An intensely felt but jumbled and poorly reasoned cinematic treatise against governmental bureaucracy run amok and specifically a series of Constitutional rights abuses by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, documentary Top Priority: The Terror Within tells the story of Julia Davis, a whistleblower who found herself on the receiving end of a years-long campaign of vindictive persecution. A tangled mess of sprawling and sometimes vague allegations never wrestled into any sort of coherent and compelling shape, the movie chronicles a shocking story, but one that seems better suited to the television news magazine format, or at least a more polished, experienced nonfiction hand.

In addition to desperately needing an editorial trim, a fog of unclear charges, motivations and facts hangs over Top Priority. Owing to the fact that actress Brittany Murphy was at one point dragged into a hearsay allegation related to Davis’ initial professional investigation, the film (sort of) posits that she and late husband Simon Monjack were also targets of some sinister governmental payback, which seems tenuous at best. Some outside perspsective on this story is sorely needed; the Davis’ both serve as producers here, on their own tale, and their (understandable) dander, combined with director Asif Akbar’s hackish instincts, overwhelms the movie. At least Stephen Colbert would be proud, though, since more than truth, an aura of “truthiness” surrounds this messy offering. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Fleur De Lis Films, unrated, 115 minutes)

The social activism documentary subgenre is a rich one, but the best of these sorts of willfully disquieting films — like The Corporation, An Inconvenient Truth, Who Killed the Electric Car? and Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story — aren’t merely reflexive sermons to the choir, but instead movies that try to root down into systemic injustice, abuse, fraud and scientific rejection, in a fervent effort to expose the cost of continued social apathy and silence. Narrated by Ryan Gosling, the slim but still thought-provoking #ReGENERATION slots in nicely as a minor-chord entry of this sort. Director Phillip Montgomery’s film has an agitator’s soul, and that’s perhaps a good thing.



Focused on the twin pillars of education and the media, and how they impact and influence everything from our occupational pursuits to social thinking and avocational interests, #ReGENERATION explores some of the galvanizing forces behind the Occupy Wall Street movement (hence its hash tag title), and the present state of social angst and activism (including a generational lack thereof). The film has a deep and engaging roster of talking heads — interviewees include Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Talib Kweli and Adbusters publisher Kalle Lasn — but Montgomery also endeavors to give his undertaking a sort of millennial generation Everyman gloss. Thusly, one strand focuses on a collective of musicians, Georgia-based STS9, working outside the corporate system; another gives voice to students and administrators at Eagen High School, a suburb of Minneapolis; and another still focuses on a conservative, married twentysomething couple about to welcome their second child.

Clocking in at but 80 minutes, Montgomery’s film doesn’t drag. But if there’s a knock against it, it’s that the subject matter is so rangy that it could certainly use a bit tighter editing focus — a fierce honing of intent and argument. As is, it’s energy that sustains and recommends it, more than lingering powerhouse insight. Still, the boisterous #ReGENERATION paints a commingled ghastly and hopeful portrait of early 21st century America and some of the changes and challenges we need to face, and it’s not a picture from which you can readily look away. In addition to its theatrical engagements, the film is available across platforms on VOD. For the trailer, more information and to get involved, click here. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Red Flag Releasing/Anonymous Content, unrated, 80 minutes)

A murder mystery, forensic investigation and political drama rolled into one, Incendiary: The Willingham Case shines a spotlight on the circumstances surrounding Cameron Todd Willingham, a Texas man convicted in the arson deaths of his three young children. Enjoying particular currency given the alleged manipulation of a post-mortem state forensics commission stacked by current Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry, this documentary, flatly told but engaging throughout, will appeal to both newsmagazine junkies and those impassioned by the death penalty debate. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the film, click here. (Truly Indie, unrated, 104 minutes)

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 Man Nobody Knew is neither fish nor fowl, and can’t get off the ground as either a unique familial memoir or a uniquely accessed view of recent world history.

