The Interrupters follows three individuals who with bravado, humility, and even humor, work to protect their Chicago communities from the violence they once employed. From acclaimed director Steve James and bestselling author Alex Kotlowitz, this is an intimate journey into the stubborn persistence of violence in our cities. Read more at IMDB or support this site and the filmmaker by buying it at Amazon.
Americana
Winnebago Man – 2009
Jack Rebney is the most famous man you’ve never heard of – after cursing his way through a Winnebago sales video, Rebney’s outrageously funny outtakes became an underground sensation and made him an internet superstar. Filmmaker Ben Steinbauer journeys to the top of a mountain to find the recluse who unwittingly became the “Winnebago Man.” Read more at IMDB or support this site by buying it at Amazon.
Americana
Off and Running – 2009
With white Jewish lesbians for parents and two adopted brothers – one mixed-race and one Korean-Brooklyn teen Avery grew up in a unique and loving household. Read more at IMDB or support this site by buying it at Amazon.
Americana
Space Tourists – 2009
Space Tourists succeeds in surprising its audience with images and situations that have very little to do with the futuristic fantasy of ‘space-tourism’. Read more at IMDB.
Americana
Order of Myths – 2009
Margaret Brown’s documentary explores the history of Mardi Gras in Mobile, Alabama, her home town, where ‘mystic’ parading began 13 years before New Orleans was even founded. Brown shows how the city’s still celebrated still-segregated tradition both reflects and impacts its contemporary culture and politics, including attitudes towards racism. Read more at IMDB or support this site by buying it at Amazon.
Americana
Crips and Bloods – 2008
With a first-person look at the notorious Crips and Bloods, this film examines the conditions that have lead to decades of devastating gang violence among young African Americans growing up in South Los Angeles. Read more at IMDB or support this site by buying it at Amazon.
Americana
The End of America – 2008
The End of America details the ten steps a country takes when it slides toward fascism. It’s not a “lefty”tot tome, rather a historical look at trends in once-functioning democracies from modern history that are being repeated in our country today. It gives any reader (or viewer of the lecture) a much-needed history lesson and constitutional refresher. Most importantly, it puts the recent gradual loss of civil liberties in the U.S. in a historical context. The average American might not be alarmed at AT&T selling our private information to the Bush administration, but when this action is seen as part of a larger series of erosions and events, a pattern emerges with unfortunate consequences that become disturbingly clear.
Americana
The Bridge – 2006
People suffer largely unnoticed while the rest of the world goes about its business. This is a documentary exploration of the mythic beauty of the Golden Gate Bridge, the most popular suicide destination in the world, and those drawn by its call. Steel and his crew filmed the bridge during daylight hours from two separate locations for all of 2004, recording most of the two dozen deaths in that year (and preventing several others). They also taped interviews with friends, families and witnesses, who recount in sorrowful detail stories of struggles with depression, substance abuse and mental illness. Raises questions about suicide, mental illness and civic responsibility as well as the filmmaker’s relationship to his fraught and complicated material.
Americana
The Weather Underground – 2002
In the 1960’s and 1970’s a group of radical Americans calling themselves The Weather Underground attempted to team up with the Black Panthers to violently confront the US government that started with street riots and escalating to bombing government targets. Thorough archival footage and interviews of the veterans of both sides of this conflict, this film covers the resistance movement’s campaign of selective violence through this period until changing times and disillusionment brought it to an end while the FBI used unethical and illegal methods to hasten it. Read more at IMDB or support this site by buying it at Amazon.
Americana
Bowling for Columbine – 2002
The United States of America is notorious for its astronomical number of people killed by firearms for a developed nation without a civil war. With his signature sense of angry humor, activist filmmaker Michael Moore sets out to explore the roots of this bloodshed. In doing so, he learns that the conventional answers of easy availability of guns, violent national history, violent entertainment and even poverty are inadequate to explain this violence when other cultures share those same factors without the equivalent carnage. In order to arrive at a possible explanation, Michael Moore takes on a deeper examination of America’s culture of fear, bigotry and violence in a nation with widespread gun ownership. Furthermore, he seeks to investigate and confront the powerful elite political and corporate interests fanning this culture for their own unscrupulous gain.
Americana
Fast, Cheap & Out of Control – 1997
What do an elderly topiary gardener, a retired lion tamer, a man fascinated by mole rats, and a cutting-edge robotics designer have in common? Both nothing and everything in this unconventional documentary directed by Erroll Morris. Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (Referring to the robot specialist’s strange philosophy of robot design structure, not Erroll Morris’s documentary techniques!) interplays, overlaps, and interrelates these four separate and highly specialized documentary subjects in order to in truth study all of humanity, raising questions about the future of mankind. Read more at IMDB or support this site by buying it at Amazon.
Americana
The Big One – 1997
Protecting the earth from the scum of corporate America. Read more at IMDB or support this site by buying it at Amazon.
Americana
Paris is burning – 1990
A chronicle of New York’s drag scene in the 1980s, focusing on balls, voguing and the ambitions and dreams of those who gave the era its warmth and vitality. Read more at IMDB or support this site by buying it at Amazon.
Americana
Sherman’s March – 1986
Ross McElwee sets out to make a documentary about the lingering effects of General Sherman’s march of destruction through the South during the Civil War, but is continually sidetracked by women who come and go in his life, his recurring dreams of nuclear holocaust, and Burt Reynolds. Read more at IMDB or support this site by buying it at Amazon.
Americana
Vernon, Florida – 1981
Early Errol Morris documentary intersplices random chatter he captured on film of the genuinely eccentric residents of Vernon. Read more at IMDB or support this site by buying it at Amazon.
Americana
Gates of Heaven -1978
Funny, inspiring, and bizarre, “Gates of Heaven” is the celebrated pet cemeteries documentary that is in reality an unorthodox look at life. Inspired by an article entitled “450 Dead Pets Going to Napa Valley,” Errol Morris set out to capture the event which centered around the transport of hundreds of animal remains from one pet cemetery to another. Pet cemetery proprietors, embalmers, pet owners and others speak about life, work, and feelings. Read more at IMDB or support this site by buying it at Amazon.