"Bittersweet" is one of those things that's better gleaned than annotated, and the weaknesses of Alexandra Brodsky's feature-length debut are highlighted by that instinct to tell instead of show. Cut by George Washington's Steven Gonzales but shot in a HiDef format that smoothes out the lyricism of David Gordon Green's 35mm first feature (George Washington's alchemy had more to do with Green's script and DP Tim Orr than with Gonzales, in other words), Bittersweet Place is another one of those indie family-deconstruction pictures that have become so rote it takes careful notes and a lot determination to separate it from Winter Solstice and A Home at the End of the World and Imaginary Heroes and Prozac Nation and so on and so forth. A poignant soundtrack and pointed movie clips caught on television offer some ad hoc depth, while a veteran actor (this time Seymour Cassel) anchors the cast of mostly-unknowns engaging in quiet conversations about the family reserve. Performances are uniformly fine, but this one's more cashed-out than a community bong: someone's dead, of course, someone else might be dying, and it all comes down to sex, drugs, and being nicer to your children.

A roundelay fiction about Serbian exiles living in New York, justifying their living as murderers-for-hire as one of the hardships of being an immigrant with your country at war. With its cascading storylines, it works a little like Irreversible, but it's not nearly so assured as that (or as Memento or Pulp Fiction), depending too heavily on a flat voice-over to provide motivation, backstory, and character development for the major players. It's the kind of device that, overused, starts to take on the cadence and mordant self-reflexivity of The Nails' "88 Lines About 44 Women." (Not a good thing for what aspires to be a gritty look at love and death in the big city.) While it works, though (and it works surprisingly well for long stretches), its tale of remorseful killers and the families they've left behind takes on the heaviness of a Takeshi Kitano joint. Moreover, Love speaks a little to the way that the racial taint of mayhem can be as distinguishing in the short term as skin colour or language.

It's easy to forget that it's just as difficult to do a traditional cinema vérité documentary right as it is to craft something self-referential and intricate like an Errol Morris piece. Where better to be reminded than through legendary documentary filmmaker Robert Drew's new, autobiographical From Two Men and a War, which traces Drew's style and philosophy of storytelling back to his pilot father and war correspondent Ernie Pyle. Not only a very fine examination of the tumult that shaped one man's respect for the holiness of the story, the picture is also a touching, deeply moving, respectful document of the men who fought in WWII; surprising that new emotion can still be plumbed from what has become the most over-valorized conflict in modern history. Comprised of still photographs, a stately narration, astonishing archive film, and interviews with survivors, From Two Men and a War is that impossibility of a fresh look at WWII achieved by an old master in the style he in large part pioneered. A fascinating glimpse into how a life's experience is inextricably intertwined with a life's work.

Actually a "making of" documentary for a box set collecting episodes of the titular public-access television program that ran from 1978-1982, Danny Vinik's TV Party is dry as melba toast without the benefit of having first watched the show to soften the tedium. A lot of talking about how much fun it all was--the show was sort of a take off on Hugh Hefner's "Playboy After Dark" cocktail party/variety show--brushes up against a lot of talking heads from New York punk luminaries like Debbie Harry and Chris Stein. Host Glenn O'Brien is on hand to reminisce in honeyed nostalgic fashion about the pot-smoking, the guests (David Bowie! Andy Warhol! George Clinton! Mick Jones!), and the contributions of cameraman and mad indie filmmaker Amos Poe, all of which amounts to a good deal less than the drugged, counter-cultural madness of the show itself. The quintessential DVD supplement, TV Party demands to be viewed after a nice, lengthy immersion in the series itself--without which there's just not a lot of appreciation for what it is these aging hipsters are so excited about.

Although it slips into magical realism now and again, Reggiani's nostalgic My Brother's Summer is for the most part a sun-filtered coming-of-age comedy featuring an irrepressible scamp, Sergio (Davide Veronese), who gets used to the idea that his mother might be pregnant by imagining a sibling (Tommaso Ferro) he promptly mistreats in a brotherly way. When it works, it works by showing how the machinations of adults are strange and capricious to children--how conversations stop dead as soon as a kid enters a room, how a child's possessions are sometimes given away with no regard for a kid's attachment to them. Reggiani has a good ear for the logic of the kingdom of childhood, in other words, enough so that even the film's eventual descent into mawkish melodrama is salvaged somewhat by the inflated romance of a child's-eye view. The treatment of a common family tragedy--one almost never addressed with any kind of seriousness in American cinema--by itself earns the film a recommendation, though in truth, I could have done without the Vivaldi score and the late-film screaming, marking this already-smotheringly Italian film as something that verges at its most dramatic moments into the fetid realm of burlesque.

