The Best Indie / International Films of 2011

Film: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil

Director: Eli Craig

Cast: Alan Tudyk, Tyler Labine, Katrina Bowden, Jesse Moss, Chelan Simmons

Image: http://images.popmatters.com/blog_art/t/tuckeranddalevsevil2.jpg

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Display Width: 200Tucker and Dale vs. Evil

The redneck. It’s a cliché that’s been carefully conceived and crafted since the wooded areas of the Deep South were discovered to be full of rapists, killers, and psychopaths. Forever undone by James Dickey’s Deliverance (and John Boorman’s big screen adaptation) the supposedly stupider, more sinister members of the closet Confederacy are now a genre given. Perhaps this explains why this twisted take on the type is so magical. Nothing is as it seems, or should be, and that’s a down and out in Dixie truth. Bill Gibron

 

Film: Fightville

Director: Petra Epperlein, Michael Tucker

Cast: Dustin Poirier, Albert Stainback, Tim Credeur, Gil Guillory

Studio: Pepper & Bones

Year: 2011

Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/f/fightville1.jpg

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Fightville

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 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. Cynthia Fuchs

 

Film: Trollhunter

Director: André Øvredal

Cast: Otto Jespersen, Hans Morten Hansen, Tomas Alf Larsen, Johanna Mørck, Knut Nærum, Robert Stoltenberg, Glenn Erland Tosterud

Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/t/troll-hunter-poster.jpg

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Trollhunter

With the way the found-footage horror genre has exploded in the past few years, it’s easy to make the mistake of thinking the subgenre is already worn out. But Norway’s Trollhunter is evidence to the contrary. A small crew doing a documentary on the country’s strictly regulated bear hunt stumbles upon a mysterious man who always seems to be hanging around the fringes of the hunt. The crew follows the man and inadvertently discovers that his real job is dealing with the Norway’s secret troll problem. It’s amazing that the government has managed to keep the problem a secret, because the trolls are huge. The special effects in the film are spectacular. There are several different types of troll, and each one looks distinctive and utterly convincing. Writer/director Andre Ovredal had the audacity to do this sort of effects-heavy concept on a small budget, and he pulled it off with impressive skill. Trollhunter is a weird, fun movie that is worth discovering. Chris Conaton

 

Film: The Mexican Suitcase (La Maleta Mexicana)

Director: Trisha Ziff

Cast: Lorna Arroyo, Sebastian Faber, Susan Meislas, Pedro Meyer, Ben Tarver, Juan Villoro, Brian Wallis, Anna Winand

Studio: 212BERLIN

Year: 2011

Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/m/mexican_suitcase_poster.jpg

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The Mexican Suitcase (La Maleta Mexicana)

Memory is at the center of The Mexican Suitcase (La Maleta Mexicana), Trisha Ziff’s magnificent, complex documentary about the Mexican Suitcase, that is, three lost boxes of images of the Spanish Civil that were discovered in Mexico in 2007. The film’s particular assembly of the images represents another way of remembering, as the photos constitute memories, instants of life and death captured by photographers Robert Capa, David Seymour “Chim,” and Gerda Taro. The film includes as well another set of memories, as curators and photographers, academics and survivors of the war sort through their recollections. As their pieces come together to form the film, they’re much like the contact sheets produced from the negatives — each separate and all connected.

Their connections can be imposed, as an expert explains the significance of a photo or elucidates a context. Thus, Lorna Arroyo notes that what we now know as the “war correspondent” was only beginning to come into being during the Spanish Civil War, when these three photographers and others traveled to the battleground and recorded what they saw. “They’re foreigners,” says Arroyo, “who come for the Spanish Civil War.” The concept is remarkable once you get past what has become so seemingly normal, that reporters would immerse themselves in battle in order to show people — “the public” — what they would never see firsthand, risking their lives in order to do so. Cynthia Fuchs



 

Film: The Interrupters

Director: Steve James

Cast: Ameena Matthews, Cobe Williams, Eddie Bocanegra, Tio Hardiman, Gary Slutkin

Studio: Kartemquin Films

Year: 2011

Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/t/the-interrupters-poster.jpg

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The Interrupters

The murder of Derrion Albert seemed a turning point. A 16-year-old student at Fenger High School in Chicago, Albert was beaten to death in September 2009 during a confrontation in Roseland, a confrontation that happened to be caught on video. The video shows that the boy is hit multiple times with a railroad tie and then stomped on once he’s on the ground. It’s a horrific, hectic scene, and it has helped to convict four suspects. But even as the video attracted international attention, as well as public statements by Jesse Jackson and then Mayor Richard M. Daley, Eric Holder and Arne Duncan, it also only exposed what too many Chicagoans already knew, that “invisible violence” was ravaging the city.

