The Illusionists (2015)

Director: Elena Rossini
Run Time: 54 min.
Call Number: HM636 .I55 2015

"...a new documentary examining the role of advertising and complicity of the media in perpetuating unattainable body images for women, and increasingly, men and children. Picking up where Jean Kilbourne’s 1979 film series, Killing Us Softly, left off, The Illusionists examines the ramifications of the globalization of Western beauty ideals and marketing strategies, tracing the saturation of cosmetic advertising from London and Paris to Beirut, Mumbai, and Tokyo."
—Erica Schwiegershausen, New York Magazine (Full Article)

The Hunting Ground (2015)

Director:    Kirby Dick
Run Time: 90 min

“'The Hunting Ground,' Kirby Dick’s documentary about sexual assault on university campuses, is important but devastating viewing. . . . It’s a film likely to make you furious, and rightly so, just as it’s breaking your heart. (Listen to the father of a young woman who killed herself after her report of an assault by a football player was seemingly ignored by campus investigators. If you can.) But, within the ire and the pain, there’s hope. Annie Clark and Andrea Pino, both victims of sexual assault during their college years, are featured in the film; these two bright, driven young women are now activists, traveling the country to speak out, to change a culture, to try to make the kind of stories we hear in 'The Hunting Ground' a thing of the past. . . ."

—Moira Macdonald, The Seattle Times (Link to Full Review)

Google and the World Brain (2013)

Director: Ben Lewis
Run Time: 89 min.

"With candid interviews from university librarians to industry insiders, the film takes you inside the enormity and secrecy surrounding Google’s attempt to scan every published book in the world. . . .With more than 10 million books scanned since the project began in 2002, Google is well on its way to achieving its goal except for one major problem: more than half of these books, six million of them, are protected by copyright laws. And not everyone is thrilled by the idea of building what author/futurist H.G. Wells conceived of as the 'World Brain' in 1937." 
—Paul Clarke, Toronto Star

Pay 2 Play (2014)

Director: John Ennis
Run Time: 97 min.
Call Number: JK2249 .P39 2014

". . . director John Ennis is interested in doing more than getting people riled up. 'How do we get past the pay-to-play system?' he asks in a voice-over narration. 'Because I’m ready to be a board flipper.' That reference is to the Monopoly game and tossing all the pieces on the floor when you’re losing. Ennis uses the Hasbro game and its cartoon mascot, the mustachioed Uncle Pennybags, as a leitmotif throughout the film. In his view, the spirit of Monopoly — the player with the most money wins — is emblematic of what’s wrong with government today."

—Michael O'Sullivan, Washington Post

Cowspiracy (2014)

Director: Kip Andersen & Keegan Kuhn

Run Time: 91 min.

Call Number: S589.75 .C69 2014 

"Animal agriculture is the leading cause of deforestation, water consumption and pollution, is responsible for more greenhouse gases than the transportation industry, and is a primary driver of rainforest destruction, species extinction, habitat loss, topsoil erosion, ocean 'dead zones,' and virtually every other environmental ill. Yet it goes on, almost entirely unchallenged. As Andersen approaches leaders in the environmental movement, he increasingly uncovers what appears to be an intentional refusal to discuss the issue of animal agriculture, while industry whistleblowers and watchdogs warn him of the risks to his freedom and even his life if he dares to persist." 
—From film's website

Burn: One Year on the Front Lines of the Battle to Save Detroit (2014)

Director: Tom Putnam & Brenna Sanchez 
Run Time: 86 min. 
Call Number: HD8039.F52 U524 2014

"As the city’s population declined to about 700,000 today from 1.85 million in 1950, abandoned houses, some of which have been taken over by squatters, serve as targets for arsonists who, according to one talking head, set fires for three reasons: 'profit, revenge and kicks.' The city has 80,000 vacant structures, of which only 3,000 are torn down each year. The city’s average of 30 fires a day is one of the highest rates in the nation. The movie includes several scenes of infernos being battled inside buildings on the verge of collapse and filmed by cameras attached to the firefighters’ helmets." 
—Stephen Holden, New York Times

Nuclear Nation (2014)

Director: Atushi Funahashi 
Run Time: 96 min. 
Call Number:TK1365.J3 N835 2014 

"Though mentioned only once, Hiroshima and Nagasaki loom large over Nuclear Nation, an assured and sobering documentary that charts the situation in Futaba, Japan, shortly after the 2011 meltdown at the nearby Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. . . . Employing straightforward, music-free aesthetics that express the grim realities of his story, director Funahashi captures both grief and outrage in equal measure, all of it tinged with the displaced and desolate citizens' regret over having predicated their fates on the very energy-source technology that cost them so much during WWII." 
                                                                     —Nick Schager, Village Voice

Is the Man Who is Tall Happy? An Animated Conversation with Noam Chomsky

Director: Michel Gondry 
Run Time: 89 min. 
Call Number: P85.C47 I8 2014

"On paper, Chomsky and Gondry seem like an eternal mismatch, but these two very smart people share an odd but genuine chemistry, as the director quizzes the philosopher-cognitive scientist on almost every topic under the sun, with the notable exception of politics (odd, perhaps, considering Chomsky's well-documented criticism of the U.S. government). . . . One of the best scenes is when Gondry asks Chomsky, out of the blue, what makes him happy. The linguist appears to be caught off guard and is briefly (very briefly) at a loss for words - a moment that humanizes this intellectual giant." 
—David Lewis, San Francisco Chronicle
 
 

Food Chain$

Director: Sanjay Rawal
Run time: 83 min.
Call number: HD1525 .F66 2014

"...Required to pick a minimum of 480 pounds of fruit per hour (hands moving so quickly that you would swear the film has been sped up), the workers average around $42 for a nine-hour shift. . . . “We live like animals in cramped housing,” one man says, as Mr. Rawal shows us jam-packed trailers and ragtag encampments. The ability to improve these conditions lies not with the farmers, we are told, but with the fast-food industry, restaurants and supermarkets whose contracts with buyers set the economics of the supply chain. But when a coalition of tomato pickers in Immokalee, Fla., began agitating for companies to pay a penny more per pound for their tomatoes, the state’s largest supermarket chain, Publix, refused to blink."

—Jeannette Catsoulis, N.Y. Times
 
 

 

Rich Hill: Three Boys in Small Town America

Director: Andrew Droz Palermo & Tracy Droz Tragos
Run time: 91 min.

Call number:  HV1437.R535 R53 2014


"The brutally sparse documentary 'Rich Hill' removes poverty from the realm of the abstract and makes it personal, closely chronicling the lives of three teenage boys—Andrew, Harley and Appachey—as they navigate adolescence in their impoverished (and cruelly named) Missouri town. . . . Rich Hill looks like a thousand other poor rural towns peppered across America — desolate landscapes, ramshackle houses, roads lined with fast-food restaurants and pawn shops. It's a town thin on resources and diversions and, even more importantly, jobs."
—Barbara VanDenburgh, The Arizona Republic

The Case Against 8 (2014)

Director: Ben Cotner & Ryan White
Run time: 112 min. 
Call number: KFC129 .C374 2014

"Looking back on the legal battle that resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court decision on California's Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage couldn't be more timely. It also makes for a riveting film. Even knowing the outcome, watching '8' . . . is like watching a well-scripted legal thriller. . . . Filmmakers Ben Cotner and Ryan White were granted extraordinary access to war rooms in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., as two seemingly ill-matched legal titans, conservative Ted Olson and liberal David Boies, led the charge against Prop. 8 through the court system."

—David Wiegand, San Francisco Chronicle