(Holden) ★ 'Paul Goodman Changed My Life' (No rating, 1 29) This spirited, incisive documentary chronicles the life and work of a poet, thinker, activist and intellectual gadfly whose ideas — about sexuality, education and civic life — may well be due for revival.
Two incisive documentary portraits — "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work," directed by Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, and Craig Teper's "Vidal Sassoon The Movie" — upset conventional notions about the businesses of comedy and hairdressing.
This means the days of flicking and accidentally chancing upon something like Being Human, or In the Flesh, or a surprisingly incisive documentary about young people and mental health, for example, will be gone.
Setting much of the taciturn, delicately choreographed action amid the city's bustle, the director fuses a rigorously stylized vision with incisive documentary observation; Tsai is one of the great sardonic observers of urban spaces, with a keen eye for both the alien chill of gleaming towers and the poetic allure of decrepitude.
Rakhshan Bani Etemad's incisive documentary, "Our Times" (2001), follows two energetic teenage campaigners for President Khatami during his second election in 2001, and a young woman who enters the race as a presidential candidate while she is the sole support of her blind mother and small daughter.
"Nanking" is a swift, incisive documentary about one of the lesser-known horrors of the 20th century: the 1937 Japanese invasion of the Chinese city now called Nanjing, where more than 200,000 civilians and prisoners of war were slaughtered in a matter of weeks.
(Dargis) 'NANKING' (R, 1 30, in English, Mandarin and Japanese) A swift, incisive documentary about one of the lesser-known horrors of the 20th century, the 1937 Japanese invasion of the Chinese city now called Nanjing, interweaves vintage news clips of the siege and occupation with readings by actors from journals and letters kept by the few Westerners who remained in the city during the attack.
The discussion reminds me of a memorable scene in the incisive, intimate documentary about Joan Rivers from 2010, "A Piece of Work".
MODEL Frederick Wiseman's incisive 1980 documentary about the modelling business starts in the middle, at the Zoli agency, on East Sixty-second Street, which plays gatekeeper to aspiring models and matchmaker for the clients who employ them.
Roger Ross Williams' incisive and absorbing documentary "God Loves Uganda" makes a compelling case for the link between the two situations without connecting all the dots for viewers, and without condemning the young missionaries who flock to "the pearl of Africa" believing they are saving souls.
