Mark Holcomb

Fluid, open-ended documentaries that demand more of an audience than foregone assent or fleeting bouts of passive outrage are rare these days, which is what makes Malik Bendjelloul's Searching for Sugar Man such a gift. In telling the tale of Sixto Rodriguez, a Mexican-American balladeer from Detroit who cut a...

Prepare to have your assumptions pitched out the window by this tense, surprisingly probing satirical documentary — and not just those about religious longing and "spirituality," its ostensible subjects, but about how deep the genre that gave us Borat and Morgan Spurlock's spotty oeuvre can go. Kumaré is essentially the...

Apocalypse movies are a venerable enough genre (and reliable box-office cash spigots) to support a few lightweight, funny-sad-romantic entries every once in a while. Given the right touch, this approach can be just the antidote to the idea-free, effects-laden blockbusters and art-house pity parties that dominate the form; it's conceivable...

Achieving something far weirder and more resonant than the genre pastiche it initially seems to reach for, Beyond the Black Rainbow satisfies on practically every level — provided you allow its narcotic pace, lysergic visuals and throbbing soundtrack to tickle your cortex into a contained frenzy instead of lulling you...

Soft-spoken Harvard poli-sci professor Gene Sharp is an unlikely mentor for the architects of the Arab Spring. But as first-time documentarian Ruaridh Arrow reveals and ultimately belabors, Sharp's 1993 handbook From Dictatorship to Democracy helped influence the resistance movements in Egypt and Syria and, before that, in Serbia, the Ukraine,...