ARMY OF ONE
directed by Sarah Goodman

The deserving winner of the Canadian Spectrum award, Army of One follows three young Americans as they enter the army to fight in the wake of 9/11. One is a middle-class boy looking to avenge the deaths at the Twin Towers (and who finds that army life is not what he bargained for); another is trying to escape the dead end of his South Bronx existence (and who goes AWOL before finishing basic training); and yet another is a failed dancer looking to turn her life around. (She winds up being sent to fight in Iraq.) The film disturbs as its three subjects are disappointed and bewildered by their new environment and find that the image and the fact of the military are not the same thing at all, although at least one of them manages to find some solace in her new career. Left-leaning without being overbearing, the film admirably sympathizes with its participants when their views don't match up with those of the filmmakers. ***1/2 (out of four)

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I, CURMUDGEON
directed by Alan Zweig

Tough call on this one: I'm at once attracted to the lonerish misfits at the film's core and repelled by their celebration of defeat. The subject is malcontents, gadflies, and other assorted riff-raff who find themselves on the outs of popular society--director Zweig identifies himself as one, and he interviews a series of famous and not-so-famous individuals (including Harvey Pekar, Scott Thompson, and Fran Liebowitz) who also answer to the name curmudgeon. It's pretty absorbing whatever side of the fence you're on, with many hilarious and/or touching moments as Zweig and his subjects contemplate what puts them at odds with mainstream society--though the director's love of jump cuts and awkward framing strains the patience a touch. Alas, I, Curmudgeon veers very close to glorifying failure and suffering as the only morally defensible positions (and the constant complaints of girl-trouble seem beside the point), even if it manages to pull up just before it crashes. *** (out of four)

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NO. 17
directed by David Ofek & Ron Rotem

Just as I was giving up on this mostly-tedious investigation, it managed to surprise me with its impressive results. The film is an inquiry into the identity of the 17th victim of a suicide bombing of a city bus who was burned beyond recognition; the filmmakers follow leads, interview survivors, and do what they have to do to fill in the blanks on the man's identity. At first, it's an annoying, subtext-free film that borders on voyeurism as it dotes on its evidence and drags out encounters well past their merits as information. But once it comes up with some findings and puts a face to the body, it becomes important far beyond its value as a film. I'm still not sure that it qualifies as a great documentary, but as a humanitarian gesture, it's unimpeachable. **1/2 (out of four)

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VIETNAM: GHOSTS OF WAR
directed by Michael Maclear

Director/star Michael Maclear, the first Western network correspondent to report from North Vietnam during the war, returns to the nation to see how things have changed, interspersing his old reports and accounts of battles like Dien Bien Phu and the Tet Offensive with glimpses of the new, peaceful nation and ruminations on the arrogance of the "great powers." Unfortunately, Maclear is through and through a TV newsman (as opposed to a more free-thinking documentarian), and so his presentation of the material is heavily dependent upon gassy voice-over that never really gets below the surface. One admires him for having gone so far to the wall for the right cause, but the results here are far from radical: aside from some revelations on the astounding tenacity of the Vietnamese people (the amount of work expended on the Ho Chi Minh Trail will boggle your mind), there's nothing here any left-leaning individual can't get with some minor digging. *1/2 (out of four)

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WORD WARS
directed by Eric Chaikin & Julian Petrillo

Essentially Spellbound for caffeine-freaks and neurotics, Word Wars deals with the trials and tribulations of the underemployed eccentrics who play tournament "Scrabble." Profiled are four New York enthusiasts who spend almost all of their free time obsessing over the anagrammatic possibilities that lie within the official "Scrabble" dictionary; it's revealed that the sport is more mathematical than literary and more logical than intuitive. Unfortunately, we don't learn much more. While there's occasionally amusement in watching these people get on each other's nerves, the cursory examination of the players, as in Spellbound, gives way to the sporting event of the national tournament, leaving analysis in the dust as the would-be tension mounts. Buy the board game instead. ** (out of four)