Colby, wiry and discreet, began his career as an OSS officer, parachuting into Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II, working behind enemy lines to foster dissent and effect sabotage. Later, rising through the CIA, he helped sway elections against the Communist Party in Italy, and eventually ran the controversial Phoenix Program in Vietnam (tabbed as a “kill squad” by its detractors), which sparked today’s legacy of counter-insurgency. Colby is most well known, however, for defying the wishes of President Ford after rising to the rank of head of the CIA, and opening up to Congress about some of the international spy agency’s most tightly held “extra-legal” operations, including attempted assassinations and coup support in various countries around the world.

Despite the possessiveness of its title, and the way it clutches its now-deceased subject to its bosom, there’s a puzzling lack of commitment on the part of Colby to the personal quality of the narrative. Family photos are aplenty, and William’s long-time wife (the director’s mother) sits for several interviews, which are parceled out amidst much historical footage, and chats with other interviewees. But there are huge gaps in family history, and the filmmaker never never solicits the opinions of his siblings, which would have given the movie crucial, added dimension. Most problematically, though, Colby includes a mess of awkward first-person narration; it pops up at weird times, uncomfortably juxtaposed, and lacks the depth and honesty for which one yearns, since Colby never really wades into the breach and significantly discusses what he knew about his father and thought him to be doing at the time versus what he knows now.

This gives The Man Nobody Knew a quality of fitful engagement. At its core, Colby’s film is seemingly about the blinkered awakening of a conscience, and how his father, after Vietnam and President Nixon’s Watergate disgrace, felt the need to increase transparency, by degrees, while also safeguarding national secrets. This third act revelation, though, gets the bum’s rush at the expense of much historical set-up. Some of these passages — about Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.’s apparently singular role in the overthrow of Vietnam’s President Diem, for instance, three weeks before the eventual assassination of President Kennedy — are shocking, and newsworthy. But other stretches come off as staid, lackluster middle school filmstrips. And Colby, too, brooks no discussion about his father’s mysterious death. These shortcomings make for a movie that dances around intrigue, but never consistently engages it. In death, as in life, William Colby remains something of an enigma. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Act 4 Entertainment, unrated, 104 minutes)

A small pleasure, at least, that Sarah Palin‘s rise to national prominence has come about in this modern day and age, for were it much earlier the amount of ink spilled and trees razed would have had a much more measurable and even greater detrimental environmental impact. As is, the erstwhile Alaskan governor and 2008 Republican Vice Presidential nominee already seems to exert a death-grip on the nation’s psyche, even with her hazily defined motivations, ambiguous ambitions and well-practiced fence-sitting. Palin is many things to many people, and very few of them without much passion or depth of feeling.

For his new documentary, Sarah Palin: You Betcha!, then, Nick Broomfield decamps to her hometown of Wasilla, donning an Alaskan starter kit — red checkered jacket, boots and hat replete with ear-flaps — to go along with his mini-boom mic and genial investigatory noodling. (Co-director Joan Churchill, meanwhile, operates the camera, allowing the pair to function in guerilla-like fashion.) Showing much more of an inquisitive mindset about her, her upbringing and what makes her tick than Palin herself has seemingly ever shown about the world around her, Broomfield’s eye-opening film re-treads a lot of known ground about Palin, but also drags out into the full light of day the danger of her particular brand of sad, self-centered, desperate paranoia.

Wasilla is a guns-and-God town of little more than 8,000 people with (if Broomfield’s assertion is correct) a fairly astounding 77 churches. Early on, Broomfield’s quest to land an interview with Palin herself seems off on the right foot; he talks to Sarah’s parents, Chuck and Sally Heath, and the former shows him how he’s trained his dog to fetch antlers instead of bones or tennis balls. The more Broomfield chats with a small handful of detractors and digs into the Palins’ evangelist church, Assembly of God, though, the more constricted the flow of information and forthcoming opinion becomes. Apart from a very small handful, almost everyone in town is reluctant to speak about Palin, it seems; those with a potential axe to grind out of fear of retribution, and those who love her most because it would apparently be considered treasonous to speak to someone who allowed for the possibility of a viewpoint at odds with theirs.

