RECOMMENDED

“I’m Pat Fucking Tillman!” were the last words of Pat Tillman, a professional football player who gave up his career in 2002 to become an Army Ranger. It was also the original title of director Amir Bar-Lev’s simmering, furious “The Tillman Story,” a documentary that unravels the military and government cover-up of his death at age 27 by friendly fire near a mountainous pass in Afghanistan. Coinciding with the fakery of the circumstances of the capture and release of Jessica Lynch, Tillman’s death was used to celebrate virtues that the headstrong, freethinking man would never have endorsed. He never publicly explained his choice to leave football and fight, and this agnostic’s intellectual curiosity ranged from religious teachings of other faiths to Noam Chomsky. Was he a hero? Or a victim of an attempt to exploit his death in support of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? His mother, Dannie Tillman, instilled those values in Pat, and her quest to get the government to tell the truth about his death is the emotional center of a keenly observed and subtly structured documentary. (Co-editor-co-writer Joe Bini’s work includes “Wanted And Desired,” Marina Zenovich’s Roman Polanski film.) The memories of his fellow soldiers are often searing, and related in profane terms. Perhaps most infuriating are the layers of deceit in the cover-up of Tillman’s death that Bar-Lev peels away. An emotionally devastating portrait of moral men and women pitted against their own government’s lies, “The Tillman Story” is both fascinating and infuriating. Narrated by Josh Brolin. 94m. (Ray Pride)

RECOMMENDED

The Oscar-shortlisted “Mugabe and the White African” charts the determination of one of the few white farm families left in Zimbabwe since President Robert Mugabe’s violent land-seizure program took effect in 2000. As the country descended further and further into confusion, an indignant Mike Campbell pressed charges of human-rights violations and racial discrimination against Mugabe in an international court in 2008. Lucy Bailey and Andrew Thompson’s brooding documentary is tense and brimming with suspense, effectively playing out as a thriller. Across the course of a year, and coinciding with a presidential election, “Mugabe and the White African” is a terrifying look at the consequences of the breakdown of the rule of law, wherever and under whatever circumstances it might occur. The effective, jangling score is by Jonny Pilcher. 94m. Video. (Ray Pride)

“Mugabe and the White African” opens Friday at Facets.

RECOMMENDED

Tamra Davis’ ” Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child” is that rare worthy hagiography, built on her friendship with the short-lived artist and footage which she shot in 1986, when he was only 25. Julian Schnabel’s impressionistic life of the artist, “Basquiat” has its own flair and myth-making pleasures. More than a bookend to that tribute, the glimpse of one artist at another in this documentary runs more in the vein of love letter and a window flung wide open to a moment in art in downtown Manhattan, a moment in the life of one artist who, alongside mentor Andy Warhol, was perhaps “famous for being famous,” but also more talented than many realized. Working with flash snapshots, memories from survivors of the time, appraisals from art-world powerhouses, as well as the central interview, pulled out of a drawer over twenty years later, Davis shows us a lost world: battered streets of Soho, littered streets, the World Trade Center tall and ordinary and unseen below those cobbled streets where 500 or so makers of art converged. “This is a high-quality film, right,” Basquiat jokes at the start. It’s a pungent snapshot of the time and how his “oblique pieces of poetry” turned into something larger, more grandiloquent, more deadly. The issues of race are aligned alongside those of fame, perhaps the most timeless of the themes bristling within. Davis’ other films include “Billy Madison” and “Half Baked.” 93m.  (Ray Pride)

“Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child” opens Friday at the Music Box.

RECOMMENDED

“Filmed and directed” by Beadie Finzi, “Only When I Dance” is a gorgeous-at-moments clear-headed documentary, small in its aims and scope, yet staking a take on class and race by examining dance in modern-day Brazil. Compassion meets passion: Finzi follows Irlan and Isabela, a pair of young students from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to unlikely success. 14-year-old Isabela, for instance, would be the first black ballerina in a Brazilian company. Referring to the world around her, she says “Everywhere I look, everywhere I go, it’s always dance, dance, dance.” It’s tender, their dreams of culture beyond their own rich landscape; the triumphant moment against the Manhattan skyline is not without precedent, but lovely nonetheless. With Irlan Santos da Silva, Isabela Santos, Mariza Estrella. 78m. HDCAM video. (Ray Pride)

“Only When I Dance” opens Friday at Siskel.