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TINTIN AND I
directed by Anders Hoegsbro Oestergaard

Imagine Errol Morris profiling Jack Kirby and you'll have some idea of the formalist rigour involved in director Oestergaard's exploration of Herge, the Belgian creator of comic book hero Tintin. Anchored around just-revealed tapes of the artist revealing his past, the film masterfully reports on the events that informed Herge's career: mentored at a fascist newspaper by a moralistic cleric, his work soon transcended those politics to take oblique swipes at the coming Nazi menace. Though muzzled during WWII (after which he was briefly blacklisted as a collaborator), his output after the war began to take on ever more personal significance with a shift in artist identification from heroic Tintin to the constantly enraged Captain Haddock. Though the film is a little too credulous of its subject--nothing is made of Herge's obsession with perfectly rendering foreign places he ironically never visited--there's no denying its love of both Herge and of film technique as archival footage and digital recreation dovetail into a moving and absorbing portrait. ***1/2 (out of four)

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DRAWING OUT THE DEMONS
directed by David Vaisbord

As the film begins, painter Attila Richard Lukacs is moving out of his studio after a disastrous 5-year attempt to break into the New York art scene; director David Vaisbord flashes back to his subject's earlier career as a precocious art star at the Emily Carr School, and to his massive, highly successful skinhead paintings during a stint in Germany and the long debacle of trying to crack the hardest art market in the world. Lukacs' parents report that he could be exploitative, his dealers never seemed to get along with him, and to top it all off, he developed a crystal meth habit that nearly killed him. Shuffling as it does between the depressive denouement of the New York adventure and the recounting of Lukacs' brilliant career arc, the film becomes unique among this year's docs: it strikes a balance between aesthetics and information. Well structured and beautifully shot, Drawing Out the Demons is an ominous tone poem about a crash-landing (and phoenix-like rebirth) waiting to happen. ***1/2 (out of four)

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THE TAKE
directed by Avi Lewis

A buoyant, crowd-pleasing doc for the anti-globalization set. Written by No Logo superstar Naomi Klein, the film deals with the most positive outcome of Argentina's recent economic crisis: workers who "expropriate" unused factories and run them co-operatively. Naturally, this doesn't go down well with the factories' owners (most of whom moved their money out of the country after the World Bank shellacked the local economy), and there are moves to evict the new "bosses." But the workers, left with no choice, manage pretty well on their own--at a lower cost than the greedy owners who pocketed corporate welfare at the expense of their employees. Admittedly, the filmmakers don't quite get close enough to the personalities of these workers, which would have made their cri de coeur a lot more piquant, but there's enough here to challenge accepted wisdom about the inevitability of capitalism. *** (out of four)

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BEING DOROTHY
directed by Howard Goldberg

Believe it or not, the town of Liberal, Kansas has been legally declared the home of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, and this film deals with the girls who portray her at the town's Oz museum. Unfortunately, it can't decide whether to sympathize with or deride the bored and cloistered girls, all of whom are seen through the filtered lens of some condescending city-slicker sophisticates. To be sure, urban audiences can be expected to flinch throughout, as the Dorothys past and present reveal their crushingly banal interpretations of the Oz myth and bemoan being trapped in an eventless Midwestern town; for the politically minded, the dreams of the museum are contrasted with the area's gung-ho attitude about the Iraq war. There's some interesting material here, but the filmmakers blow the follow-through: there's no excuse for the sub-Errol Morris derision of these people's feelings, especially during the faux dreamy footage of the Dorothys in various pastoral settings. **1/2 (out of four)

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CALLING NATE
directed by Pamela Gawn

Nate (née Nadia) is an 18-year-old lesbian with a hanging sweep of a hairstyle and a very uncertain future. She's been in and out of school, and has a sad past involving a dead sister and a distant mother--still, she goes about her business, looking for work and a place of her own and arguing occasionally with her transsexual father, who drums in the Women's Blues Review. Although the piece is far too brief, cutting off just as you're getting into it, there's no denying the appeal of its protagonist and the absorbing nature of her story. *** (out of four)