While in large part a sort of on-the-ground travelogue of (largely unsuccessful) interview chasing, Broomfield and Churchill also tell in chronological fashion the story of Palin’s rise — how she quickly cast away her political mentor, former Wasilla mayor John Stein, and soon embarked on a firing spree of public officials who disagreed with her on even the smallest of issues. Through it all, she flogged hot-button social issues as relevant, and later, in 2006, she positioned herself in savvy fashion between two bickering fellow Republicans, to score a primary upset.

Broomfield is part provocateur, part bumbling professor. He injects himself into the proceedings, but in a manner that lacks the blunt-force emotionalism of someone like Michael Moore. The distinctive quality of Broomfield’s voice — which conveys an occasional sarcasm but mostly an ever-present bemusement with his own stumbling, shrugging exploration — gives his movie a comfortable, lived-in feeling and sense of fair play, even though there’s undeniably something of a bent. While it’s edited into a cogent narrative, one feels that Broomfield mostly heads out each day of a shoot armed less with research, and more with an eager desire to see what sorts of reactions he can capture, no matter where the particular opinions fall.

When Broomfield touches, in passing, on Palin’s depression upon her return to the governorship of Alaska in the wake of the 2008 election, it’s hard not to feel at least a small pang of empathetic sorrow for the subject. Would that Broomfield were allowed to mine this seam more, through the participation of those close to and sympathetic to the Palins. Instead, what one sees manifested, time and again, is a pattern of emotional retrenchment and vindictive lashing out. In Sarah Palin’s world, nothing can be her fault; after all, she is chosen, she is anointed.

Her own former campaign managers and legislative directors paint a portrait of Palin as an air-quote leader who made decisions based on perceived threats and disrespect, wielding governmental power as a cudgel for score-settling of the sort given to a popular teenage girl’s flight-of-fancy. The sheltered and simplistic nature of this worldview is one thing, but Palin is forever mining for nuggets of victimization that can then be peddled into inflammatory and/or ridiculous rhetoric (“death panels,” “don’t retreat, reload,” “blood libel”), and then used as table scraps to further feed a narrative of persecution, and increase her cult of aggrieved identification. There is nothing in Palin’s world that is merely a misguided idea or a different way by which to achieve the same means of a greater good and fairer world — only evils to be fought and enemies to be vanquished. In the end, that is the true horror — not Palin herself. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Content Media/Channel 4 Films/Awakening Films, unrated, 91 minutes)

Fewer recent documentary films evince a bigger gap between potential level of intrigue and delivered interest than Programming the Nation, a shaggy look at the history of subliminal messaging in the United States that leaves one wanting for the pruning of a sensible editor. Flitting back and forth from 1950s and ’60s cinema and advertising to the alleged usage of subliminal tactics in everything from anti-theft devices, political propaganda, military psychological operations and advanced weapons development, Warrick’s film is interesting in pieces and patches, but ultimately done in by its own manic desire to cram in as much anecdotal detail as possible, no matter its big-picture relevance. It’s the nonfiction equivalent of an excited teenager relating to a parent the story of an important event in their world, and what it individually means for all of their friends. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, meanwhile, click here. (International Film Circuit, unrated, 105 minutes)

If one conducted a day-long survey of random persons from any given major metropolitan street, and asked them to name the biggest polluter in the country, it’s doubtful that the Department of Defense’s name would come up at all, and if it did then almost certainly one wouldn’t need a second hand to keep track of that tally. And yet that’s the central assertion of Semper Fi: Always Faithful, a damning new documentary about drinking water contaminants at a military training base spanning a period of 30 years. At once emotionally powerful and a little more under-sketched than one might like it to be, the film is a frustrating yet nonetheless engaging and heartrending entry in the all-too-swollen canon of social-justice nonfiction films.

