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Co-directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, The Invisible War addresses the issue of rape in the military. Dick’s previous films include Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (97), Derrida (02), Twist of Faith (04), This Film Is Not Yet Rated (06), and Outrage (09), working with Ziering on the last three titles). FILM COMMENT spoke to Dick and Ziering about putting the film together, interviewing subjects, and the roles of activism, funding, and social media in making and releasing a documentary....

All images from No Data Plan (Miko Revereza, 2019) Shot on a cross-country train trip from Los Angeles to New York, Miko Revereza’s debut feature No Data Plan turns a familiar cinematic conceit into a conduit for personal reflection. Living in the U.S. illegally for over twenty years, the Filipino-born Revereza frames the three-day journey as a microcosm of the immigrant experience—its dangers, practicalities, and realities. As the film begins, Revereza is boarding an Amtrak at Los Angeles’s Union Station, his small digital camera capturing the mass of bodies as they funnel into the various compartments....

Born in Torquay, England, Deakins’s love of painting led him to the Bath School of Art and Design, where he discovered photography. After a year of recording his native county of Devon with his camera, he relocated to the National Film and Television School at Buckinghamshire. Upon graduating, he spent seven years as a cameraman on documentaries, including Around the World With Ridgeway (79), a chronicle of a nine-month yacht race, and Zimbabwe (77), an account of the genocide that ravaged that nation after its 15-year civil war....

“Completing a trilogy that they began with To Take a Wife (04) and 7 Days (08), the Elkabetzes set themselves certain formal limitations to unearth profound drama and mystery from the dry-sounding scenario . . . According to accepted archaic law, Viviane (Ronit Elkabetz) can only legally finalize her divorce with the complete consent of her husband, Elisha (Simon Abkarian). Supported by her lawyer (Menashe Noy), she returns again and again to court, with friends and family called as witnesses, but the man to whom she is unluckily bound holds firm, for increasingly opaque reasons in which anger, love, and pure male prerogative are merged together....

Youth (Spring) (Wang Bing, 2023) “The first camera in the history of cinema was pointed at a factory,” Harun Farocki wrote in 2001, “but a century later it can be said that film is hardly drawn to the factory and is even repelled by it.” Few filmmakers have done as much to redress cinema’s historical neglect of labor as the Chinese documentarian Wang Bing. If Wang’s momentous debut, the three-part, nine-hour West of the Tracks (Tie Xi Qu) (2002), chronicled the decline of an industrial district of state-owned factories, the three-and-a-half-hour Youth (Spring)—his first Cannes competition entry, and itself the first of a trilogy—is squarely situated within a private-enterprise China, where new economic structures have engendered new forms of exploitation....

James Benning’s Ruhr The first creative challenge faced by the inaugural class of Master’s students in Experimental & Documentary Arts at Duke—the first MFA degree to be offered at the university—was more practical than artistic. Students were assigned a giant room in the former university carpentry shop to use as studio space, and they had to come up with a method of sharing it. They assembled dividers, but these didn’t make the room sufficiently private for some students, and not everyone used it....

Killing Them Safely I first caught Nick Berardini’s Killing Them Safely back in the spring, at a sneak preview screening before its premiere in Tribeca, and when it was still called Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle. Yet in conversation, it’s always been referred to as “The Taser Film” in honor of its subject—Taser International, founded by Rick and Tom Smith. Purveyors of the world’s most popular stun gun, which is purveyed wholesale to law enforcement agencies around the world, Taser enjoys name recognition not unlike Hoover or Kleenex in the mid-20th century—the brand has become synonymous with the product....

The Wandering Princess (Kinuyo Tanaka, 1960) Kinuyo Tanaka was 14 when she first stepped in front of a movie camera, and during the next half-century she appeared in more than 250 films and directed six. Explaining why she never became a wife or a mother, she liked to say that she “chose to marry cinema.” When she moved behind the camera, she looked at women’s lives with realism and ardor for the ways they find to assert themselves within stifling circumstances....

Mikio Naruse was known during his lifetime as a great director of women. “To act in his films was really an honor for actresses,” said Yoko Tsukasa, who appeared in several Naruse films, most notably his last, Scattered Clouds, in 1967. “He understood perfectly the psychology of women.” If women and their problems predominate in Naruse’s films, as in Mizoguchi’s, the unique mixture of anguish and calm that characterizes the work of the less famous (but no less great) director arises from the fact that his female figures are always doubled....

Although the characters in Donald Cried may have convoluted lives, the film’s story is simple: right when thirty-something New York banker Peter Latang (Jesse Wakeman) returns home after nearly two decades to pick up the ashes of his recently deceased grandmother, he loses his wallet. With no money and nobody to call, he is forced to knock on the door of his estranged high-school friend, Donald Treebeck (an enthralling Avedisian), a socially awkward bowling alley employee who still lives with his mother....

Born in Flames Thirty-five years later, Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames remains a stirring call to arms against racist and sexist governmental oppression. The labor issues explored in Working Girls, her 1986 film about middle-class sex workers in Manhattan, also retain a contemporary urgency. “What’s so bizarre is that I made both of these films not expecting them to be relevant today, and they’re both relevant in very different ways,” Borden told Film Comment by phone from her home in West Hollywood....

It’s true: Ice-T (a.k.a. Tracy Marrow, the rapper turned actor turned reality TV star) has made a documentary. Who’s next, Keanu Reeves?* For his directorial debut, Ice used his name recognition and industry connections to produce Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap, an exhaustive compilation of helicopter shots, street footage, and interviews with more than 40 famous rappers from the old and new schools. Significantly chopped down from its initial four-hour running time, Ice’s two-hour theatrical cut remains admirably spare, an underrated accomplishment in the expanding wasteland of noisy, mediocre, and uninspired hot-topic mainstream docs....

The French Dispatch (Wes Anderson, 2021) The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, an ongoing multimedia project by John Koenig that archives original neologisms for universal but heretofore undefined subjective sensations, coined the term “anemoia” to describe nostalgia for a time you’ve never experienced. Surely Wes Anderson qualifies as world cinema’s most anemoic auteur, cramming each frame with loving allusions to the periods and personages that fill him with regret for not having known them firsthand....

Just the title itself is pretty damn queer. Probably the most entertaining daunting-sounding American movie of all time, William Greaves’s Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, shot in 1968, finished in 1971, shelved by its director until a Sundance premiere in 1993, and not given a proper theatrical release until 2001, never quite fit into any of its times. In broad outline a “behind-the-scenes” documentary about the shooting of a movie that was never really intended to be a movie in the first place, Greaves’s daring—and daringly nonchalant—whatsit turns a bemused eye on the moviemaking process, investigating the various hierarchies and social power games that exist on a film set and by extension the world at large....

Shark Monroe By 1918, Hart was one of the biggest draws in Hollywood. His “good-bad man” persona was defined in Hell’s Hinges (1916) in a shot where his outlaw Blaze Tracy reads the Bible with a bottle of booze at his side. Though born in Newburgh, New York, Hart had grown up in the West for parts of his childhood, and revered the mythology of Westward expansion and the self-made man....