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GERT'S SECRET
directed by John Kastner

Still kicking at 102 years old, the titular Gertrude may be the prisoner of a nursing home, but she has the zest for living to keep going on. Using her as a focal point, director John Kastner explores the various pitfalls of long-term care for the elderly. While Gert is fighting on, most of the other members of her home are succumbing to despair: their bodies are failing them, and they're often neglected by their families and forced to deal with "dementia patients," who can be a frightening nuisance. But Kastner refuses to give in to this despair, doing his best to expose this invisible part of growing old while maintaining the dignity of his subjects--and he's succeeded admirably, packing a lot of information into 90 minutes yet remaining anchored to his difficult but resilient protagonist. Though it was clearly designed for television (the CBC was involved), Gert's Secret manages to transcend the limitations of the form and grabs you for the entire running time. ***1/2 (out of four)

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ARNA'S CHILDREN
directed by Juliano Mer Khamis & Danniel Danniel

Those who see Arabs as crazed monsters will have their stereotypes spun by this disheartening but moving documentary about life in Palestinian hell. Arna is director Juliano Mer Khamis' mother, a far-left Jew who came to Jenin to build a theatre for the Palestinian children; Khamis' film is an investigation into what happened to the children he knew from their theatre school. And the updates are heartbreaking: one sees little boys playing at being kings and princes, only to grow up to die as martyrs in the second Intifadah; the ones who aren't already dead are dug in and ready to die, and Khamis captures them as they reminisce and argue in between combat with Israeli tanks. For once, the person is connected to the act (and the phenomenon to the person), shattering the one-sided spectacle we see on the nightly news. ***1/2 (out of four)

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GARDEN
directed by Ruthie Shatz & Adi Barash

Nino and Dudu are two street kids working Tel Aviv's 'electricity garden' district; their story is by turns absorbing and shattering. There's no rest for the boys--fiercely loyal to one another, with nobody else to trust--as they turn tricks, search for shelter, wrestle with drug addiction, and face incarceration for various crimes. Nino's story is complicated further by his Arab status, which makes him persona non grata to his people and a suspected terrorist by the Jews. And so we watch as they try to keep each other from going under; Dudu advises Nino to return to the reformatory, Nino implores Dudu to stay off heroin, and both of them try to figure out what to do with their anchorless lives. The filmmakers' vérité approach is just what this movie needs, inundating you with the randomness by which the pair live and showing over and over again that nobody is watching out for them. Highly recommended. ***1/2 (out of four)

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ARAKIMENTARI
directed by Travis Klose

It's a little rough, and perhaps a bit indulgent, but this exploration of a controversial figure manages to move you with his contradictions. The subject is Nobuyoshi Araki, the Japanese photographer most famous (perhaps infamous) for raunchy nudes and bondage pictures that have enraged feminists and tender sensibilities worldwide. Sure enough, he's a big bundle of unfocussed libido as he goes about his dirty work of unclothing and tying up his models. But just as you think the film will be shallow erotic hagiography, the film shifts gears and explores his other photographs--of flowers, of Arbus-like faces, of his dying wife. The film suddenly becomes about his deep investment in the complexities of representing the fragile human body. One comes away strangely moved, with an impression of someone more ambivalent than his "filthy uncle" front would otherwise suggest. *** (out of four)

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WHAT REMAINS OF US
directed by François Prévost & Hugo Latulippe

I hate to come down on a film so well-intentioned and made under such dangerous conditions, but one simply has to concede that there's no new information here. This is an exile's return trip to a China-ruled Tibet, taking with her a video message from the Dalai Lama; she visits various locations, clandestinely shows the tapes, and gathers impressions from the tearful viewers. But one could have easily deduced the reactions, and one can't get an impression of the regional differences because to do so would put the subjects at risk. Thus all the film really has to fall back on is our exile's voice-over and some statistics concerning Chinese rule (and the businessmen who love it) that will come as no surprise to anyone who would buy a ticket. Add a leisurely pace that fails completely to give a sense of urgency and you have a film about passive resistance that's more passive than resistant. ** (out of four)

