There’s lots of action along with music in The Present (including The Clash before each act and the odd Europop sensation, Haddaway), drinking, dancing, and Blanchett, in one scene, pulling off her black bra before firing a shotgun into the air (multiple times).

Always direct, stark, simple, reductivist, economical and refined, yet wildly raw and natural and usually funny, the videos of Barbara Rosenthal are personal and universal at the same time.

What does it mean to be normal? And is normalcy a guarantee of happiness? This is a thematic question that has animated countless films, plays, and novels--be it a high school comedy or historical epic, the desire to fit in is an animating force throughout one's life just as it is in film,

Year after year tinsel town can be counted upon to roll out an entire army of films featuring grizzled, muscular men, predictably going about doing what grizzled, muscular men do best—namely kicking ass and taking names all while stoically continuing to be grizzled, muscular men.

The Wasted Times is a powerful, multi-layered, richly lived film about a cat-and-mouse battle for power between the Japanese and Chinese in Shanghai in the years running up to the Japanese invasion of the city in 1937.

It's a brisk autumn day and I'm standing in front of the SVA Theater on 23rd Street in Manhattan, looking at hundreds of people lining up for the DOC NYC Festival. Marc Levin and Mark Benjamin have invited me, a second time, to come see the world premier of their new documentary "Rikers". 

In 1992, after the first read through of Anna Deavere Smith’s play Fires in the Mirror, a one-woman show examining the 1991 riots in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Smith received an apathetic response. Everybody in the audience, made up largely of theater professionals, she recalls, “said that no one will care about this play.” 

Occasionally a film comes along that manages to land on a hot button issue at the exact moment when it is heavily present in the cultural consciousness. 

Zero days is a documentary by Alex Gibney about Stuxnet, a computer virus discovered in 2010 that was almost undeniably the work of the the U.S. and Israel attacking the Iranian nuclear program.

Old: hey you, you looking for something out here. Seems like you're lost

Young: oh no I'm just new to the neighborhood. I'm feeling my way around.

O: well where you livin at and where are you from?