The day after Dr. Conrad Murray was found guilty in committing involuntary manslaughter in the death of Michael Jackson, TMZ reported that a documentary about Murray and his relationship with Jackson will air in the United States. According to the site, the documentary, Murray agreed to participate in the documentary, called “Michael Jackson and The Doctor: A Fatal Friendship,” was shot during the time Murray was waiting for his manslaughter trial to start. The documentary is supposed to show “shockingly candid” footage of Murray’s preparation for the trial, which also involves some heavy fighting between the lawyers acting as Murray’s representation. Personally, after watching the trial from start to finish,  [ Read More ]

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  [ Read More ]

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  [ Read More ]

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  [ Read More ]

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  [ Read More ]

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  [ Read More ]

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  [ Read More ]

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  [ Read More ]

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  [ Read More ]

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  [ Read More ]

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  [ Read More ]

NBA lockout got you down? Don’t worry; you can still have some basketball in your life thanks to the upcoming documentary Elevate. The film focuses on four students at the SEEDS Academy in Dakar, Senegal, an institution that caters to West Africa’s most talented basketball players. In the case of Elevate‘s stars, they’re the best of the best and the school honors their talent with scholarships to United States prep schools. The piece follows the players over the course of four years, partially in West Africa and then some in the US, and provides a look at what these incredibly tall players have to face in their effort to make  [ Read More ]

In “Beautiful Boy,” Bill and Kate (Michael Sheen and Maria Bello) are a married couple already on the verge of separation when their college-age son, Sam (Kyle Gallner), goes on a shooting rampage at his school and then takes his own life. In the pained weeks that follow, as they avoid an inquisitive media by first staying with family and then holing up in a dingy hotel room, the pair finds that the tragedy both brings them together a bit while also exposing a variety of old wounds and grudges. The rawness and unprecious nature of the lead performances help neophyte director Shawn Ku’s film achieve a certain hold, enough so  [ Read More ]

Title: Granito: How To Nail a Dictator Director: Pamela Yates The art of reflexive cinematic disquisition — in which an area of putative inquiry and the very arc of the filmmaker’s own artistic quest are commingled, and presented alongside one another — is a tricky feat. It can make for heady entertainment when the pretzel makers are whipsmart (witness Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze’s “Adaptation,” for instance), and even give extra layers of sociological heft and insight to nonfiction films, as in works like “Capturing the Friedmans” and “Catfish.” For Pamela Yates’ “Granito: How To Nail a Dictator,” however, which premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, it  [ Read More ]

In an admission that will come as a considerable disappointment to a former coworker (who, for the record, is decidedly not Goth), my initial memories of “The Nightmare Before Christmas” were somewhat fuzzy. My first viewing of producer Tim Burton and director Henry Selick’s stop-motion animated film, not too long after its original home video release, was marred with, umm, distractions. So I hadn’t the concrete impressions one might have with a more focused viewing — just an impression of the hand-crafted feel, and a lingering sense of disappointment in relation to the movie’s songs, from Danny Elfman. A re-visiting of the somewhat seminal work — which scored a visual effects  [ Read More ]