CeaseFire is one group working to intervene in this “war zone.” And their efforts are made visible in The Interrupters. This magnificent documentary, from producer/director Steve James and author-turned-producer Alex Kotlowitz, was the centerpiece screening of last year’s Silverdocs Film Festival. It describes its focus in an opening title: “One year in the life of a city grappling with violence.” That year is laid out by seasons in the film, but it’s shaped by three Interrupters, former offenders now dedicated to stopping acts of violence. As it details their backstories and their current efforts, the movie also considers CeaseFire’s premise, that violence can be treated like a disease, that its transmission can be interrupted. Cynthia Fuchs

15 – 11

Film: Tabloid

Director: Errol Morris

Cast: Joyce McKinney, Jackson Shaw, Peter Tory, Kent Gavin

Studio: Sundance Selects

Year: 2011

Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/d/dvd-tabloid-cvr.jpg

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Display Width: 200Tabloid

“Dogs and children love me, they love Joyce McKinney,” says Joyce McKinney, “Because they sense in me an innocence, you know, they sense in me a gentleness. And they don’t read tabloid papers. On first look, Errol Morris’ documentary appears to tell McKinney’s story, drawing from the story reported by British tabloids in 1977. A former beauty queen, she became the center of a scandal when she flew from Los Angeles to London, England, in pursuit of her ex-boyfriend, a Mormon named Kirk Anderson. It’s a key point for Tabloid, that individuals involved with the press — as objects or producers or consumers — don’t always “know.” They don’t know what they’re “giving,” they don’t anticipate consequences, they don’t know if what they’re reading or seeing is even close to a truth. Tabloids are only the most extreme versions of this tenuous relationship between experiences, of storytelling and use, of truth-seeking and exploitation. As the documentary illustrates pieces of multiple stories with film clips or animation, headlines and photos, it doesn’t so much present a truth as it questions all of them. By the time Joyce McKinney is again the object of tabloid photographers, holding cloned puppies in South Korea, the circle of celebrity seems both reinforced and imploded. Cynthia Fuchs

 

Film: Project Nim

Director: James Marsh

Cast: Herbert Terrace, Stephanie LaFarge, Jenny Lee, Laura-Ann Petitto, Joyce Butler, Bill Tynan, Renee Falitz, Bob Ingersoll, James Mahoney

Studio: Roadside Attractions and HBO Documentary Films

Year: 2011

Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/p/project-nim-movie-poster.jpg

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Project Nim

“Wouldn’t it be exciting to communicate with a chimp and learn what it was thinking?” The question posed by Professor Herb Terrace of Columbia University is an enduring one. It’s echoed in the suggestion (above) made by filmmaker James Marsh, who interviews Terrace in his documentary Project Nim, that you might see signs of “Nim’s state of mind” in images. The difference between their approaches indicates their circumstances: the first is born of “scientific research” circa 1973, the other an artist’s reflection four decades later. But it also points to a broader cultural shift, a changing sense of responsibility, by humans, for others — others of various sorts.

Exposing this shift is the broad project of Project Nim. Not unlike Marsh’s Man on Wire, the new documentary uses an extraordinary story — before, Philippe Petit’s walk across a cable between the Twin Towers, now, the attempt to teach Nim sign language — to reveal other stories, about human ambition and failure, insight and arrogance, regret and ignorance. The film works around words in ways that films can, as images alternately support, contradict, and complicate what people say. Even as individuals articulate their desires to care for Nim or convey their relations with him, it also provides images of Nim himself, in still photos, contact sheets, Super-8 footage, and even magazine spreads. These images invite your own efforts to understand, to believe what you see, to translate what you can. They also remind you that your capacity is limited. Cynthia Fuchs

 

Film: Attack the Block

Director: Joe Cornish

Cast: Jodie Whittaker, John Boyega, Alex Esmail, Franz Drameh, Leeon Jones, Simon Howard, Luke Treadaway, Jumayn Hunter, Nick Frost

