previously: part 1 || part 2 || part 3
peace officer
Director: Scott Christopherson & Brad Barber (USA)
Premise: 30 years after William Lawrence helped found the USA’s first-ever SWAT team, the police-ordered death of his son-in-law turns him into an anti-SWAT activist.
Film Carewzin': This sterling documentary succeeds as both personal drama and topical investigation; using Lawrence’s personal pain to illuminate the fallout from America’s increasing militarisation of their police.
Go Watch It If: You know the cops shoot first, ask questions later.
phoenix
Director: Christian Petzold (Germany)
Premise: At the end of WWII, a concentration camp survivor (Nina Hoss) undergoes radical surgery to reconstruct her disfigured face. When she eventually tracks down her wayward, erstwhile, untrustworthy husband (Ronald Zehrfeld), he mistakes her as mere doppelgänger for his ‘dead’ wife.
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Film Carewzin': Petzold’s Barbara follow-up delivers another tense period drama that plays as national parable; Hoss’s attempt to reclaim her old life and her rebuilt face both standing as symbols of Jewish reconstruction.
Go Watch It If: You want to see a cold, meticulous thriller whose central device evokes Eyes Without A Face, Vertigo, and The Skin I Live In.
a poem is a naked person
Director: Les Blank (USA)
Premise: In 1972, ascendant boogie-rockier Leon Russell employs Les Blank to make a documentary about the recording of his country album Hank Wilson’s Back. When Blank submits a free-form, nearly-incoherent picture, it’s left unreleased for over 40 years.
Film Carewzin': A scattershot —and very stoned-seeming— time capsule, in which Blank is less interested in rock’n’roll than a snake eating a chick, a building being imploded, parachuters, tractor pulls, and Jim Franklin catching scorpions in an empty swimming pool.
Go Watch It If: You’re over watching the same tired type of rockumentaries.
the postman’s white nights
Director: Andrei Konchalovsky (Russia)
Premise: In remote Arctic Russia, a postman serves as the glue that binds a tiny community, and their envoy to the outside world.
Film Carewzin': Poetic piece of rural miserablism/mysticism, in which drunken Russians —playing themselves in a quasi-documentary— stumble about in a remote lakeside idyll.
Go Watch It If: You want to drift away into the distant North.
prophet’s prey
Director: Amy Berg (USA)
Premise: An exposé on the Fundamentalist Mormons, a polygamist sect ruled over by a single God-like figure, Warren Jeffs.
Film Carewzin': Anyone who lamented the recent Scientology doc Going Clear lacked cult-ish creepiness, get ready to see a self-appointed prophet fed a steady diet of inbred 12-year-old brides, millions in cash, and Godlike reverence. Berg’s picture is a chilling portrait of the isolation, indoctrination, and manipulation at the core of religious sects.
Go Watch It If: You’re ready to be creeped the fuck out.
queen of earth
Director: Alex Ross Perry (USA)
Premise: Alone in a lakehouse, old friends Elisabeth Moss and Katherine Waterston swap sprawling stories, gently bicker, and inch towards mutual breakdown.
Film Carewzin': Perry’s fascinating film leans a little too heavily on ominous music to foreshadow its drama, but when he lets the camera roll, he captures two actors going deep, and conveys unease through filmmaking choices. It doesn’t ‘work’ as well as either The Color Wheel or Listen Up Philip, but it’s still plenty effecting.
Go Watch It If: You want to see the darling of Mad Men go off the deep end.
raiders!
Director: Tim Skousen & Jeremy Coon (USA)
Premise: In 1982, a group of Mississippi kids get together and decide to remake Indiana Jones shot-for-shot. It ends up taking them six years, and consuming their entire adolescence. When their film is discovered by Eli Roth in 2002, it becomes a proto viral video.
Film Carewzin': This documentary is a riot in its behind-the-scenes look at the no-budget, daredevil making of one of the most elaborate fan-videos ever. But when it shifts to the present day, and looks at the reunited, 40-something friends’ attempts to shoot a ‘professional’ version of the blockbuster sequence that eluded them in the ’80s, you can feel it strain to generate a sense of drama.