A presentation at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, where it won an editing award and was runner-up in the Audience Award balloting, co-directors Rachel Libert and Tony Hardmon’s movie tells the story of toxic cleaning chemicals that were improperly disposed of at North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base, beginning in 1957 and stretching well into the 1980s. The result was that nearly one million Marines and their families were exposed to high levels of carcinogens through drinking water drawn from wells on the base, and when the Marine Corps eventually closed the toxic wells they compounded their sins by never making the contamination public. Using technology to connect, a group of committed ex-Marines — many of whom have lost children, and some of whom are now sick themselves — work together and try to bring about long-delayed justice.

Semper Fi undeniably has emotional punching power, largely courtesy of one of its chief subjects, Jerry Ensminger, a former Master Sergeant and drill instructor for nearly 25 years. When he recollects his dying daughter — who had for weeks resisted any pain medication — asking for a morphine shot to be shared with him, because she knew her dad was in pain too, it is absolutely devastating. If there are failings, it’s that Libert and Hardmon do not construct a particularly strong narrative backbone beyond the chronological one attached to the quest fronted by Ensminger, or, frankly, attempt to expand their story beyond the limits of an emotional cudgel.

Neither do they make a deeply persuasive case for the potential reasons (or, indeed, the existence) of widespread military environmental abuses, or broad misconduct and cover-up. Simply tossing up title cards that indicate there are “130 contaminated military sites” in the United States, and pointing out that one in 10 Americans lives within 10 miles of a military base does not do justice to the gravity of Semper Fi‘s central story. While it’s understandable that the narrative is partially impacted by the fact that the story is still ongoing and unfolding (a bill mandating that the DOD notify all those who stayed at Camp Lejeune during the impacted timeframe is awaiting a final Congressional vote, and has been since February 2010), Libert and Hardmon don’t dig quite deep enough.

They’re content to stay with the activists, and while their journeys are all engaging on a human level, the film’s basic failure to aggressively seek out the contrasting point-of-view means that a viewer leaves uncertain as to whether this is all part of a sinister, coordinated cover-up, mere bureaucratic incompetence unrelated to government, or actually part of a larger military-culture “code of silence” in which the notion of honest, greater-good whistle-blowing, or standing up to and reporting problems up the chain of command, is not merely frowned upon but beaten into submission. Semper Fi tells one hell of a story, but unfortunately it’s just not the complete one. For more information on the film and its subjects, click here. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, meanwhile, click here. (Wider Film Projects/Chicken and Egg Pictures, unrated, 76 minutes)

When people talk about a movie being depressing, whether in a context either admiring or dismissive, they’re almost always talking about and assessing the dramatic heft of a down-tempo narrative film — how a writer, director and actors worked in concert to shine a light on various human frailties, turmoils and difficulties, and in doing so impacted a viewer’s mood in a manner that lingered with them long after the theater lights came up. Real life, however, is even more full of disease and death, moral injustice and underdogs being smacked down by the powers that be.

That may not always be what one wishes to see in a movie, but it can sometimes be bracing, in a good way, to be confronted by the ugliness of reality on its own terms, in broad daylight. And that’s the kind of beautiful, heart-rending melancholy on display in Battle For Brooklyn, a surprisingly touching documentary from husband-and-wife filmmakers Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley that details the struggle of a small group of Brooklynites as they try to prevent New York State from seizing 22 acres of land to hand off to a commercial real estate developer with grand designs on building a new arena for the NBA’s New Jersey Nets.

