By Ray Pride

Sarah Polley’s third feature, the nonfiction “Stories We Tell,” is a tricky thing, one that does not stop reflecting and refracting until its very final frames.

It’s exceptionally fine, smudging the boundaries of what many consider to be documentary practice, and almost impossible to describe without tarnishing the unalloyed joy of the discoveries it offers the viewer. Starting with her third short, the thirty-eight-minute “I Shout Love” (2001), Polley was readily identifiable as a talented filmmaker, one whose intelligence was not limited to distinctive performances in movies like Atom Egoyan’s “The Sweet Hereafter” (1997) or “Guinevere” (1999). And then her Oscar-nominated “Away From Her” (2006) and “Take This Waltz” (2012) marked her as an idiosyncratic, compelling writer-director, even as you realize each of her films, to date, have dealt with the limits of long-term relationships. In “I Shout Love,” a mismatched Toronto couple can’t part, because of their shared love for the Leafs; “Away From Her” observes a man letting his Alzheimer’s-stricken wife find a new life, apart; and the bracing awkwardness of her female protagonist in “Take This Waltz,” watching her wreck a marriage, and more, out of headstrong willfulness. Read the rest of this entry »

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A fierce fish tale from POV of fish and sea. Plus: Clank. Groannn. Caw-caw-cawwwwww. Rrrra– Pop. Shreeeeeee! Splurp. Ammmg. R r r rrrr— “Sweetgrass” filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University further their immersive excursions with the singular nonfiction artifact, “Leviathan,” aka “Heavy Metal Fishing Ship.” Off New Bedford, Massachusetts, once whaling capital of the world, they seek the secrets of the sea within and without the confines of one trawler among hundreds of weeks-long travails to harvest the riches of the ocean. There’s terror within the fishbelly of the beast, clamoring at work, and beneath the waves and in gull-serrated sky. Read the rest of this entry »

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Kevin Schreck’s “Persistence of Vision” is about folly, perseverance, beauty and finally, yes, vision. The vision belongs to animator Richard Williams, who, like Jacques Tati with his life-changing, life-smashing “Playtime,” devoted himself to a self-funded, handmade masterwork, “The Thief and the Cobbler” that drained his fortunes and the patience of all those around him across nearly three decades. Tati finished “Playtime,” even as it finished him as the perfectionist filmmaker he always hoped to be. In the case of Schreck’s modest documentary, Williams declined to participate in the film, apparently unwilling to revisit those many lost years. Other figures testify to his dogged, workaholic ways. Williams made other work in later years, including supervision of the animation of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” The success of that film led its studio to offer a pipeline of millions of dollars to Williams, but it all came to naught, and was seized by its completion bond company. Read the rest of this entry »

A Kickstarter-supported film that has nothing to with “Veronica Mars” or the mind of Zach Braff, Roberta Grossman’s pat, threadbare “Hava Nagila,” more suited to television than a bigger screen, is prototypical latter-day micro-budget moviemaking: an affable dip into a subject with the narrowest possible interest, in this case a long-forgotten 1950s pop-music novelty fad, entertaining to a pocketful of viewers who already have their own glancing relationship to the material or have a lasting fondness for dull kitsch. On screen, Harry Belafonte calls it “this Hebrew song of rejoicing,” continuing, “In song, I think, all humanity finds a place in which to reside where there is no fear. In song, there’s something that touches the best in the sensibility of the human family.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Effective agitprop bristling with clear-headed outrage, Peter Getzels and Eduardo López’s “Harvest of Empire: The Untold Story of Latinos in America” presents a punchy history of a seldom-explored basis for the so-called “immigration crisis,” of Latin American emigration after U.S. interventions, drawn from the research of journalist and Pacifica Radio contributor Juan González. As González has written, “We are all Americans of the new world, and our most dangerous enemies are not each other, but the great wall of ignorance between us.” Getzels and López’s approach is to cut through a wide swathe of information in a brief amount of time, which will engage many and swamp those who likely wouldn’t be interested in the subject in any case. Read the rest of this entry »

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Gonzo is seldom the way to go in documentary, but there is a blithe prankishness and sweet-souled don’t-give-a-fuck to some, if not all, of Tanner King Barklow and Gil Kofman’s “Unmade in China,” which follows Kofman’s hiring to direct a cheap, slapdash thriller, in Chinese, in the Fujian city Xiamen, China and have it sanctioned by the strictures of local censorship. (The script for ”Case Sensitive” was based on a famous Internet hoax.) Kofman doesn’t speak Chinese and says he doesn’t even like Chinese food. I don’t have a handy description to say what “Unmade in China” is on its own terms, following the stages of “unmaking” a movie the producers wanted an American director for, in name only, but it could handily wind up on a shelf that also holds “American Movie” and a good half-dozen other movies about movies about moviemakers falling on their face. Read the rest of this entry »

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One of the least likely adventure movies of any given year, Janet Tobias’ “No Place On Earth” tells the story of 511 days spent by thirty-eight members of five Ukrainian Jewish families during World War II in sunless caves. Voiceovers, shadow-encrusted interviews and cloacal recreations take much of the potential snap out of the genuinely compelling tale of how the families survived in the seventy-seven miles of “Priest’s Grotto Cave.” Read the rest of this entry »

Shannah Laumeister’s ragged, sometimes laughably awful documentary, “Bert Stern: Original Mad Man” (2011) is a tagalong to the career of photographer Bert Stern in autumn, from his days as a magazine shooter to a chronicler of fashion and top-drawer maker of 1960s advertising in the days celebrated ever-so-doomily in Matthew Weiner’s “Mad Men” series. “Women and photography are the two things I loved most in the world,” Stern says of his days at Vogue. A fall from grace after an affair with meth led him to escape Manhattan for sunnier climes in Spain and further adventures in iconic images and lashings of lust. It’s far from hagiography, more like an unfocused, self-indulgent wiki-mentary. Read the rest of this entry »

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A sinister lark that functions at once as satire of both the obsession of fans and the niggling habits of film critics, Rodney Ascher’s “Room 237″ uses Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” as fodder for a murmurous assemblage of conspiracy theories that veer from placid to maniac. It’s paranoid entertainment about a vivid text and even more vivid contemplations by a film’s perfervid admirers. Like his clever, eerie 2012 short “S From Hell,” which refashioned the Screen Gems syndicated television animation into a close reading of corporate branding run amok, to the point of conspiratorial daffiness. The same curatorial style—found or gathered imagery accompanied by disembodied voiceovers—persists in “Room 237,” but imposed upon a much more complex text. Ascher interviews five compulsive viewers—a professor, a journalist, an artist, a musician and a conspiracy hunter—who believe the movie is seamed with dozens of hidden meanings and conflicting themes, that it was about “genocidal armies” of white men who massacred Native Americans; the faking of the moon landing as well as taking place across a vast topographical impossibility. Read the rest of this entry »

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After a middle career making movies in the U. S. like “My Best Friend’s Wedding” and “Peter Pan” (2003), PJ Hogan returns to his Australian roots with the autobiographical “Mental,” two decades past his early success with “Muriel’s Wedding” (1994). Set in the fictional suburban beach town of Dolphin Heads, “Mental”‘s brood of lead characters are the Moochmore girls, each equally convinced they are suffering various psychological disorders: one would much rather be mental than simply unpopular. Their “Sound of Music”-obsessed mother goes “on holiday” after suffering a mental breakdown, leaving the philandering politician father (Anthony Lapaglia), the local mayor, to care for five girls he barely knows. Read the rest of this entry »