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THE ORIGIN OF AIDS
directed by Catherine Peix & Peter Chappell

One of the questions that has bedevilled the study of AIDS is how the disease was spread from monkeys to humans; this film's controversial thesis is that it has something to do with the race in the 1950s to develop a polio vaccine. At first, the story of a corrupt and ambitious scientist who cavalierly used monkey kidneys in his prototype vaccine and then forced them on unwilling citizens of the Belgian Congo (now Zaire) is mostly persuasive. Unfortunately, the filmmakers hit a brick wall about midpoint, when The Origin of AIDS turns into a search for evidence that was suppressed or destroyed and comes up with only shreds of proof. The film has some residual interest as a record of colonial arrogance, however, as the abuses piled on the Zairians are quite shocking. **1/2 (out of four)

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ANOTHER ROAD HOME
directed by Danae Elon

When Danae Elon was a growing up in Israel, she had a distant left-wing intellectual father and a Palestinian "babysitter" with whom she shared a bond. A decade later, having relocated to America, she felt a need to track down the latter so as to reckon with the unspoken assumptions that defined their relationship. At first one feels reproachful at how much she didn't know about her caretaker and his children, several of whom question her as much as she questions them. But as the object of her search arrives in America from Israel (via Jordan), one is amazed at his willingness to overlook these lapses and embrace her. All said, it's a provocative and moving journey that deals with not only the tortured relationship between Jews and Palestinians, but also the unstable nature of power and respect. *** (out of four)

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THE MAN WHO STOLE MY MOTHER'S FACE
directed by Cathy Henkel

In 1988, Cathy Henkel's mother was brutally raped by a young man she invited into her Johannesburg home; the resulting disbelief of family, friends, and police (and her initial disfigurement from the assault) sent her deep into depression and isolation. But her daughter was not about to let the matter drop, and so years later trained her camera on a quest to bring the rapist to justice. Her travels take her through the South African justice system and encounters with anti-rape activists and educators, as well as a reckoning with how big the problem is in South Africa. As the initial shakiness of Henkel's technique gives way to a flood of painful information both personal (a confrontation with the director's thick-headed brother) and political (questioning why her mother's file was mysteriously "destroyed" by the police), one has to concede that the film is a thorough and upsetting exploration of the responses to and experiences surrounding the trauma of such an event. *** (out of four)

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SUPER SIZE ME
directed by Morgan Spurlock

Michael Moore meets Eric Schlosser in this populist muckraker about the evils of fast food. Suspicious of the Golden Arches' sinister hold on the American diet, director Morgan Spurlock decides to see what will happen if he eats three square meals a day at nowhere but McDonald's--and uses his descent from fitness into gluttony as a line on which to hang a variety of disquieting statistics concerning food industry practices. Though Spurlock seems a tad smug at first, his mission an apparently frivolous time-waster, the film quickly gains speed as he succumbs to depression and illness; as a battery of doctors chart his downward spiral (including, to everyone's surprise, the first signs of liver damage), the industry's determination to stand between you and healthy eating is exposed as the callous disregard that it is. There's some residual cutesy imagery, but even that can't entirely blunt the film's impact. *** (out of four)

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FINAL SOLUTION
directed by Rakesh Sharma

An urgent subject gets so-so treatment in this sprawling, deadening documentary. Dealing with the Indian region of Gujurat, Final Solution chronicles the appalling human rights abuses carried out by nationalistic Hindus on their Muslim neighbours: untold thousands were raped, mutilated, killed, or displaced when reprisals for an apparent Muslim terrorist attack turned into what amounted to state-sponsored genocide. Though Director Rakesh Sharma does his best to chronicle the Muslims' suffering through endless eyewitness accounts and records of hateful campaign speeches by the local Hindu politicians, he often doesn't know when he's made his point, losing you in a sea of talking heads when he should be bringing in context and clarifying relationships. While one can understand his desire to inundate you with the Muslims' suffering, his muddy lack of focus has the opposite effect, leaving you to wade through repetitions when he should be exposing the framework that houses them. **1/2 (out of four)

