My other favorite documentary: Doug Block’s 51 Birch Street, the filmmaker putting a bold camera on his quietly estranged parents. Made in the same suburban Jewish milieu as Capturing the Friedmans, it’s gentler, kinder, less pathological, but no less effective in shaking the family tree. And Vermonter Jay Craven’s Disappearances is an extraordinary accomplishment, a Depression-era piece made on a sub-shoestring budget. This Peckinpah-like Eastern Western stars grizzled Kris Kristofferson as a ex-moonshiner on a last quest, an optimist forwever. “Just the opposite of me,” Kristofferson said at Austin.
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Al Franken: God Spoke, Ditto drama, Feel-bad cinema, More 
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Who are the world’s greatest living narrative filmmakers, what I call the Magnificent Seven?
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President-elect Barack Obama's pick of Leon Panetta as director of the Central Intelligence Agency caught Washington by surprise.
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When Stephen Colbert threw his hat into the presidential ring — before South Carolina threw it back — he was embarking on a remarkably recurrent pop-culture event.
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When in 1999 Björn Wennås moved from Sweden to Boston to study jazz guitar, he hardly imagined that he'd one day be playing in an ensemble that specializes in Italian folk music of the 12th to 19th centuries.
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