Director Angio takes the traditional documentary route in this loving, comprehensive look at the life and career of maverick jack-of-all-trades Melvin Van Peebles, which intersperses interviews with archival footage. Moving to Paris as a young man and teaching himself French while earning a living as a street performer, Van Peebles--novelist, film director, playwright, artist, lothario, musician (his son Mario describes dad's singing style as a "frog on acid"), professional gadfly--is a man of steadfast individualism with a gift for knowing what buttons to push with the society at large. The documentary does a good job chronicling his evolution from urchin to icon even as it leaves the contextualization to scholars, ex-Panthers, and Spike Lee. Still, a lot of the clips are rare and Angio lets them run long enough for us to gain an invaluable insight into how Van Peebles was stirring the pot before Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song changed the conversation for everyone. For a more uncompromising look at Van Peebles, consult the excellent Baadassss!--but for a curriculum vitae, you could do a far sight worse.

Recent NYU grad Mora Stephens melds footage of the recent Republican National Convention with improvisations between actors Mate Mabe and Woodwyn Koons, whose characters meet across party lines for an affair of the heart. Not a terrible idea as ideas go and shot on 24p DV with some documentary professionalism, Conventioneers falters when it stocks its faith in our continued interest in a broad spectrum of situations and incidental characters and conversations. Mabe and Koons are good, natural ad-libbers, and their scenes together--while wordy--sound a lot like how awkward people talk to each other about awkward topics in awkward situations. The whole thing feels a lot like a student project, however, consumed as it is with its process and workshop conception instead of a compelling passion and human connection that would surpass red state/blue state stereotypes. Not all GOP men wear black suits and red ties and not all leftie chicks dress like Ché Guevara in patchouli oil, making this romantic Medium Cool more of a political cartoon than anything else.

In the late-'90s, Florin Krasniqi put tar on roofs by day, and by night he raised thirty million dollars to legally purchase firearms in the United States that he subsequently shipped to Albania (also legally) for use in the war in Kosovo. Just a Brooklyn guy rubbing elbows with conventioneers at various fundraisers up and down the East Coast, taking advantage of the red-blooded American right, gol-darnit, to own anti-personnel assault rifles and sniper scopes--the better to turn deer into a fine red mist and defend homes from a small platoon of...commies? Arabs? Pick your poison. A diary of a shrinking world told in mordant shorthand, Quirijns' fine, almost deadpan documentary is stride-for-stride with Krasniqi's patriotic desire to build a counter-insurgency guerrilla army from his modest New York home, where he plays a tape of a funeral for his martyred cousin on a television that, seconds before, was showing a rerun of "The Cosby Show." There's a fear that Krasniqi (for him, it's a promise) and people like him will turn the holy Second Amendment into the launch pad for mayhem in whatever name on a global scale. Chilling and revelatory, even if the premise outstrips the craft of the telling by the end.

Absolutely vital viewing for anyone interested in how our best intentions are constantly ruined by the people we trust the most, Curry's Street Fight follows the difficult campaign of Cory Booker, the young, handsome son of Civil Rights activists as well as a Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law graduate who turned away from a lucrative living to try to affect change in downtrodden Newark. But his campaign efforts are turned away at every move by entrenched incumbent Mayor Sharpe James: shockingly playing the race card (both men are black), the mayor alleges that the light-skinned Booker isn't "black enough" and is the product, perhaps, of a Jewish conspiracy intent on installing a "great white hope." James' tactics run the gamut from closing down businesses that support Booker to actually physically intimidating Booker supporters. It'd be surprising if it weren't unsurprising--and Curry, his film crew a victim of intimidation at a James rally, shoots the shenanigans with a mute outrage. A scary look at how race and class divisions are perhaps the most venomous when they afflict the same race and class (cancer is one metaphor, flesh-eating virus another); look to James' smooth oratory skills as his ways and means of convincing blue-collar voters to side against their own economic and social interests. Not too much to call Street Fight a microcosm of a crippling national disease.

Already sold to cable channel A&E, Bearing Witness washes out as the wartime journal of five female war correspondents (photographers, reporters, producers) who do essentially the same job covering the Iraq war as their male counterparts. It's interesting to a degree to learn about the lives of these women, but no more or less so than it would have been to learn about the lives of anyone willing to visit the earth's most inhospitable locales to take pictures and ask invasive questions. Some time is spent with a producer for Al Jazeera, May Ying Welsh (currently with Cannel News Asia), who outlines the pressures of producing perhaps the most-watched--in the Orwellian sense--news outlet during the current conflict. (Her most vital contribution to the conversation is a documentary detailing the collateral damage amongst Iraqi civilians called Why We Fight.) Underlying all of it, however, is this gathering suspicion that the film is actually just a propagandist piece trumpeting a cause that no one--not even Al Jazeera--is opposing: that women are competent, courageous, passionate news gatherers. A documentary that sets them apart becomes its own kind of indictment.