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Attack the Block

Joe Cornish’s debut film is a fast-paced combination of action and horror that never lets up and never stops being fun. The premise is a simple twist on ‘80s monster movies like Critters and Gremlins where it’s up to kids to save the town from nasty creatures. This time, though, the aliens land near a downtrodden 30-story South London apartment building. And our heroes are a gang of thuggish teens who open the movie by attempting to mug a young woman. It’s a difficult way to start a film, but Cornish pulls off the trick of making us like these kids despite the cold opening. It helps that the alien creatures are vicious and relentless and that the action sequences are expertly staged, full of tension and humor. The thick, difficult to parse South London accents make Attack the Block seem more foreign than most British films, but this is a ride worth taking all the same. Chris Conaton

 

Film: Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles

Director: Jon Foy

Cast: Justin Duerr, Steve Weinik, Colin Smith

Studio: Argot Pictures

Year: 2011

Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/r/resurrectdead_poster.jpg

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Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles

“The first time I noticed a Toynbee Tile on the street was on South Street.” It sounds so simple and innocuous, this “first time.” And yet it’s not. As Justin Duerr tells his story in the documentary Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles, spotting the tile initiates an investigation that will go on for years. And the imagery as he tells it — the close-up of his nearly painfully pale face, then the cuts to tiles, seeming to float even as they’re anchored in pavement — is hinting at why it goes on for years, an indication of Justin’s capacity for creative thinking and commitment and a particular kind of evolving comprehension. It’s a sign of what he will come to see, beyond the tile, and beyond the next step he imagines for himself, as well as the film’s own part in that imagining.

It’s also a sign of how smart and odd and provocative Resurrect Dead will be. If Jon Foy’s film begins with Justin’s discovery, it goes on to examine what’s at stake in discovery as an idea and a practice, what Justin and his fellow investigators working on the Toynbee Tile Mystery realize about themselves in this process. It’s also, more profoundly, a consideration of how the material world can intersect with imagined worlds, conjured from subjective experiences, collective perspectives, and efforts to define selves in relation to others. The film tells the stories of lives, but also looks at how those stories are produced and told, how they circulate and how they lead to other stories. It’s a remarkable movie, both for the questions it poses and the answers it never quite articulates. Cynthia Fuchs

 

Film: Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Director: Werner Herzog

Cast: Werner Herzog, Dominique Baffier, Jean Clottes

Studio: IFC Films

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Cave of Forgotten Dreams

A documentary about the oldest artwork in the world may make the newest film technology viable for independent cinema. Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams brings to life the Paleolithic treasures discovered in 1994 in Chauvet cave in southern France. Sealed off by a rockslide in the distant past, the cave has perfectly preserved a trove of bones, prints, and magnificent renderings of horses, bears, lions, rhinoceroses, and other animals painted and etched into the cave walls more than 30,000 years ago.

You can’t get more intimate than Chauvet cave (named for one of its discoverers, Jean-Marie Chauvet), where precious few visitors are even allowed inside each year, and Herzog had to limit his crew to three, use battery-powered cameras and low-heat lights, and film from a narrow catwalk that snakes through the cave to keep anyone from damaging the floor. The crew could only shoot part of the time with their professional rig; otherwise they had to make do with a smaller camera. Despite and because of such restrictions, Cave ranges widely. Scenes inside the cave that detail artifacts and show scientists at work alternate with footage shot in the surrounding landscape or in laboratories that features interviews with experts who discuss the significance of the finds and give mini-primers on various facets of Paleolithic culture. Michael Curtis Nelson

10 – 6

Film: The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975

Director: Göran Olsson

Cast: Erykah Badu, Harry Belafonte, Stokely Carmichael, Kathleen Cleaver, Angela Davis, Danny Glover, Talib Kweli, Bobby Seale, Ahmir-Khalib Thompson

Studio: Sundance Selects

Year: 2011

Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/b/black_power_mixtape_poster.jpg

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Display Width: 200The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975

The first scenes in The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 reveal the documentary’s premise, that the Black Power Movement, building and then suppressed during these eight years, emerged out of needs, the needs to resist injury and endure trauma, and also, to make visible what was going on in America, what remained unknown to people who didn’t have to know. Black Power had to do with pride, politics, and culture, of course, with Richard Wright, James Brown, and the Black Panther Party (BPP). But it also had to do with people trying to survive abuses at once banal and outrageous.

