“Both of us are very proud to be Americans and when you see someone is poisoning what you love, and what you believe in, I think if you allow yourself, you become someone who wants to fight against it.” As David McKay describes his thinking, you might think you know where Better This World is headed. McKay and Brad Crowley, two friends from Midland, Texas, tell a story that seems familiar: as young activists, they were arrested at the Republican National Convention in 2008. As the film unfolds, they’re fighting their legal cases. At the time, that is, after 9/11, says FBI Assistant Special Agent Tim Gossfeld, domestic terrorism was a specific target: “That is what we need to focus all our resources on,” he asserts, “to the best of our ability.”

Six-year-old Jeanne (Malonn Lévana) like pink: her bedroom is painted pink, her bedspread is pink, and she wears a pink tutu when she practices her ballet lessons. Her 10-year-old sister Laure Michaël (Zoé Héran) prefers blue. Céline Sciamma’s wonderful Tomboy—now available on iTunes from FilmBuff—presents their relationship and changing circumstances from their perspectives. The camera remains low as yhey watch their parents (Sophie Cattani and Mathieu Demy) chat in their new kitchen (the family has is moving to a new home just outside Paris as the film begins). Their mother’s belly is large, as she’s pregnant with a boy: they see mom smiling and excited, remarking the baby’s movements. Laure sees in her mother a new delight and also a distance: she wonders, without being aware that she’s wondering, how to regain her attention.

“Ninety-five percent of what Americans eat, you can’t pronounce and you can’t make it in your kitchen,” observes Joel Salatin. The owner of Polyface Farms, Salatin repeats in Farmageddon: The Unseen War on American Family Farms what he’s said elsewhere—in his books and in the movies Fresh and Food, Inc.—namely, that the US government’s efforts to regulate small farmers’ food production are not just misbegotten, but also dangerous. With Farmageddon, first time filmmaker Kristin Canty brings more evidence to bear, in the stories of farmers who have been harassed by federal and local agencies (the FBI, the USDA, and the FDA, as well as assorted sheriffs’ departments). Linked through their handling by the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund’s D. Gary Cox, these cases include unannounced raids, inspections that turn into seizures, sheep killing, and, in the case of Jackie Stowers (owner of a private food co-op), the armed invasion of the farmhouse she shares with 10 kids and her husband.

As Gil Guillory sees it, his career is an extension of human history. A former fighter, he now runs USA-MMA, promoting mixed martial arts bouts in Lafayette, Louisiana. “There’s something about beating another man into submission that the world is attracted to,” he says, while you watch a few fighters bouncing on the balls of their feet, shadowboxing and kicking. A percussive beat on the soundtrack punctuates their movements. Framed by doorways and silhouetted, they’re poetic here, at the start of Fightville. They’re also products—of their own lives, of a culture committed to particular masculine and also commercial ideals. “By nature, [man’s] a warrior,” Guillory goes on, “So when you say ‘fight,’ everyone is gonna turn and look.” In his world (the one “attracted to” cage fighting), selling that entertainment is as important as providing it, the show and the look work together. Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker’s new documentary—which opens 20 April in New York and LA, as well as on iTunes and VOD—considers the effects of this apparent shift—from fighting as primal contest to spectacle for paying consumers—a shift that depends equally on that fighting’s brutality and its poetry.

See PopMatters’ review.

“I’m sick and tired of worrying about gas prices every six months, I’m sick and tired of these failed wars in the Middle East,” says Gavin Newsom. “I’m sick and tired of breathing the air that we’re breathing.” One of the several celebrity talking heads in Revenge of the Electric Car, Chris Paine’s follow-up to Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006), the California Lieutenant Governor lays out the most obvious reasons electric cars are a good idea. Taking such rationale as pretty much self-evident (Danny DeVito on his now-extinct EV1: “I wasn’t gunking up the air, it was a fantastic ride”), the new documentary follows independent entrepreneurs like Gadget Abbott (who refits a gas-fueled Triumph Spitfire and a GT6 to take electricity) and Tesla CEO Elon Musk (whom Jon Favreau describes as “The closest you’re going to get in real life to Tony Stark”), as well as mainstream bosses like GM’s Bob Lutz (who presses for the Chevy Volt) and Nissan’s Carlos Ghosn (the Leaf). They all want to make the world better and also make money. Narrator Tim Robbins introduces turns in the story with colorful, if simplifying, phrases (“Elon’s coup was just what Bob needed to drag GM back into the race”), and the film briefly recalls the 2008 auto hearings (with a shot of a corporate jet to emphasize the Big Three automakers’ tone-deafness) as well as the subsequent bailout. These efforts to bring back electric cars help to structure a seemingly linear adventure, as the documentary accepts and even celebrates the ways that money drives the process of revolution. Where the first film railed against conspiring corporations and government, this one insists they need to be part of the solution.

Revenge of the Electric Car premieres this week on Independent Lens.