Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ****

Within America’s conversation about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan much criticism has been lobbed at journalists who reported from warzones while being embedded with the troops. Critics say a reporter’s chief concern should be objectivity which would (understandably) be comprised when sharing life and death situations on a daily basis. Proponents say it provides an invaluable view of war from the ground-eye perspective of the troops. I tend to fall in the latter category, and feel it’s a far more damning statement about the predicament of journalism that any one reporters’ work is expected (by editors or readers) to be all things to all people.

Restrepo [official site], the collaborative effort between author Sebastian Junger (who also penned the bestseller The Perfect Storm) and photographer Tim Hetherington, depicts five months (over the course of a year) spent at an outpost in the Korengal Valley, the most violent front in the Afghanistan war. The film -- which opened the Sundance film festival earlier this year and picked up the Grand Jury Prize --builds its story with on-the-ground footage as the soldiers inch along the valley, picking off Taliban members and trying to convince locals not to accept the $5/day payment to fight the United States on the Taliban’s behalf.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ***

In the mid-1980s, filmmaker Tamra Davis videotaped an interview with painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. When he died in 1988 at the age of 27, she put the footage away and kept it there until recently. That footage is the raison d'être for Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, a feature-length documentary about Basquiat and his turbulent life.

Born to a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat ran away from home as a teen and came to New York City. He began as a graffiti artist and quickly joined the circle of New York artists, musicians and filmmakers of the early 1980s. He eventually moved from walls to canvases, began to appear in galleries, and began to sell his art. He became very rich, very quickly. An association with his hero Andy Warhol turned the public against him and he began to fall just as quickly as he climbed. Eventually, drugs did him in.

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ***½

At the center of Videocracy, Erik Gandini's snapshot of Italy's celebrity-obsessed popular culture, is Silvio Berlusconi. Berlusconi, a millionaire turned television mogul turned billionaire turned Prime Minister, is an untouchable figure who has become the revered and reviled focal point for Italy's perception of itself. (See Michael Moore's Roger & Me for a different version on a similar theme.) Berlusconi made his fortune by buying up 90% of Italy's television networks and churning out cheap programming that was high on nudity, silliness and spectacle.

Reviewer: Steve Dollar
Louie Bluie; Crumb Rating (out of 5): ****½ (both)

Consumed and driven by the bawdy vigor of good old American vernacular culture, the artists who lend their names to this pair of documentaries are such dynamos of idiosyncrasy that no one could have made them up. Newly reissued in a simultaneous one-two punch by the Criterion Collection, Louie Bluie (1985) and Crumb (1995), concern but can barely contain the outsized, wildly original personalities of charismatic African-American string band legend Howard “Louie Bluie” Armstrong, and the cranky underground cartoonist Robert Crumb. These were the first two films made by Terry Zwigoff, a San Francisco government office-worker and obsessive enthusiast for 78 rpm recordings of pre-war American music, who also happened to play saw, mandolin and fiddle in Crumb's own string combo, R. Crumb and His Cheap Suit Serenaders.

Zwigoff is now more widely known for his later features, Bad Santa and Ghost World, which further articulated the director's kinship with irascible iconoclasts and socially awkward connoisseurs of cultural arcana. Fans of those entertainments checking out Zwigoff's back-catalog classics for the first time will find the square root of his aesthetic, with all its irreverence, political incorrectness, and rude zest charging up every frame. They'll also discover a passion for storytelling and a gift for directorial self-effacement, one that allows these natural-born originals to narrate their own lives so compellingly that its easy to forget there's a camera and crew involved - even as Zwigoff thoughtfully embroiders the narratives.