The film goes on to consider the shifting effects and inspirations of the movement, in “nine chapters,” each denoted as a year, more or less. An early chapter focuses on Stokely Carmichael, remembered here by Talib Kweli in an especially poignant context, as the leader of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) moves a crowd in 1967, and then interviews his own mother, asking about her neighborhood. Speaking in public, Carmichael (later Kwame Toure) describes his admiration for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 covers so much ground, from Attica and William Kunstler to John Forte, speaking here about his experience in prison, his reading of Angela Davis, to point out that the Movement was primarily about making wrongs visible. For prisoners, who are disproportionately people of color, he says, “The question comes down to something that’s very fundamental: do prisoners have human rights?” Cynthia Fuchs

 

Film: Pina

Director: Wim Wenders

Cast: Pina Bausch, Malou Airaudo, Jorge Puerta Armenta, Andrey Berezin, Damiano Ottavio Bigi, Clementine Deluy, Josephine Ann Endicot, Lutz Foerster

Studio: Sundance Selects

Year: 2011

Rated: NR

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Pina

Breathing. When you watch bodies in Wim Wenders’ Pina, you hear and see them breathing. In a movie about dancers — about the work of dancers, their efforts to tell stories, to move audiences, to help them wonder — this is no small thing. As it remembers Pina Bausch, the choreographer, the movie also explores the relationship between bodies and movies, using 3D in new ways. At first, this relationship might seem simple: dancers from Pina’s Tanztheater Wuppertal appear, they gesture or step, they are framed, and shots are cut together to insinuate or follow movements. But soon Pina is doing something else: it’s breaking up and putting together the gestures and the steps, it’s gazing at faces, it’s not quite keep up. The first dance in the film, Rite of Spring, from 1975 and set to Igor Stravinsky, is startling. Men and women dance in groups, approaching and retreating from each other, enacting the rite of coming together and apart, of violence and attraction.

As they dance, as they move and breathe and sweat, the stage is transformed. As dirt is laid on the floor, bodies become dirty: sex as dance as is work, a process, an adaptation. The dancers continue to move and sweat and breathe, and now come new sounds, scratching and scraping and softening, they move in shafts of light, they recede into shadows. Their efforts are increasingly, insistently visible in the 3D, an illusion of density the film doesn’t press but allows to hover. Cynthia Fuchs

 

Film: Le Quattro Volte

Director: Michelangelo Frammartino

Cast: Giuseppe Fuda, Nazareno Timpano, Bruno Timpano, Artemio Vellone

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Le Quattro Volte

A unique celebration of the cycle of life, Michelangelo Frammartino’s second film, set in a remote Italian village, follows a sickly, elderly shepherd, a newborn lamb, a tree and a coal kiln, all of these ‘stories’ tangentially linked. Frammartino has a magical gift for long, unforced sequences: one of these, in which goats run loose through the village, symbolizing the death of their master, is one of the most memorable and delightful of any this year. Cleansing and evocative, despite the lack of dialogue; otherworldly, yet grounded by the realization that death is never far away, Le Quattro Volte is perhaps even more beguiling than The Tree of Life. Andrew Blackie

 

Film: The Trip

Director: Michael Winterbottom

Cast: Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Paul Popplewell

Image: http://images.popmatters.com/blog_art/t/thetripfilm.jpg

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The Trip

Nobody should look this miserable having a supposedly good time. No one, be it on holiday or as part of a cook’s tour of Northern England, should be so angst-ridden and afraid. But that’s exactly the look that UK funnyman Steve Coogan carries throughout this likeable, laugh-filled quasi-documentary. Taken from a six part UK series co-starring the artist formerly/currently known as Alan Partridge and his comedian/impressionist buddy Rob Brydon, what was supposed to be a sunny adventure with his live-in love turns into a battle of wits between two men whose company they could each care less for. It’s a war we want to watch over and over again. Bill Gibron

 

Film: Tomboy

Director: Céline Sciamma

Cast: Zoé Héran, Malonn Levana, Jeanne Disson, Sophie Cattani, Matthieu Demy,Yohan Vero, Noah Vero, Cheyenne Laine, Ryan Boubekri

Studio: Dada Films

Year: 2011

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Tomboy

Jeanne (Malonn Lévana) likes pink. She’s six years old: her bedroom is painted pink, her bedspread is pink, and she wears a pink tutu when she practices her ballet lessons. As she steps and twirls, the camera in Tomboy observes her closely, her face composed, each foot carefully placed. Jeanne’s ten-year-old sister Laure Michaël (Zoé Héran) prefers blue. When their family moves into an apartment in the Marne valley, outside Paris, Laure’s mother (Sophie Cattani) is eager to know whether she’s pleased with her own new bedroom, painted blue, “just the way you wanted.” It’s summertime, so the girls are left to find their way around their neighborhood, without the framework of school, the structure that offers a schedule, a community, and an identity.

