WHERE TO INVADE NEXT criss-crosses the globe in search of successful nations for America to invade. Relax, kids. He’s not really advocating for a military occupation of a foreign nation. The title’s just a clever way of getting your attention. Moore’s more interested in planting a flag and stealing the best sociopolitical ideas of other countries – Italy’s paid vacations, Norway’s more humane prison system, Finland’s better schools, Tunisia’s free health care for women, Iceland’s gender-balanced banking system. (See full Where To Invade Next review).
Available to watch: Netflix
ALL GOVERNMENTS LIE: TRUTH, DECEPTION, AND THE SPIRIT OF I.F. STONE connects with an array of impressive indie journalists – Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, Matt Taibbi, among others – who are filling in the gaps left by a pandering mainstream media. The film works best when it focuses on the stories we would otherwise have missed – in 2015 John Carlos Frey famously reported the discovery of the mass graves of 200 Mexican immigrants in Brooks County, Texas, 70 miles from the border when nobody else seemed to care – but there’s not much new in the analysis of media’s failure. (See full All Governments Lie review).
Available to watch: Upcoming screenings
DO NOT RESIST explains the horrific state of the American policing system and why it’s been destroying civil liberties over the past decade: arms manufacturers are using a Homeland Security grant program to sell their surplus weapons to domestic police. The result is an over-militarized police force itching to use their shiny new toys and trained to see every civilian interaction as a life-or-death throwdown. Atkinson eavesdrops on a motivational speaker whose entire pitch is that cops are superheroes battling “monsters” and follows a small-town SWAT team on drug busts that display an unnerving level of testosterone and ordnance. (See full Do Not Resist review).
Available to watch: iTunes
LO AND BEHOLD: REVERIES OF THE CONNECTED WORLD explores the effect of the internet on human communication and quickly concludes we’re all doomed. Grimly warning us of hackers, AI and state-sponsored cybercrime, Herzog turns into everyone’s grumpy uncle on Facebook, fretting about how, thanks to our reliance on centralized shipping, America’s food supply is only two brownouts away from total collapse. (The film was produced by NetScout Systems, an “application and network performance management” company, which might explain that angle.) (See full Lo And Behold: Reveries Of The Connected World review).
Available to watch: iTunes
Anthony Weiner probably isn’t sexting here.
WEINER is a rigorously drawn, warts-and-all portrait of a man driven by ego – precisely the reason Anthony Weiner would take the risk of being the subject of a documentary. Even more fascinating is his brilliant wife, Hillary Clinton adviser Huma Abedin, who à la Clinton – and TV’s The Good Wife – stands by her man. (See full Weiner review).
Available to watch: iTunes
THE RUSSIAN WOODPECKER is a documentary constructed as a conspiracy thriller, The Russian Woodpecker follows Ukrainian activist Fedor Alexandrovich, who grew up close enough to Chernobyl that he has mildly radioactive isotopes in his bones. He’s come to believe, after decades of admittedly obsessive research, that the 1986 meltdown was connected to a nearby Soviet military installation called the Duga-1. History tells us the Duga-1 was a massive radar array, part of the distant early warning system designed to track inbound nuclear strikes. The apparatus was powerful enough to cause shortwave radio interference that sounded like a rapid clicking noise – thus, the nickname “Russian woodpecker” – but it also ran insanely over budget, to the point where the whole thing was about to be written off as a failure. (See full The Russian Woodpecker review).
Available to watch: iTunes