As many as 3000 Shiite Muslims a day illegally cross the border between Iran and Iraq to pilgrimage to the holy city of Karbala and the shrine of Imam Hussein, grandson of the prophet Mohammad. Kiarostami's short, powerful documentary Pilgrimage chronicles the journey of true faith as a steady string of worshippers encounter various bureaucratic entanglements, geographical hardships, and a constant threat of imprisonment, death (sudden and gradual), or deportation. Complicating matters are varying views of whether dying en route to Karbala constitutes holy martyrdom, a debate engaged by two holy leaders interviewed for the project with whom Kiarostami (son of Abbas) intercuts a pilgrim sitting by the side of the road, his tires slashed by Iraqi border agents. Shot with simplicity, its second half edited with heat, the piece claims as its most startling revelation the frankness with which the Iranians praise the American soldiers ("They give you food and water until your heart is content")--testimonials in stark contrast to the Iranian military's party line that the Yanks are on the prowl, out to defile Muslim women. A document of the entrenched problems of a holy land with armed borders, Pilgrimage is at its best a fine microcosm of a world in flux.

Infused with a ferocious air of independence both in its genesis and within its plot, hyphenate Winner's Satellite may prove best remembered for providing a winsome stage to gamine Stephanie Szostak. Indescribably adorable with her slightly buck teeth, wide eyes, and a reedy, Rosanna Arquette-like voice inflected with just a touch of Paris, Szostak has the same ethereal quality to her that's made Nicole Kidman the most over-exposed star on the planet. As Ro, a girl swept off her feet by Kevin (Karl Geary) in something like an urban Badlands conceit, she quits her job on a whim, shoplifts on a dare, and agrees to spend a couple of seasons unmoored in the pursuit of the life authentic. Her performance is the most magnetic and winning thing about the film as Winner traces a knowing finger along the delicate line between loving to be free and being anxious that you're not working. It's good, but how much better would it have been to just sit back and behold beautiful, breathless, Godard-ian conflict in the midst of non-conflict than reach, in the last reels, for another genre altogether? Still, it's romantic in a way that avoids sappiness. Ambitious, too: a fairy tale about love. Then again, aren't they all?

An energetic look at the gentrification of Soho slum the Bowery, one of the nation's most notorious and romanticized skid rows. The picture's thesis is that restaurateurs are often the spearhead for urban revitalization (in Denver, it was a baseball field), and it proves its point by interviewing a slew of business owners while offering paparazzi glimpses of those contemporary luminaries (Robert De Niro, Gwen Stefani, Michael Stipe) often seen haunting its once-mean streets. Packed with sociological reflection on not only this area but also similarly "reclaimed" areas around the world, Bowery Dish has the savvy attitude to allow that as with any social movement, the whys and hows are damnably complicated. The film has the feel of the underseen short Terminal Bar and the street smarts of a veteran Bowery bum; it has the balls to allow a hired egghead to wonder aloud if this sort of phenomena isn't a kind of indirect punishment of the poor and the wisdom to frame its conflicted stance with a quote from Howard Shafer, manager of the Bowery Bar & Grill, who, though he owns one of the area's most successful businesses, "hate[s] what [gentrification] has done to my neighbourhood." Food for thought, elegantly served.

Iranian expatriate Arash Riahi presents The Souvenirs of Mr. X, a charming semi-documentary on the joy of 8mm filmmaking and the aged Austrian fanatics who have founded between eighty and ninety Amateur Filmmaker clubs across their country. Inspired by a real-life flea market discovery of 60 rolls of 8mm movies made by one enterprising, unnamed gentleman (the titular "Mr. X"), Riahi went on to collect over 3,000 rolls, becoming obsessed with the idea of filmmaking as an addiction, where thousands of amateur films sit unseen in basements and attics. The picture is arranged a little like the atrocious Stone Reader as the filmmaker embarks on a quest to locate the director of these little celluloid masterpieces, but Riahi finds his voice and rhythm in the passionate, holy eccentrics he meets along the way. A film about movie-love that avoids mockery while featuring front-and-centre clips from Riahi's huge collection of amateur stock, The Souvenirs of Mr. X raises a few genuinely alarming existential questions. Why, for instance, the repetition of certain images and motifs across all these unrelated reels? And what is the effect, ultimately, of creating and disseminating images? It's a picture about the life of a junkie--you, me, and these outsider artists make three.

Freeform musings from a trio of high-school girls (of whom Vanessa Yuille makes the strongest impression) on the brink of moving away from titular Queens neighbourhood, Street's non-linear Rockaway takes the tactic of Eve Ensler's "The Vagina Monologues" in covering the bases from sexuality and virginity using poetry, improvised dialogue, direct monologues, and short sketches; measuring the weight of losing parents; and articulating the terror attached to taking those first giant steps into the great unknown universe, alone. It's uneven--wildly so, with some scenes (a picnic on a beach, a juxtaposition of images involving toddlers spinning around a pole) striking a resonant chord yet others (like an improvised telephone call that's not going to keep Bob Newhart awake at night) revealing the non-professional cast for what they are. The mother of one of the girls, in particular, overplays her role badly enough that she's not only a thorn in her daughter's side, but in ours as well. Still, there's a guilelessness about this well-meant, at times ambitious project that invites affection even when the bulk of time is spent appreciating its good intentions.