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THE WORLD STOPPED WATCHING
directed by Peter Raymont

Nicaragua was forgotten long ago by the world press, but The World Stopped Watching features a couple of journalists who will never forget what they saw there, and their return to the country to see what's happened in the interim makes for an uneven but absorbing documentary. Hunting down the people they taped and photographed, our principals catch up with Nicaragua's decline from communist haven to corrupt hellhole and see first-hand how the citizenry has taken on the daunting task of reconciliation. The film perhaps is a little heavy on the journos' hand-wringing, which has a habit of upstaging the nation they're supposed to be chronicling, but there's no denying that the information they turn up is fascinating and heartbreaking. The highlight of the piece: an interview with the hilariously crass wife of the country's corrupt president, currently under house arrest for looting the treasury. *** (out of four)

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LA CUECA SOLA
directed by Marilu Mallet

The subject matter of this film--an exploration of the women whose fathers, husbands, and brothers were "disappeared" during the brutal reign of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (including novelist Isabelle Allende, daughter of deposed president Salvador Allende)--is certainly worthy. And the interview subjects have plenty to say, from how women were forced to pick up the banner after the men were arrested and must now, with the dictatorship finished, keep their memories alive. But though the monologues are often moving, there's really nothing definite said and very little to link these women beyond their disparate connections to the left and to the horrors of Pinochet. No coherent picture is painted about Chile then or now--it's an alternately powerful and slack hodgepodge of recollections that could have been spectacular with a little more focus. **1/2 (out of four)

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TURBULENT WATERS
directed by Malcolm Guy

A little-known set of abuses comes to light as the filmmakers probe the shady enterprise of seafarer exploitation, where ships fly flags of convenience so that they might refuse pay, skimp on food, and keep crews at sea almost indefinitely. Following the efforts of international union inspectors as they arrest ships and try to enforce decent working conditions, we find that there's often little they can do: the agreed-upon changes in condition vanish as ships leave port, and crew members who complain or strike often find themselves (illegally) blacklisted. It's a sorry litany of suffering that, under normal circumstances, would go unnoticed, and while the technique of the film is a little clumsy, the stories it tells are enraging and heartbreaking. *** (out of four)

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SHORT INFINITY
directed by Kun Chang

The tiny St. Lawrence fishing community of Entry Island is featured in this sprightly but ultimately shallow film. Talking to island natives about their lives, the film initially paints a portrait of the island as idyllic and friendly, only to shift gears to show how the population is beginning to thin as its young people disappear into school and far-flung jobs. It's fertile ground for a documentary--unfortunately, director Kun Chang's approach isn't interior enough to capture the personalities of the island's denizens: every question he asks is obvious and superficial, listlessly noting the goings-on of the island without painting a picture of the personalities who live there. Though the tone is light and the imagery blissful and smooth, there's nothing here that truly makes demands on the mind or emotions. ** (out of four)

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THE RITCHIE BOYS
directed by Christian Bauer

An exploration of the contribution of some unusual heroes: immigrant German Jews drafted into the US army as an elite intelligence unit. So named because of their schooling at Camp Ritchie, MD, the team had been selected for their intimate knowledge of the German mind, and their memories of both their lives and their methods are by turns hilarious and disturbing. Aesthetically, the film is hugely conventional, alternating interview recollections with stock footage and voice-overs to such middling effect that I wasn't surprised to see the History Channel listed in the credits. But there's no denying the fascinating nature of the recollections as they interrogate POWs (where the German fear of the Russians was the biggest tool), take part in the Battle of the Bulge, and find themselves stunned at the liberation of the concentration camps. *** (out of four)