The film focuses on Daniel Goldstein (above), a graphic designer turned reluctant but square-jawed activist whose apartment sits almost at what would be center court of said shimmering new arena, part of a polarizing Atlantic Yards project to overhaul the neighborhood of Prospect Heights and also erect a dozen-plus skyscrapers. When the plans were announced in 2004, it was a shock to those whose lives might be most impacted, since they had never heard of it, or been consulted. Developer Bruce Ratner owned a parcel of Brooklyn land easily big enough to house plans for the stadium, but basically wanted to keep that so he could build (and then of course make lots of money leasing) other commercial buildings. So Ratner’s plan called for the displacement of 800-plus residents, ranging in socioeconomic status from the very poor to the much better-off, part of a group of new townhome apartments. Forcing them to move would involve invoking the power of “eminent domain,” which is used when government is building something expressly for the good and benefit of the public — mostly with highways, and sometimes schools.

A very substantial public gift to a private developer, though, didn’t sit well with Goldstein and others, so they fought back. Pitted against them was an entourage of lawyers and public relations emissaries, as well as the entire local government, fans of the basketball team, and other residents excited by the lure of potential construction and/or concession jobs. Spanning years of this fight, Galinsky and Hawley’s film is an engrossing and sometimes even chilling portrait of the way underclasses can and will always be pitted and played off against one another, for veritable scraps off a table. Goldstein is an involving subject, and some of the case’s dark developments — including the revelation of air-quote community groups funded by Ratner to give the appearance of public embrace of the project — are worthy of a regular narrative thriller.

Battle For Brooklyn is in some ways reminiscent of Don Argott’s 2010 documentary The Art of the Steal, about a decades-long tug-of-war over the late Albert Barnes’ $30 billion art collection, and efforts to bring it to Philadelphia, which ran counter to his expressly indicated wishes. Movies like each of these both deftly illustrate the ravenous impulses of capitalism, which abhors unexploited value, and confirm the fact that the American legal system, as it pertains to non-criminal matters, is basically just a gamed system for moneyed and mighty interests to eventually win out. A powerful movie about an important and little-reflected-upon topic, Battle For Brooklyn is a telling snapshot of (offscreen) political maneuvering, and the tossed-around wrecking-ball weight of corporate might as it relates to individual rights. (Rumur Productions, unrated, 93 minutes)

Stirring and eye-opening, The Last Mountain details a small community’s fight against the coal industry in Coal River Valley, West Virginia, and gives lie to the notion that the debate over independence from Middle Eastern oil is the only, or even most important, front in the battle for America’s energy future. It’s the most jointly effective and stirring environmental documentary
since the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth, and sure to be a
contender for Academy Award shortlisting later this year.

Bill Haney’s Sundance-minted nonfiction film digs into the heretofore unsexy and largely unknown issue of mountain top removal, a particularly invasive form of strip mining, and makes a persuasive case that insidious corporations have allied themselves with (mostly though not exclusively Republican) politicians and political interests to chip away at the efficacy of the 1972 Clean Water Act and other greater-public-good environmental regulations.

It’s a somewhat but not entirely subjective genre entry, benefiting from a good, pointed diner discussion between Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Bill Raney, president of the West Virginia Coal Association. That the tired “local-jobs” arguments Raney and others trot out are right out of the obstructionist’s status quo playbook (the now-indicted CEO of Massey Energy, Don Blankenship, literally wraps himself in the American flag, slagging environmentalists as job-killing dilettantes while decked out in a gaudy flag-print shirt and hat) may make them risible from afar, but it’s not a laughing matter for the families of six deceased victims of brain tumors along one sad street.