Leslie Zemeckis’ writing-directing debut as a documentarian, “Behind the Burly Q” dives headlong into the history of burlesque in the first half of the twentieth century, mingling archive footage and stories told by now-elderly ecdysiasts who revealed-concealed for a generation of surreptitious fantasists. Not the most well-organized of documentaries, “Burly Q” still revels in raunchy tale-telling for the ages, with great characters footage that will tickle the eyeballs of fans of the form. Among the interviewees is a tickled Alan Alda, who recollects the stories of his father, Robert Alda, who shared bills as a comedian with the doyennes of dishabille. The overall quality of the newly shot video footage is decidedly sub-par. Zemeckis’ husband, Robert, has an executive producer credit. With Renny and Dorothy von Muchow; John Perilli; Joan Arline, a stripper who performed with two white Russian wolfhounds and was an elder in her church; Lorraine Lee; Taffy O’Neil; Rachel Schteir, author of “Striptease”; Sunny Dare; White Fury, “who painted herself with buckets of paint and lit her tassels on fire”; Sean Rand, son of fan dancer Sally Rand; Chris Costello, daughter of Lou Costello; Tempest Storm, still stripping in her seventies, claiming affairs with JFK and Elvis; Blaze Starr; Kitty West; and Sherry Britton. 98m. (Ray Pride)

“Behind the Burly-Q” opens Friday at Siskel.

Documentarian Roger Nygard beams up from “Trekkies” to assemble an eclectic range of subjects, from poets to wrestlers to rabbis to scholars to scientists to consider the big “Why,” starting with the same question to each interview subject: “Why do we exist?” Nygard’s unpretentious approach makes “The Nature of Existence” less weighty than similar thinking-heads movies like James Toback’s “The Big Bang,” but also can feel like a 500-channels-but-nothing’s-on story. Less speed and more thought, a little dash of structure, might have tied the welter of opinions into something more than the intermittently engaging result on screen. Big questions sometimes yield only small answers. 94m. (Ray Pride)

“The Nature of Existence” opens Friday at Facets. Nygard will appear at all Saturday shows.

RECOMMENDED

Brit comedy group The Mighty Boosh are followed by filmmaker Oliver Ralfe through the ninety-nine dates of their Future Sailors Tour, crossing the UK and Ireland in a huge bus. Fans of their surreal 2004-2007 BBC series will get the most from the off-hours exposure of stars Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt, which emphasizes, as any honest doc about touring will, the exhaustion, the grind, the mundane, but also their quiet professionalism in honing their work day-to-day, moment-to-moment. Grant Gee’s Radiohead tour doc, 1998′s “Meeting People Is Easy” remains the gold standard of the small genre, but “Journey” has its rewards, especially in its choice to follow process rather than rely on nothing but clips from the live presentation. 82m. (Ray Pride)

“Journey of the Childmen: The Mighty Boosh on Tour” plays Saturday and Wednesday at Siskel. Their feature “Bunny and the Bull” opens Friday for a week-long run.

RECOMMENDED

Chills, baby, chills. In “Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands,” Canadian filmmaker Peter Mettler, whose visionary work includes “Gambling, Gods and LSD” (2002) takes to the skies above that province to explore the vast industrial forces being assembled to draw out the 200-million-year-old fossil fuels in the world’s second-largest reserve. Shooting in high definition, Mettler’s work is almost entirely image and sound, moving from placid natural beauty to man’s remaking of the landscape. Like his countryman, the photographer Edward Burtynsky (who is thanked), Mettler is unsentimental. This is what is in front of us, this is what lies beneath, this is the skin and surface of our planet. And while the film was made for Greenpeace Canada, “Petropolis” isn’t an activisit tract or merely evidence and witness. It holds terrible beauty and fierce horror. The score and sound design are impeccable, of a piece with Mettler’s insistently paced imagery. Shown with Jorge Rivero’s “La Presa” (The Dam) about how growth returns to a flooded valley. Program 59m. (Ray Pride)

“Petropolis” plays August 13 at 8pm at Chicago Filmmakers, 5243 North Clark. A trailer is below. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Outside a Mafia-run dive bar on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village in June 1969, three days of rioting spilled into the streets after police raided the Stonewall Inn, which catered to gay customers. (The “watering hole on the savanna,” one customer calls it.) Kate Davis and David Heilbroner’s documentary “Stonewall Uprising” opens by noting that there are almost no photographs of the raid and riots: re-creations and other footage from the era are used. Combined with vital interviews from social observers and witnesses, it’s a powerful glimpse of an era that may be past but ought not be forgotten. Read the rest of this entry »

Andrew Jacobs, Albert Maysles

RECOMMENDED

A labor of love, and such a large portion! Cheery, bawdy, big-hearted and whole-heartedly celebratory, New York Times journalist Andrew Jacobs’ “Four Seasons Lodge” is time well spent within a Jewish summer community with an elderly group of friends, largely nonagenarian, at an upstate New York retreat in the Catskills, all survivors of Auschwitz. Working with cinematographer Albert Maysles, Jacobs stays close to his subject’s play and verbal give-and-take. This is observant documentary making that rises above the need for sturdy structure or rigid plotting. People, faces, places, hope, joy, survival, creating a network of friends when family has been taken: all superb ingredients. The underlying irony that in their fading years, their camaraderie is situated in a camp they call “the colony” does not have to be strained. It would be wrong to class this poignant, sometimes joyous film as a “Holocaust documentary”: it’s simply human, simply humane. “Life can be beautiful, even when it’s not so easy.” 97m. (Ray Pride)

“Four Seasons Lodge” plays Sunday-Monday and Wednesday at Siskel. The trailer is below. Read the rest of this entry »