film was drawing cult audiences at Cambridge’s legendary Orson Welles Cinema. Thus began the Midnight Movie Craze. Night Of The Living Dead, The Harder They Come, Eraserhead, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show all drew considerable followings. But what really appealed to a generation steeped in Carlos Castaneda and Timothy Leary? A surrealistic landscape featuring the director Jodorowsky on horseback, dressed from head-to-toe in black leather and accompanied by his naked 5 year-old so
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There have been some terrific documentaries lately chronicling the trials and tribulations of late 20th century music: Twenty Feet From Stardom, Sound City, Muscle Shoals, and Boston native Beth Harrington’s festival film The Winding Stream, which honors the Carter Family’s contribution to the roots of American country music. Today, country takes many forms: the whiskery country of Willie Nelson, the “bro-country” of Blake Shelton, Tim McGraw’s cowboy writ-large, twanging songs with lyrics about liquor, love, losing your lady, and standing by your man. Allegedly, this is the sound of America singing. But nowhere is the stereotype ladled out with as much cornpone as in Branson, Missouri, a town that is a theme park dedicated to country music entertainment. The so-called “live music capital of the world” with 10,000 residents generates an astounding 2.9 billion dollars from 7.5 million tourists each year. READ MORE ...

The growth in popularity of non-fiction film in the past several decades has included some important political documents and examples of advocacy journalism such as Fog of War, The Inconvenient Truth, Fahrenheit 451, and Taxi to the Dark Side. This year Laura Poitras won an Oscar for her Citizen Four, which profiles Edward Snowden. When accepting her Oscar, Poitras stated that “when the most important decisions being made, affecting all of us, are made in secret, we lose our ability to check the powers that control.” These movies serve to check that power.

Peter Davis received an Oscar in 1974 for Hearts and Minds, his powerful film about the controversies surrounding the Vietnam War. Two years later Barbara Koppel won an Oscar for Harlan County, USA, which exposed the exploitation of coal miners by their unions. That same year

This Best Foreign Picture nominee from Argentina is comprised of six imaginative stories that dramatize the uncivilized impulses that seethe beneath the veneer of civilized life. Director and writer Damián Szifrón fills his tangy tales with lethal ironies and jarring twists of fate that build with relentless momentum to resolutions that somehow manage to be both horrid and comical. Each yarn takes place in a distinct setting and proffers a visual style that befits its particularly sorry vision of humanity.

Before the credits even roll Szifrón gives us a taste of the madness to come. “Pasternak” is set aboard a passenger plane on which a group of passengers discover a secret that sends a chill though the audience. The mini-tale begins at a slow suspenseful burn and ends on a final dazzling shot that freezes the frame. After viewers are no doubt left shaken, the credits roll and the film begins again. READ MORE