A bit more could be done earlier to tie the Coal Valley fight to the rest of the country (given that half of all railroad freight involves coal, and thus they too have a vested interest in keeping their best customers around, and profitable), and to detail some of the specifics of Massey’s terrible record of safety violations (more than 60,000 over a six-year period). But The Last Mountain is a powerful and unsettling call to action, yet again throwing a spotlight on the virulent schemes that moneyed interests hatch to wring as much private profit as possible from public lands. Lest one think it’s all doom-and-gloom, however, there’s also a heartening, clear-eyed case made for the cost-effectiveness of alternative energies. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the film, meanwhile, click here. (Dada Films, PG, 95 minutes)

A film never to be confused with the 1995 Cindy Crawford-Billy Baldwin actioner of the same name, director Doug Liman’s Fair Game is a riveting political thriller based on the real-life exposure of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts), whose career was destroyed when her covert identity was published as part of a politically motivated press leak after her ex-diplomat husband, Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), penned a critical op-ed outlining his conclusions about the alleged attempted sale of enriched uranium from Niger to Iraq during the drumbeat of run-up to war in that country.



There’s enough political intrigue and moving and shaking here to more or less satisfy fans of adult power-corridor drama like Michael Clayton, The International and Body of Lies. Whipsmart pacing, crackerjack dialogue and smart editing make it bristle with an entirely earned indignation; Fair Game is the sort of film Alan J. Pakula would have knocked out of the park just as resolutely as Liman were its circumstances set two decades or so ago. And the real (and important) themes under the microscope here — personal courage and steadfastness, bureaucratic cowardice and governmental betrayal — are more than just ably delineated, they’re given a searingly tangible injection of intimacy and immediacy, courtesy of all those involved in the production.

But screenwriters Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, working from two books by the film’s subjects, also tackle the human consequences of Plame’s outing with great economy and aplomb. It is greatly to its credit that the film is brutally honest about the widening chasm in the pair’s marriage as a result of differing reactive approaches — Wilson wants to hit back, and hit back hard, while Plame is reticent to do so. The performances here, in Watts and Penn’s third pairing, are swollen with angst and interpersonal turmoil, and Liman’s handheld camera style matches the swirl of chaos, both domestic and professionally, that envelops the narrative.

In its end game, the movie dips just a bit into awkward, civics lesson speechifying, but it’s a lecture, regardless of personal politics, more Americans would be wise to heed — a powerful message about the bullhorn naturally accorded to power, and the anger and betrayal the public should feel when that benefit of the doubt is willfully abused, in perfidious fashion. (Summit, PG-13, 106 minutes)

Billed as a “participatory documentary,” a work-in-progress, nonfiction snapshot assembled and edited by Jeff Deutchman, 11/4/08 chronicles a day around the world, leading up to the presidential election of Barack Obama. The film, which premiered earlier this year at the South by Southwest
Festival, screens tonight in Los Angeles at the Laemmle
Claremont 5, Monica 4-Plex, Playhouse 7, Town Center 5 and Sunset 5 theaters, and
is available this week across various digital download platforms, including iTunes, AmazonVOD,
CinemaNow and more.

Two weeks before the election of Obama, filmmaker Deutchman
asked friends and acquaintances all over the globe to record their experiences of the 2008 Election Day, a day that in many ways had an impending sense of being “historic” before any history at all had even really taken
place. After collecting footage from a combination of passionate amateurs
and acclaimed independent filmmakers — the latter group including Margaret
Brown, Joe Swanberg, Benh Zeitlin and Henry Joost, one of the co-directors of Catfish — Deutchman then went about working up a vérité narrative that skips to and fro, offering an impressionistic, bird’s eye view of the groundswell feeling of momentous change against a sometimes humdrum backdrop of workaday domesticity and regular hustle-and-bustle.

Ostensibly, the film’s chief selling point is that it trades in emotionality rather than some sort of strict, imposed-from-on-high narrative. It depicts idealistic volunteers in St. Louis and Austin working to turn their states
blue; voting lines in Chicago snaking around the block; and young kids, in Alaska and elsewhere, who seem invested in
the election results. One Los Angeles participant even films his cell phone as he talks to his gobsmacked mother, who ran into Bill Clinton while going to cast her vote.