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STORY OF A BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY
directed by Khalo Matabane

The new South Africa, filtered through the lens of a road movie. Director Khalo Matabane takes a minibus trip through his nation a decade on from its release from apartheid. There he grills subjects white and black on both their feelings for their country and their lives within it. The results are extremely moving, from tourists enthusing on the beauty of the land to an Afrikaaner resentful of being blamed, from an interracial couple sick of being ostracized to a young black man who wants to keep the old wounds open. As my old teachers used to say, the personal is political--and the political is personal. If the focus is unavoidably all over the place (I could have lived without the pointless performance of a young man with a cello), the good parts are very good indeed, making the film a fitting tribute and elegy to an uncertain nation. *** (out of four)

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WORDS OF MY PERFECT TEACHER
directed by Lesley Ann Patten

Renowned spiritual teacher Dzongsar Khyentse Norbu leads three students--one of them director Lesley Ann Patten--on a wild goose chase around the world, pressing their buttons and challenging their devotion at every turn of the screw. No sooner has he pushed them away does he rematerialize for more lessons, a habit that initially made me want to punch him hard. But as the film progresses and the three pilgrims are plunged into ever more introspective states, one begrudgingly has to admit that there might be something to his process. For neophytes who regard Buddhists as gentle, passive, and dreamy, Dzongsar's blunt and dismissive tone will come as a rude shock, but the film surrounding him serves as an excellent springboard to spiritual discussion beyond its value as a stereotype-buster. *** (out of four)

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METALLICA: SOME KIND OF MONSTER
directed by Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky

To say that Metallica: Some Kind of Monster isn't lacking in incident would be putting it mildly: so many bad things happen (or have happened, or are still happening) to the eponymous metal gods that it's amazing they manage to make the music at all. Thus it's entirely appropriate that co-directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky (Paradise Lost) play fly on the wall as the bandmates hammer out their latest album, though whether the exercise yields anything approaching reflection on these events is up for debate. While the spectacle of the band inching towards dissolution--the sight of Metallica attending group therapy boggles the mind--is initially arresting, the film eventually wears out its welcome by indulging in too many of the band's maudlin ruminations, and by never really considering the issue of their creative process. There are some amazing smash-ups (particularly the scene where fired band member Dave Mustaine vents his spleen), but nothing that wouldn't be at home in conventional tabloid journalism. **1/2 (out of four)

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HARDWOOD
directed by Hubert Davis

Hubert Davis explains early on in Hardwood that although he initially intended to merely profile his father, ex-Harlem Globetrotter Mel Davis, the project really required an exploration of his own demons as well. And there are plenty in the offing: the director's birth is the result of a doomed liaison between Davis and a white Canadian woman, leading to a quest for both a father and a history that will bridge Davis' two families. Thus the film offers interviews with both Hubert's disappointed mother and Mel's other, would-be official family. This could have easily degenerated into name-calling and finger-pointing, but incredibly, all of the participants have tried to make the strained relationships work. Though there's incredible sadness at Mel's initial dereliction of parental duties, the film serves as testament to what can happen when people pull together, however late in the game that might be. *** (out of four)

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ANIMALS
directed by Jason Young

Think of a more taciturn Ross McElwee flirting with veganism and you'll have an idea of the tone of Animals. Director Jason Young is a farmer with pangs of guilt over the countless livestock deaths made in the name of his livelihood; his experiment is to take in a handful of beasts marked for the slaughterhouse, grow attached to them, then do the killing himself. As farmer after farmer shows him the ropes of animal death, nonchalantly offing/castrating/manipulating the various beasts in his possession, the film ponders without answering the question of whether the practice is acceptable to allegedly humane humans. If the film starts off rocky--Young isn't the most charismatic figure, and his voice-over pontification is a tad abbreviated--there's no denying the importance of its inquiry, which offers the chilling sound of squealing pigs crammed together as food for thought. *** (out of four)

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