Meryl Streep as Mother Courage in John Walter's absorbing, perceptive Theater of War. There are documentaries that entertain and many more that educate, and there are plenty that grab you by the lapels and spout hummus-breath in your face about how you need to stop eating meat and trade your vulgar, barbarous combustion-powered vehicle in for a bike — today! Then there are the rare documentaries that prod you, subtly but insistently, to reexamine the......

There has been no shortage of filmed analysis of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath during the last three years. And much of it has been quite good, particularly Spike Lee's sprawling (and riveting) four-hour documentary, When the Levees Broke, which also screened at SILVERDOCS this year. But one doesn't really realize what's missing from these other films until watching Trouble the Water, Carl Deal and Tia Lessin's take on the material, which is both harrowing......

No roads may lead to Antarctica, but all longitude lines do. It's these lines that the continent's few residents have followed, from wherever they started, to their shared terminus at the bottom of the planet, stepping, as one resident puts it, "off the edge of the map." Werner Herzog has made a career out of films based on characters on the margins. Some are real, some are imagined, but nearly all of them are obsessives......

He's a lover and a fighter: Kassim Ouma reflects on his violent past in Kassim the Dream It sounds like — if you’ll pardon the expression — something out of a movie: Junior Middleweight Champion fighter Kassim “The Dream” Ouma escapes the darkest of pasts to find his way from Africa to America, arrives penniless and unable to speak English, and within a year he’s a professional fighter with a surrogate family, money in......

Joanna Rudnick ponders whether to keep her breasts and ovaries in In the Family at SILVERDOCS. If the measure of a good film is that you're still thinking about it days later, then In the Family is the best movie I've seen all year. But in no small way was this documentary, directed by filmmaker Joanna Rudnick, more or less tailor made to hit someone like me square in the jaw. Rudnick, all of......

At the outset of Lost Holiday, a charming, funny, and almost unintentionally political documentary out of the Czech Republic, director Lucie Králová rather cheekily declares the film, via the opening credits, to be a "detective documentary." It's a touch that borders on precious, and a tone that continues in the often wry intertitles that mark time throughout the "investigation" that is the film's subject. What they're trying to detect are the identities of six men......

Fidelis Cloer takes aim at competition seen and unseen in Bulletproof Salesman. “I want war. I don’t want peace,” says German armored-car merchant Fidelis Cloer at the beginning of Bulletproof Salesman. An hour later, in the doc’s final moments, he offers a slightly more nuanced view, pointing out that he did nothing at all to instigate or sustain the protracted conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan than have proved such a windfall for his company.......

In case you hadn't noticed, SILVERDOCS is in full swing now, and it's been occupying all of our film-going attention this week. While D.C. has no shortage of film festivals throughout the year, there is none as good as SILVERDOCS, so we have trouble thinking of movies in any other terms while the festival is occupying Silver Spring. It's also an endurance test just trying to see all the films one wants to in the......

Director Alex Gibney (who we interviewed earlier this year) is making a mounting case for a future legacy as the first great documentarian of the 21st century. Hot on the heels of his incisive investigations into the collapse of a major corporation and the collapse of America's wartime moral compass, Gibney has switched gears. Rather than going after an entity whose misdeeds he feels are in dire need of being exposed, he has made what......

With the recent cinematic dramatizations of the life of Che Guevara, from his early days as a road tripping med student in the excellent The Motorcycle Diaries to Steven Soderbergh's lengthy version of his revolutionary years in the four and a half hour biopic that just premiered at Cannes, an unusual perspective was obviously necessary to any documentary version of his story to keep it from seeming stale or overly academic in comparison. And......

As you probably noticed from our first review this morning, the SILVERDOCS AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival is now underway in Silver Spring, Md. The festival runs beginning today through Monday, June 23, and presents 108 documentary films over the course of the week. Now in its sixth year, SILVERDOCS is by far and away the classiest and best run film festival the D.C. metro area has to offer, and DCist will be crawling all over......

Yoko Ono, George Martin, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr at the Las Vegas premiere of Love, the subject of the documentary All Together Now. Combining the music of the most beloved band in the world with the most visually arresting live performance troupe working today seems like a surefire recipe for a hit. That's probably what the late George Harrison and Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté thought when they first dreamed up the......