Rooftop alum and blogger Calvin Lee Reeder’s The Oregonian is a psychotic horror freakout of epic proportions, scary and hilarious.

Vik Muniz is an internationally-acclaimed artist best known for his playful recreations of famous masterpieces using quotidian materials–the peanut butter and jelly Mona Lisa, for example. But coming from a lower class background in Brazil, Muniz is now developing an interest in breaking out of art world gags and doing something more global, more socially significant.

Spanish director Rodrigo Cortes introduced his film Buried thusly: “I am sorry that Ryan Reynolds cannot be here today, because he is much taller and better looking than I am, but I have this accent, which perhaps to you is sexy. This is a film about a man in a coffin. That’s it. And yet you are still here. I don’t know why.”

Rooftop alum Sam Green and Dave Cerf’s philosophical film essay Utopia in Four Movements swirls brilliantly and casually through cultural history and detritus, through fantasy and forgotten fact. The film hits NYC in October.

Traveling to one of the most isolated countries in the world, making fun of one of the most deadly regimes in history, takes courage and passion, but it should also be terrifying.

Gasland opens on September 15th at the IFC Center in New York City.
Learn more about Gasland screenings in your area.

When a natural gas mining company offered Josh Fox and his upstate New York neighbors $100,000 each for the right to drill for gas on their land, Fox thought he’d better examine what was going on [...]

Late last night, after jumping from IFC’s My Morning Jacket / Yo La Tengo concert to the wide-open SXSW Closing Night party and finally onto Joel Heller’s birthday, I wound up at the Magnolia diner, eating scrambled eggs and discussing scrambled documentaries. I was there with Dan Nuxoll from Rooftop, Joel, and Alex Karpovsky and [...]

Is Barry Jenkins‘ “Medicine for Melancholy” the first African-American “Mumblecore” movie? Hell yeah!
And, uh, maybe not.
Jenkins’ engaging and entertaining low-budget love story certainly fits many of Mumblecore’s thematic ideas, and premiered at SXSW, the cauldron that supposedly brewed the movement. The film takes place over the course of one dreamy day, from the [...]

The pleasure of “The Pleasure of Being Robbed” is the joy of discovering a bag full of kittens (and watching them playfully flip through the air); the bliss of an unexpected overnight road trip with a friend; the warmth of a frolic with a polar bear. Josh Safdie’s film is filled with a carefree awkwardness, [...]

In a certain way, this entire review is a spoiler, so if you don’t want to know too much, skip my writings and go see the film. Herein, I don’t really tell you the plot–an exciting and gripping drama–but I do get at the essence of the film.  I highly recommend it.
In Daniel Stamm’s [...]