There’s a sort of plebian engagement and value in these collected snapshots, but they don’t really fit together in any compelling fashion. The chief problem, of course, is that, removed from the rarefied air of a historical Democratic primary and general election campaign, the United States is still (and probably even more so) in a place of retrenched partisan grenade lobbing, so any and all attempts 11/4/08 makes at grabbing or inducing joy feel hopelessly leaden, stacked up against the real world outside. Apart from the Republican Party’s unwillingness to engage in any reasonable partnership of governance, and Fox News’ typical idiocy and still ongoing smear campaign of hysterical pitch and volume, Obama is saddled with the crushing reality of very real problems — a tattered economy, small business enmity, and a war in Afghanistan that is dragging on and possibly widening, to name but a few.

While some Stateside anecdotal bits are fascinating (an Indiana canvasser relating the shared story of a voter who believes Black Panthers will actually be killing people at the polls), and others still emotionally tangible and relevant (an African-American volunteer talking about friendships formed during the campaign), the film is most successful when it moves away from mere moment-in-time noodling, and tries to connect both rhetoric and action to the actual deeper feelings and motivations driving them. By and large, this means when the film casts a glance across the Atlantic Ocean, where expatriates and foreign citizens alike express their opinions on the election. Women in Switzerland note that it is “young people who build the future,” and a gentleman in New Delhi talks about the enduring power of America’s ideals.

It’s this material that most provides important context. Political partisans on the far right may regard the aura of hope and optimism attached to Obama’s election as false, misplaced or foolish, but it was certainly real, and no less ridiculous than clubby, rallying blue-hairs feeling safe and sentimental about their country (and their place in it, specifically) when Republicans were ringing up presidential wins in five out of the previous seven contests. In clinging to the notion that Obama was or still is an avatar, and only an empty vessel for the mantle of “change,” there is a fundamental failure to acknowledge and respect his considerable intellect and political gifts, certainly, but also recognize and embrace the dream of American possibility — the dream children need to carry forward in the world, which is in turn actually a worldwide dream. It’s a snapshot of why we matter, essentially — a robust, living example of American exceptionalism. For more information, click here. (Film Buff/Consensual Cinema, unrated, 70 minutes)

There have been a spate of tiny, reform-touting documentaries lamenting the dismal state of American public education recently, including The Cartel, The Lottery, Teached and Paramount Duty, but the 800-pound gorilla on the block is Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting For Superman. As director of the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth, Guggenheim built up a following of admirers, swayed by science, on the political left and in the middle — and an equally passionate cabal of detractors on the right, who decried his “activist” filmmaking. This film would seem to be a less politicized issue to tackle, but that would also assume our capacity for partisan scapegoating is somehow on the wane.



Taking its name from an anecdote about intractable stasis and the absence of any single superhuman rescuer, the movie explores a variety of reasons for public school underachievement, and paints a fairly dire portrait of future American readiness in a global economy. Unions and entrenched bureaucracies take plenty of heat; perhaps most frustrating is how Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the Washington, D.C. Public School system, has a merit-pay proposal stymied by a teachers’ union that won’t even let it come to a vote.

Still, Guggenheim doesn’t demonize in a blind rage; instead, he flips the script on the conventional wisdom that failing kids are a product of failing (largely urban) neighborhoods and uninterested parents, showing instead how schools that let down children actually help foster larger social unrest, and how smart, targeted reform — including the type peddled by Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone — can not merely close but flat out obliterate the achievement gap between poor kids and those in better economic households.

While it has glancing statistical devastation on its side (there are more than 2,000 so-called dropout factories in the United States, where more than 40 percent of high school attendees fail to graduate), Waiting For Superman also has an unhurried rhythm and personal grounding (Guggenheim narrates the movie, and talks about his tough decision to send his own children to private school) that produce an emotional wallop as it winds its way toward a montage finale involving various educational lotteries. There may not be a more heartbreaking scene this year than Anthony, a fifth-grader being raised alone by his grandmother, talking quietly about wanting a better life for his own future kids, and them not having to grow up in “this environment.” (Paramount, PG, 102 minutes)