Title: Into the Abyss Director: Werner Herzog Starring: Werner Herzog (narrator), Jason Burkett, Michael Perry, Jeremy Richardson, Adam Stotler, Sandra Stotler, Kristen Willis Werner Herzog comes in with a documentary about death row; specifically focusing on a triple homicide that occurred in Conroe, Texas back in 2001. The two perpetrators, Jason Burkett and Michael Perry, were found guilty yet only one of them – Michael Perry – was sentenced to the state’s death penalty. Herzog tracks the boys down and has in-depth discussions with both of the convicted twenty-something’s at their current detainment centers in Texas. Initially, the 107 documentary begins with Herzog first meeting with Michael as he probes…

Title: Elevate Director: Anne Buford As basketball has spread across the world, so too has the view of it as a unique opportunity, and a tool for upward social mobility. While sports — and in particular boxing, baseball and soccer — have long offered a potential path out of the proverbial ghetto for socioeconomically disadvantaged kids, hoops entered this phase of its public trajectory only fairly recently. As a global phenomenon, the National Basketball Association now attracts interest from Europe, Asia and beyond. Anne Buford’s engaging documentary “Elevate” takes a look at the professional aspirations of a handful of West African kids. At the center of the movie is Amadou Gallo Fall, a former…

Title: Revenge of the Electric Car Director: Chris Paine Documentary sequels are few and far between, but maybe they should be more frequent, because as events in society change, so too do the currency and context of social-statement works like “The Corporation,” ”Inside Job” and “Who Killed the Electric Car?” The latter, from 2006, told in compelling fashion the story of the crib-murder of a vehicle that would have done wonders for the environment, massively curbed the United States’ dependence on foreign oil, and additionally put the nation on a clearly defined, decades-long path toward export dominance in both automobiles and the emerging market of cell battery technology. One massive worldwide economic disaster and the near-total collapse…

Title: The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby Director: Carl Colby Both individually and collectively, Americans may profess a desire for honesty, but the intrigue of serial deception — as a practiced tradecraft, and almost an art — makes compelling subject matter of state espionage, spies and double agents. So a movie like “The Man Nobody Knew,” a documentary about former Central Intelligence Agency head William Colby, directed by his son, Carl, would seem to offer a fantastic chance to explore the topic from a unique perspective, to richly plumb that different psychological and ethical space that trickery and lying on such a grand scale requires. Unfortunately, “The…

Firefighters are people who are close to Denis Leary’s heart–his cousin and childhood friend were firefighters, and tragically, his cousin, friend and four other firefighters were killed in a 1999 Worchester, Mass. fire. Leary, who also played a firefighter in “Rescue Me,” along with Jim Serpico, his partner at his production company Apostle, will executive produce the feature film “BURN,” a documentary about Detroit firefighters directed by Tom Putnman and Brenna Sanchez. The film is looking to show at the 2012 winter festival circuit and there are plans for a theatrical release. In order to help fund the documentary, Leary and the team behind the film have created a Kickstarter…

Title: Bombay Beach Director: Alma Har’el A strikingly photographed and well constructed snapshot of American despair, and the winner of the Best Documentary prize at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, “Bombay Beach” is a searing portrait of those whom America has failed (or is in the process of doing so), complicated by the at-odds presence of an eager directorial hand on the tiller. It unfolds in an isolated, same-named town on the edge of the Salton Sea, where the prospect of an optimistic future and the upwardly mobile American dream seems as distant as the inland area’s recreation boom of the 1950s. Metaphorically formidable, the 385-square-mile Salton Sea was formed in the early…

Title: Klitschko Director: Sebastian Dehnhardt Proving its subjects uncommon thinkers as well as uncommon fighters, the new documentary “Klitschko” is a surprisingly humanizing and informative look at the Ukrainian-born world champion boxing brothers of the same surname. Striking a nice balance between the personal and professional and for the most part avoiding the pitfalls of overly worshipful hagiography, the movie casts a spotlight on a deep, sincere and certainly much more well adjusted fraternal love than on display in last year’s Oscar-winning “The Fighter.” Shot over the course of two years by director Sebastian Dehnhardt, “Klitschko” has an immediate currency, given the brothers’ collective lock on the five heavyweight championship boxing belts…

Title: Hell and Back Again Director: Danfung Dennis Not to suggest that the two are in any way equivalent, but wading through Afghanistan and Iraq war documentaries, whose prevalence and grip on the psyche of the fragile American indie filmmaker is evident at festivals across the nation, is often its own kind of special hell, because subpar storytelling technique is so often brought to bear upon legitimately heartrending stories. The deserving winner of both jury documentary and cinematography awards in the World Cinema category at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, “Hell and Back Again” belies those notions that a nonfiction effort on the subject can’t be artistically minded, and also…

Title: El Bulli: Cooking in Progress Director: Gereon Wetzel For the first six months of the year, renowned Spanish chef Ferran Adria closes his tiny restaurant elBulli, overlooking Catalonia’s Costa Brava Bay, and works with his culinary team to prepare for the next season. (Or did — the amazing restaurant has now shuttered permanently, set to re-open in 2014 as only a culinary center and institute.) “El Bulli: Cooking in Progress,” a rather elegantly simplistic and hands-off exploration of food as avant-garde art, spotlights this unusual process, and cooks up all sorts of elemental yearnings in the tastebuds of viewers. Adria is one of the undisputed masters of haute cuisine (one of…

Title: Connected Director: Tiffany Shlain A documentary snapshot of the blurry, ever-evolving intersection of the relationship between technology and human bonds and grander societal development, “Connected” is wonderfully emblematic of the ways that intelligent artists can use the medium of film to explore issues and ask questions in a manner that encourages and bolsters a pleasantly unsettled life of exploration and outreach in the minds and hearts of viewers. Self-touted as “an autobiography about love, death and technology,” Tiffany Shlain’s film is a deeply felt personal travelogue in the vein of Tom Shadyac’s similarly questioning “I Am,” in which the director set out (broadly speaking) to make sense of his feelings of emptiness…