First Position (Kargman, 2012)
Admittedly, my two favorite moments in Bess Kargman's First Position happened when nobody was dancing.
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The Queen of Versailles (Greenfield, 2012)
Not just one of the best documentaries at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Lauren Greenfield’s The Queen of Versailles deserves to be in the conversation as one of the best films of 2012.
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Big Boys Gone Bananas!* (Gertten, 2012)
Big Boys Gone Bananas!*, aside from having the distinction of the hardest title in awhile to spell correctly, is the kind of film of which every documentary film festival needs at least one. It’s not exactly a feel good story, but it is a feel better story.
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Love Free or Die (Alston, 2012)
Nobody has ever hated me the way Christians have hated me.
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Italy Love It or Leave It (Hofer and Ragazzi, 2011)
Italy Love It or Leave It is a modest film, almost modest enough to work.
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The Waiting Room (Nicks, 2012)
Peter Nicks's The Waiting Room is the sort of documentary that advocates on either side of the American health care debate could end up pointing at to bolster their ideological claims.
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Mr. Cao Goes to Washington (Chiang, 2012)
"The Tea Party does not represent this district, I do."
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Turn Me on Dammit! (Jacobsen, 2011)
I think the thing that may disarm some viewers who are predisposed to dislike or be offended by Turn Me on Dammit! is that it isn't really, truly, in the final analysis, about the sex.
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Surviving Progress (Roy & Crooks, 2012)
Six years after An Inconvenient Truth, it is depressing, maddening, and probably a little counterproductive that the immanent global catastrophe film has become a genre unto itself
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Mirror Mirror (Singh, 2012)
But Mirror Mirror has Julia Roberts in it, so it must be a Julia Roberts movie. I like Julia Roberts. I found her charming in Notting Hill and I respect her work in other places. I think, however, her persona is wrong for the material. Her evil queen has neither the icy malevolence to be truly scary, nor the whiff of desperation to be at all sympathetic.