If a filmmaker or publicist contacts me regarding my reviews, it’s usually to complain—with the unhappy missive-composers often forgetting that the job of a critic is to, well, critique and not to make friends or earn pats on the back.  One does not undertake this type of writing to be popular, or even liked.  (I could point to my school years as evidence of this, but never mind.)  If we’re lucky, a critic might see his or her name on publicity

Many people are familiar with the Kinsey Report on sexual behavior, which rocked the establishment in the early fifties, but far fewer know about 1976’s Hite Report, which effectively described the frequency and variability of female orgasm. The report’s author, feminist researcher Shere Hite, was alternately celebrated and vilified for her writing, with media outlets often outwardly hostile to her research. But she pressed on, with other reports on

At the start of the twentieth century, it was estimated that fewer than 1,000 bison were left on the Great Plains following two centuries of unchecked extermination. Today, thanks to conservation efforts, they number approximately 450,000—but still far, far below the tens of millions of animals that once roamed the continent.  

In “The American Buffalo"

In the last century, more than ninety percent of Black farmers lost their property, often in schemes that dispossessed them of decades or even centuries of ties to their land. Greed, as it often does, plays a part, especially when backed by a corporate machine intent on seizing property for development.

Just one such example of land grabbing is documented in the new film “Silver Dollar

Joan Baez I Am a Noise” is less a travelogue of Joan Baez’s six decades in music than it is an exploration of her personality, her hopes, her tragedies, her triumphs and her political advocacy on behalf of the cause of peace.  In addition to the music she made early on with Bob Dylan, the film tells of Baez’s difficulties with anxiety as well as her later-in-life wish to confront her parents about what she viewed as unacceptable

The filmmaker Dawn Porter is also a lawyer. And even though she has the utmost respect for the Supreme Court, she is nonetheless perturbed by what she describes as the public’s loss of faith in its premier judicial institution.

“The court did not just turn right suddenly,” Porter said on a recent phone call. “We have a very dramatic and ideological shift. And so I wanted to trace the history so that

It’s said everything is bigger in Texas, perhaps nowhere more so than in the incredible true story of Garrison Brothers, a bespoke whiskey distillery in the humble town of Hye whose Texas bourbon is now the toast of the Lone Star State.  

“Cowboy Bourbon” is an intriguing new documentary about Dan Garrison, a dreamer who believed that authentic bourbon