Go Watch It If: You’re an obtainer of rare antiquities.
red army
Director: Gabe Polsky (USA/Russia)
Premise: The life and times of Slava Fetisov, star captain of the greatest ice-hockey team that ever was, the USSR’s national Red Army team.
Film Carewzin': Early in Polsky’s playfully-edited documentary, a local journalist opines that, in Soviet Russia, sports were indivisible from politics. Fetisov’s tales —of years spent skating for the state— have the same quality.
Go Watch It If: You want to see the rare sports documentary that isn’t exactly about sports.
ruined heart: another love story between a criminal and a whore
Director: Khavn de la Cruz (Philippines)
Premise: Um, another love story between a criminal (Asano Tadanobu) and a whore (Nathalia Acevedo).
Film Carewzin': An exuberant punk-opera that plays as one long, deranged, Christopher Doyle-shot music video —scored by Stereo Total!— Khavn’s weird, whimsical, super-energetic picture will delight those attuned to its playful sensibility.
Go Watch It If: You’re ready to go rollicking through Manila’s madcap backstreets.
rules of the game
Director: Claudine Bories & Patrice Chagnard (France)
Premise: An observationist chronicle of a host of young jobseekers being interviewed at an employment training centre.
Film Carewzin': Told in chapters and delivered with a dry wryness, this fly-on-the-wall doc is essentially a character study in a handful of young adults still getting comfortable in their skin.
Go Watch It If: You want to bring back painful unemployment memories.
the russian woodpecker
Director: Chad Gracia (Ukraine)
Premise: Eccentric Ukrainian artist Fedor Alexandrovich grows increasingly obsessed with the Chernobyl reactor explosion of 1986.
Film Carewzin': This documentary goes from personal portrait of strange subject, to a thorough examination of Russia’s Cold War program of weaponised radio-waves, a bonkers conspiracy-theorising paranoia-thriller, and, finally, a snapshot of the epoch of contemporary Ukrainian unrest.
Go Watch It If: A wild ride beckons.
salad days: a decade of punk in washington, dc 1980-1990
Director: Scott Crawford (USA)
Premise: Um, read the title.
Film Carewzin': Another nostalgic rockumentary whose ranks of talking heads include talking-head staples Thurston Moore, Henry Rollins, and Ian MacKaye. Only Bono away from a full house!
Go Watch It If: You laugh at the thought of eating ’ludes.
she’s beautiful when she’s angry
Director: Mary Dore (USA)
Premise: A chronicle of the rise of second-wave feminism from the women who were in the trenches.
Film Carewzin': In its blessed moments of archival footage, Dore’s documentary taps into the sense of cultural urgency, danger, and change in the air in the activist ’60s. But, too often it has that static documentary presentation of endless talking heads and TV-timed beats.
Go Watch It If: You want to see bras actually being burnt.
song of the sea
Director: Tomm Moore (Ireland)
Premise: A pair of grief-stricken Irish siblings slip into a magical world of Celtic mythology.
Film Carewzin': Moore’s Secret Of Kells also matched Celtic myth with idiosyncratic animation and unexpectedly-deep emotion, and, here, he stirs up the same sweet brew.
Go Watch It If: You’re aged 8+.
spartacus & cassandra
Director: Ioania Nuguet (France)
Premise: A pair of immigrant Romani kids must choose between the familiarity of life on the street, or leaving their parents for a chance at housing and education.
Film Carewzin': Nuguet’s raw documentary is an unvarnished glimpse into lives below the poverty line.
Go Watch It If: You want to see years roll out on screen.
spring
Director: Aaron Moorhead & Justin Benson (Italy/USA)
Premise: An American (Lou Taylor Pucci) backpacking in Italy meets a hot babe (Nadia Hillker) who turns out to be enigmatic, evasive, and, um, actually a mystical mythological monster.
Film Carewzin': That set-up, in most cases, would either be played for terror or comedy, but Moorhead and Benson instead pitch Spring as a tender romance.
Go Watch It If: You wanna watch something that plays like Before Sunrise made by Buffy fans.
