If you head over to the IMDb, look up Roger Corman, and start scrolling through his filmography, make sure your scrolling finger is limbered up. The list of producing credits alone stretches, as of this writing, to 398. And Corman, well into his 80s now, is still consistently averaging two to three movies a year. Many of those aren't just putting-up-the-money executive producer credits, either. Corman, as Alex Stapleton's documentary Corman's World demonstrates in its opening minutes, is a hands-on producer, offering directorial input onset (keep scrolling down the page and you'll find over 50 directorial credits from 1955-1990), and sitting with the editor and guiding the cutting process. more ›

I'm generally a proponent of the notion that if there is information essential to the understanding of your movie that isn't contained in your movie, then there's a good chance you've failed to do your job as a filmmaker. Andrei Ujică's The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu would be one of the exceptions to that rule. more ›

Can you crowdsource an entire feature film? Of course you can: getting a massive number of people to respond to an online call to action is the easy part. But can the result be something worthwhile? When you've got talented filmmakers guiding the project, as is the case with Life in a Day, you can not only get worthwhile results, but even something approaching extraordinary. more ›

What were they thinking? That question may come up in your own mind multiple times during the first half-hour of Project Nim, as the team of scientists and caretakers involved in trying to teach a chimpanzee named Nim to use sign language in a human fashion, describe their research design. more ›

Cinema's a tough industry for an artist. Sure, actors can become stars, and some actors might even gain notoriety for the artistry of their performances, but those two tracks don't always merge. A select few directors might also be raised up on the pedestal of capital-A Artist. But most everyone else, no matter how towering a figure they might be in their field, is limited to a glance in a credit scroll, or a quick title card while people are still getting in their seats. more ›

Earlier this year, the Washington Area Music Association celebrated its 25th Wammies Awards ceremony at the State Theater. Although the wrangling over WAMA's nominations and winners for its awards seems to be a yearly phenomenon -- also calling into question the relevance of the organization itself -- the association's 25-year staying power is at least a small testament to the group's nook in the city. Now that we're celebrating another anniversary this extra long weekend, you'll have plenty of time to watch this 15-minute video documenting WAMA and D.C.'s music scene for the past 25 years. The archival footage and live performances alone make it worth a look. more ›

Last night was "closing night" for Silverdocs, and the awards were handed out yesterday afternoon, but that doesn't mean the festival's over. Indeed, today and tomorrow are packed with final screenings of films that played this week, including some of the most high-profile titles and award winners. more ›

In today's Silverdocs roundup, we cover last night's Guggenheim award winners, D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, and three more new films you can still catch before the festival's over. Be sure to check out our complete coverage of the festival. more ›

Today's roundup of Silverdocs reviews starts off with three films about finding the right targets for blame, and the damage that can occur when our need to hold someone responsible oversteps justice and fairness. more ›

In today's roundup of Silverdocs reviews, we cover films on the last record shop in Teesside, England, Romanian school integration, a remote Georgian town and Baltimore school lunches. Check out our previous reviews here and here. more ›

DCist's daily roundup of films playing this week at Silverdocs: thoughts on the festival-opening eponymous doc on The Swell Season, plus our reviews of other films with upcoming screenings. more ›

Tonight's screening of The Swell Season -- a documentary on the band formed by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, the stars of the 2006 indie hit Once -- marks the opening of the D.C. area's most prestigious film festival, and the largest documentary-based film festival in the country. Over the next seven days in the AFI's three theaters and a screening room in the Discovery Channel headquarters, the Silverdocs film festival will screen over 100 feature and short documentaries, and host conference events and workshops for filmmakers and industry professionals. more ›

For his debut exercise in stunt-documentary filmmaking, Super-Size Me, Morgan Spurlock spent thirty days putting a whole lot of beasts in his belly. This time around, he heads into the belly of the beast. more ›

A newly-single mother is forced out of her home, as a rival family brutally beats her, and murders her husband. Displaced, she flees to unfamiliar territory, homeless and barely able to watch over her three young children. Her efforts to put food on the table for her family are blocked at every turn by the hulking, scarfaced leader of a band of thugs who like to hang out near the area where she's tried to stake out a hideaway. Meanwhile, that rival family, led by a half-blind silver-eyed matriarch, continues to stalk her and her children, intent on wiping them out entirely. The mother must somehow run all of these gauntlets and either learn to survive on her own or manage to get accepted into that rival family if she has any hope of raising her children.

That may sound like the pitch for a pretty intense crime thriller, or an intimate gangster piece about warring mob families. Believe it or not, it's actually the basic outline of the conservation-minded nature documentary, The Last Lions. more ›

"Because it's there," is the iconic, oft-quoted, and possibly apocryphal answer given by George Mallory when asked why on Earth he'd want to try to get to the top of the 29,029-foot-tall Mount Everest. more ›

Narrative movies about war can be harrowing to watch, but it's easy to remind yourself that when the scene cuts, the actors go back to their trailers. Documentaries about war, while taking place in reality, rarely have the in-the-trenches gut-punch affect that draws us into their narrative counterparts. more ›

The AFI/Discovery Channel Silverdocs documentary film festival gets underway tonight with a screening of the multi-director collaborative adaptation of Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner's book, Freakonomics. We'll have coverage of the opening night festivities tomorrow, but in the meantime, here's the first in a daily roundup of reviews of films screening in the festival tomorrow. more ›