The film lets you ponder. What does it mean to be a girl, now? How do mothers and fathers sort out their responsibilities in shaping a gendered child? How is a ten-year-old girl like or different from her six-year-old sister? How do your friends assess you as a girl or a boy and why does it matter that you are one or the other? How does kissing or flirting or fighting shape how you feel about yourself or how someone else feels about you? And how do your feelings intersect with anyone else’s? Why does it matter that you assume and act out a single gender, when you’re ten? It’s a terrific set of questions. And Tomboy lets you imagine your own answers. Cynthia Fuchs

5 – 1

Film: Martha Marcy May Marlene

Director: Sean Durkin

Cast: Elizabeth Olsen, John Hawkes, Sarah Paulson, Hugh Dancy

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Display Width: 200Martha Marcy May Marlene

Debut director Sean Durkin has an instinctive sense of the power of mood, especially in movies about the breakdown of the mind. His film, about a young girl’s escape from a cult, excels at conjuring an atmosphere of icy, oppressive dread. We feel Martha’s paranoia, as everything about her new identity keeps triggering fragments of her old one. Aided by a terrific, enigmatic performance from Elizabeth Olsen, Durkin cleverly reinforces Martha’s growing sense of alienation, slowly revealing just how traumatized and hollowed-out her personality has become. Martha Marcy May Marlene slow burns like a dark and disturbing dream. Andrew Blackie

 

Film: Le Havre

Director: Aki Kaurismäki

Cast: André Wilms, Kati Outinen, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Blondin Miguel

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Le Havre

The most uplifting film you’ll see all year about illegal immigration, death, and poverty Aki Kaurismaki’s fantastic new film is is ultimately a modern fairy tale underscored by a searing realism. A light tone and hopeful tenor runs through the entire film, but Kaurismaki never turns away from the sad realities that his characters must live through. It’s an important lesson to learn: that a movie can leave you smiling without having to be blind to the most basic sources of pain in our lives. Tomas Hachard

 

Film: The Artist

Director: Michel Hazanavicius

Cast: Jean Dujardin, Bérénice Bejo, Uggie, John Goodman, James Cromwell, Missi Pyle

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The Artist

Michel Hazanavicius’ silent film about a ruined silent movie star in the age of talkies is a gimmick, and it is sentimental, and it is undoubtedly one of the best movies of the year. Watch it in a theater for the moment of total silence where the audience breathes the film in together, in complete awareness of their mass experience, enthralled by the images on screen. The Artist is a tour de force of rapturous performances, imaginative visuals, and a simple but utterly engaging story. It is not necessarily an argument for bringing movies down to their simplest essence, but it is an argument for the great effect of working every detail of a movie to perfection. Tomas Hachard

 

Film: Meek’s Cutoff

Director: Kelly Reichardt

Cast: Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Bruce Greenwood, Shirley Henderson, Neal Huff, Zoe Kazan, Tommy Nelson, Will Patton

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Meek’s Cutoff

The “frontier western” equivalent of the 2007 meditative science-fiction delight The Man From Earth, Kelly Reichardt’s deeply moving and profoundly philosophical Meek’s Cutoff is a rich and deeply-rewarding slow-burn of a motion picture. Richly textured in story, characters and symbolism, as well as gifted with a truly unique and beautiful backdrop, Meek’s Cutoff may be set in the 1800s, but is one of the most socially and politically relevant films to be released this year. Reichardt’s deft, masterful direction and a career-best performance by the always fantastic and terribly underrated Bruce Greenwood are the needle and thread that sew the disparate elements of the piece together to make Meek’s Cutoff one of the best films of the year. Kevin Brettauer

 

Film: Into the Abyss

Director: Werner Herzog

Cast: Werner Herzog, Michael Perry, Jason Burkett

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Into the Abyss

Sending Werner Herzog into the woods of East Texas with his jabbing camera and querulous Germanic bark would seem like a recipe for unmitigated laugh-at-the-rednecks disaster. But Herzog’s documentary about a horrific murder and the execution scheduled to follow it turns out to be a stunningly impactful, open-minded, and humanistic investigation into the morality of and the industry of death. Taking in all sides of the issue while still hitting home a strong editorial viewpoint, director curtails the fuzzy amblings that critically wounded other recent efforts like Cave of Forgotten Dreams to deliver what should be the last film needed to be made about the state-sponsored barbarism that is the death penalty. Chris Barsanti