Category Archives: Recommendations

Coming to VOD this coming Tuesday, March 3: ACTRESS

Robert Greene’s look at a woman uncomfortably performing a domestic role debuted at True/False last year. Other festival engagements included Hot Docs, Nantucket, AFI Docs, Art of the Real, Sarasota, DMZ Docs, Camden, CPH:DOX, RIDM, and IDFA, among others.

I previously wrote about the film here.

Coming to Al Jazeera America in two parts on Sunday, March 1 and Sunday, March 8: FREEWAY: CRACK IN THE SYSTEM

Marc Levin’s look at the rise and fall of a crack kingpin debuted at Los Angeles’ Pan African Film Festival. It was also shown in a sneak preview earlier this month in NYC’s Stranger Than Fiction series.

I previously wrote about the program here.

Coming to DVD tomorrow, Tuesday, February 24: CODE BLACK

Ryan McGarry’s inside look into America’s health care crisis made its debut at Los Angeles in 2013, where it won the Best Documentary Award. Other fest appearances include the Hamptons, Vancouver, Heartland, Denver, Santa Barbara, Portland, and Cleveland. In addition to a theatrical release, the film has screened at numerous medical schools around the US and in several other countries.

Shot between 2008 and 2012 by McGarry while he was a resident at LA Country General, this film presents a candid, doctor’s-eye-view of the state of emergency medicine from within the trenches. Beginning in the legendary, cramped C-Booth, the ward where many of the tenets of emergency medicine were originated, the film soon follows its young physician subjects as they adjust to the new demands of a state-of-the-art facility, which basically results in a stifling amount of bureaucratic paperwork that takes time away from actual interactions with patients who need them the most. As waiting times to seek medical attention continue to grow, the residents and staff grow frustrated, turning to unorthodox solutions to try to alleviate the problem, with varying levels of success. In focusing his attention on his experiences as a young physician, McGarry offers an unexpected, compelling perspective on the problems plaguing American health care, and, moreso, a provocation that a solution needs to be found, even if he doesn’t pretend to have an all-encompassing panacea himself.

Coming to PBS’s America ReFramed series this coming Tuesday, February 24: A WILL FOR THE WOODS

Amy Browne, Jeremy Kaplan, Tony Hale, and Brian Wilson’s look at the intersection of environmentalism and the mortuary industry made its debut at Full Frame in 2013. It went on to screen at DOC NYC, New Orleans, AFI Docs, Sidewalk, Camden, Big Sky, Cleveland, and Atlanta, among other events.

I included the film in my AFI Docs coverage here.

Coming to HBO this coming Monday, February 23: CITIZENFOUR

Laura Poitras’ chronicle of how Edward Snowden revealed his knowledge to the world made its bow at the New York Film Festival last Fall. It went on to screen at London, DOC NYC, DOK Leipzig, CPH:DOX, IDFA, and Goteborg, in addition to its theatrical release. The film has been nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar, with the winner announced this Sunday, February 22.

I previously wrote about the doc upon its release

Coming to PBS’s Independent Lens this coming Monday, February 23: AMERICAN DENIAL

Llewellyn Smith’s exploration of the US’s historical and current problems with race makes its debut on the Emmy Award-winning public television series. It is also being shown at community screenings around the country.

Smith’s wide-ranging profile on American attitudes to race centers on the work of Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal, who was commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation to conduct an impartial, outsider’s study on race relations in 1938. Visiting the Deep South, then fully under Jim Crow, and adopting a curious naïveté, Myrdal elicited the true opinions of white residents on the so-called “Negro problem,” which he essentially recouched as white prejudice. The researcher ultimately released his findings in a landmark book, AN AMERICAN DILEMMA: THE NEGRO PROBLEM AND MODERN DEMOCRACY, which identified a provocative cognitive dissonance between what he referred to as the “American Creed” – the democratic principle of equality and opportunity that shapes the nation’s identity – and a deep-seated white prejudice which seeks to limit the political, social, and economic status of non-whites. Smith threads Myrdal’s story through the film, while also applying its conclusions to later studies – such as psychological tests that reveal lingering, unconscious bias against blacks in both white and black subjects – and in present-day systems of power, most notably the cumulative effect of racial profiling and mass incarceration on generations of black men’s sense of self and self-worth. The film tackles a bit too much for its hour running time – for example, unnecessarily delving into Myrdal’s personal issues with his research partner and wife, even given their tangential, thematic parallels to his research – and intermittently employs an irksome series of staged still re-enactments, but is better served by its use of creative illustrations and footage of psychological experiments with young African-American children. Belying wishful thinking that American society has reached a colorblind, post-racial state, the thought-provoking film instead challenges viewers to acknowledge the powerful role denial plays in the disjunction between our principles and our actions, in both our individual and systemic approaches to race.