There's something wrong with America's education system, and filmmaker Bob Bowden starts his new documentary, The Cartel, examining the roots and potential solution to those problems like any good doctor, first attempting to diagnose and define the problem. His findings — that our reading and math scores are abysmal, and our dropout rates staggering — come as no surprise, but it's a necessary setup for his task of finding out why this is the case, and what can be done about it. more ›

We're really looking forward to this latest history of D.C. offered by WETA: Washington in the '70s, hosted by Bernard Shaw, premieres tonight at 9 p.m. and features interviews with the likes of Marion Barry, former Rep. Walter Fauntroy, Carol Schwartz, Donnie Simpson, Pat Buchanan, Ben Bradlee and Colbert King, among others. more ›

Videographer Rob Parsell hosted a screening for the trailer of his forthcoming documentary about famed Bad Brains–singer H.R. last night at DC9, but didn't know until late that he would be joined by a special guest: old Human Rights himself. The documentary, which is still in production, covers the story of H.R. (and by extension, his legendary hardcore fusion band Bad Brains) from 1984 'til the present. more ›

With the endless parade of legal dramas, small claims reality shows, and an entire network devoted solely to the wheels of justice, it's understandable if you've hit the point of fatigue for any sort of filmed courtroom experience. Improbably, director Joe Berlinger actually brings something new to the table in Crude, which looks at a long-running, multi-billion dollar class action suit involving 30,000 residents of the Ecuadorian Amazon on one side, and oil giant Chevron on the other. The residents claim that Chevron (actually, Texaco, whose legal liability Chevron assumed when they purchased the company) left millions of barrels of oil sitting in pits all along the villages lining the Amazon, contaminating the land and the water, and causing outbreaks of cancer, birth defects, and horrific skin conditions. The environmental impact is estimated to be many times that of the Exxon Valdez spill. more ›

When Michael Moore went looking for funding for his newest film, he claims he told the studio that it would be a kind of sequel to Fahrenheit 9/11, the director's most financially successful film to date. They handed over the cash, and he turned around and made a film that has little to do with that anti-Bush polemic, that is instead unapologetic about biting the corporate hands that feed him. That doesn't mean that Capitalism: A Love Story isn't a sequel, though. It's just that its direct antecedent is Moore's debut (and arguably still his best), Roger & Me, which was released 20 years ago this December. more ›

Imagine for a moment that you're sitting in your rather modestly sized one bedroom apartment. Now imagine being in that space and being surrounded by over 4000 paintings, sculptures, and other pieces of modern art. So much art, in fact, stacked in every corner, to the ceilings, in every conceivable space, that when you donate it to one of the largest museums in the country, they don't have room to accept it all. The art itself may be Minimalist, but there's nothing minimal about that mental picture. more ›

Most of America only really knows two things about Marion Barry: he was once the District of Columbia's mayor, and he seemingly can't stay out of trouble with the law. With yesterday's HBO premiere of the new documentary, The Nine Lives of Marion Barry, it's likely that many people have gained a broader sense of who Barry was and what he once represented for the District. But even with the additional context provided by the film, it's less likely that all that many people will become more sympathetic to the aging local politico and his persistent troubles. more ›

The new documentary by Dana Flor and Toby Oppenheimer about D.C.'s own Mayor for Life, The Nine Lives of Marion Barry, premieres on HBO tonight at 9 p.m. DCist caught the film when it debuted at SILVERDOCS earlier this summer, and overall the reviews have been a mixed bag. Critics already familiar with Barry and his lengthy history wanted more, while others were pretty much satisfied. You can be the judge for yourself tonight, if you've got access to HBO. more ›

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. more ›

Did you know that Lyme Disease affects Americans at a rate possibly as high as 10 times that of AIDS? Did you know that the test recommended by the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) to diagnose Lyme misses it 3/4ths of the time? Or that in areas of the country where infectious deer ticks are closest to the population — like nearby Loudoun County — entire households are often afflicted? Or that it can and does result in death? All of these facts are covered in Andy Abrahams Wilson's new documentary, Under Our Skin. But simply raising awareness of these and other facts isn't the point of the film — what concerns Wilson more greatly is why there is so little public discussion of the most common vector-borne disease in the country, and why the disease has become so politicized and controversial. more ›

There is a pool that sits by the ocean in Sea Point, a suburb of Cape Town, South Africa. Like most public pools, it is a place where a diverse cross-section of the community come together to relax and to play. Unlike many other locations, however, South Africa is a place where the concept of "coming together" is still taking some getting used to. more ›

AJ Schnack returned to SILVERDOCS last night with the world premiere screening of his latest, Convention. Schnack received the festival's Cinematic Vision Award a few years back for his About a Boy, an elegiac tribute to Kurt Cobain featuring taped interviews with the singer combined with filmed images of the places where he lived and grew up. It was an acquired taste as a film, but even its detractors couldn't deny it's simple beauty. For his latest feature, though, Schnack was required to take a far more journalistic approach, as he set out to cover the behind-the-scenes workings of the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver. more ›

Anyone who's ever spent time cleaning up after others knows it's a thankless job. Add to that the stigma attached and the tendency of people to look down their noses at anyone who's ever had to be elbow deep in a public toilet for a paycheck, and it's easy to assume that custodians do what they do because they can't do anything else. As one custodian in Patrick Shen's The Philosopher Kings sadly tells it, some people just stop talking to you when they find out what she does. Another tells of how some people won't even respond if he speaks to them while working. more ›