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Every week, IndieWire asks a select handful of film and TV critics two questions and publishes the results on Monday. (The answer to the second, “What is the best film in theaters right now?”, can be found at the end of this post.)

This week’s question: This past Friday saw the release of Raoul Peck’s “I Am Not Your Negro,” a documentary that speaks to our present moment through the writings and actions of the late James Baldwin. What other documentaries — recent or not — might help people better understand and / or respond to the state of the world today?

Richard Brody (@tnyfrontrow), The New Yorker

“The state of the world today” is too big a matter for any one documentary, because there’s no one state of things, there’s an overwhelming diversity of experiences — and the history of movies is as much the history of the ones that it doesn’t show.

Sometimes in horror, a giant creature will do. It takes us back to a simpler time, I think. A time when an oversized spider, or a massive lizard sparked shuttered eyes at the Drive-In or local theatre. It feels almost like a cleansing; a reset of the scare-o-meter back to the innocent levels of the Saturday matinee. And if you were a kid in the ‘70s, Bert I. Gordon’s The Food of the Gods (1976) fit the bill nicely.

Released in June by Aip stateside, and then rolled out across the world in ’77, Food brought in $1 million at the gate (good revenue by Aip standards) and the reviews were, not surprisingly, as low grade as the budget. But hey, legendary schlockmeister Gordon did not survive the biz on good copy. And what kind of reviews would you expect from a movie that features giant chickens, gargantuan rats, and Marjoe Gortner?...

Oh hey, it’s that time of year again where we get another Woody Allen movie. What better way to celebrate than to tell people not to watch it and recommend a documentary to watch instead? Even for one of the director’s latter-day films, Magic in the Moonlight is especially airy and forgettable. It involves many of the philosophical ideas with which Allen is so enamored, such as the search for meaning in a godless universe, but makes none of them stick. Which is a shame, since the film’s story, about a 1920s magician who seeks to debunk a young psychic, had potential. As an alternative, check out Marjoe, another film about exposing religious fraud, albeit in a radically different context. While Moonlight is set amidst the spiritualism craze of the early 20th century, Marjoe deals with revival evangelism, which was the choice avenue for hucksters of that era (and whose spirit continues to a...

“Argo” (edited by William Goldenberg, A.C.E.) and “The Silver Linings Playbook” (edited byJay Cassidy, A.C.E. and Crispin Struthers) won Best Edited Feature Film (Dramatic) and Best Edited Feature Film (Comedy/Musical) respectively at the 63rd Annual Ace Eddie Awards tonight where trophies were handed out in ten (10) categories of film, television and documentaries.

The black-tie ceremony was held in the International Ballroom of the Beverly Hilton Hotel with over 1,000 in attendance to celebrate the year’s best editing. “Brave” (edited by Nicholas C. Smith, A.C.E. & Robert Grahamjones, A.C.E.) won Best Edited Animated Feature Film and “Searching For Sugar Man” (edited by Malik Bendjelloul) won Best Edited Documentary (Feature).

Television winners included ”Nurse Jackie – Handle Your Scandle” (edited by Gary Levy) for Best Edited Half-Hour Series for Television, “Breaking Bad – Dead Freight” (edited by Skip MacDonald, A.C.E.) for Best Edited One-Hour Series for Commercial television,...

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) will present “Oscar’s Docs, 1955–2002: American Stories” from February 2 through February 14 at MoMA in New York City. This annual collaboration highlights Oscar®–winning and nominated short and feature-length documentary films that explore the history, culture and politics of the United States. All prints are from the Academy Film Archive’s collection. The filmmakers will be present at several screenings (visit MoMA.org for details).

The schedule is as follows:

Sat., Feb. 2, 2 p.m.

American Dream (1990)

Barbara Kopple. This stirring film depicts the effects of a mid-1980s strike by the workers of a Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota. 98 min.

Sat., Feb. 2, 8 p.m.

Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision (1994)

Freida Lee Mock. A profile of Maya Lin, the young artist who created the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington and other politically motivated artistic creations.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) will present “Oscar’s Docs, 1955–2002: American Stories” from February 2 through February 14 at MoMA in New York City. This annual collaboration highlights Oscar®–winning and nominated short and feature-length documentary films that explore the history, culture and politics of the United States. All prints are from the Academy Film Archive’s collection. The filmmakers will be present at several screenings (visit MoMA.org for details). The schedule is as follows: Sat., Feb. 2, 2 p.m. American Dream (1990) Barbara Kopple. This stirring film depicts the effects of a mid-1980s strike by the workers of a Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota. 98 min. Sat., Feb. 2, 8 p.m. Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision (1994) Freida Lee Mock. A profile of Maya Lin, the young artist who created the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington and other politically motivated artistic creations.

Sun City - What are you going to when it comes time to retire? Do you really have enough money saved up to last you for the rest of your life? Can you hold out till Willard Scott puts you on the Smuckers jar and wishes you a happy 100th? Will you really be enjoying the good life with round the clock sponge baths from young orderlies? Have you done the math to figure out how much it’ll cost for a day at a retirement community in 20 years? Can your 401K hold out?

Odds are the answer is a resounding, “Maybe?”

The golden years require platinum reserves. With talk that Medicare is about to be destroyed, your budget for health insurance is about to go completely out of control. When is the last time Blue Cross hyped individual policies for people hitting 90? Even the most frugal of senior citizens...

Carlsbad - LEGOs…those colorful blocks that snap together so easily. Many view them as a childhood toy, but they’re serious fun among collectors and adult builders. They can vacation at the American LEGOland. They can get those rare pieces at Lego stores across the country in malls. Lego video games featuring Star Wars, Batman and Indiana Jones are all the rage. Keeping up with what’s happening in Lego is about as foreboding a task as your mother keeping up with your LEGOs.

Joe Meno organizes the Lego universe through BrickJournal magazine. The periodical announces upcoming products, events and how-to articles by top buildings. It’s a coffeetable magazine featuring all the Lego pieces your kids lost under the sofa. The pages are addictive even for someone mildly interested in Lego with illustrations that show how the plastic building blocks can snap into amazing works of art. For...

What’s the best movie from the late 70’s that features light sabers, an enormous space fortress capable of annihilating entire planets, wisecracking robot sidekicks, and dogfights between interplanetary spaceships? If you said Star Wars, you’d be wrong! Leave it to the wacky Italians, always quick to exploit a popular trend, to rip off George Lucas’s cash cow resulting in a film so spectacularly cheesy that over 30 years later it has actually aged better than the film it emulates. That movie is of course is the insane 1978 sci-fi “epic” Star Crash, an infamously harebrained but entertaining-as-hell Star Wars knockoff that is Not available on DVD.

Like Star Wars, most of Star Crash is comprised of a string of Flash Gordon-inspired cliffhanger adventures. Caroline Munro stars as Stella Star, an intergalactic smuggler who, along with her alien companion Akton (Marjoe Gortner), is captured by some sort of galaxy-wide...

“Glory gee to Besus!” Marjoe is an interesting revelation of a documentary. It was when it came out and won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature; and it is now, this many years later, when Marjoe Gortner is but an obscure factoid. In the film, we follow Marjoe as he preaches in Pentecostal revival tents. He tells of the glory of God, the fire of damnation, and the healing power of the Holy Ghost. People cry, people feel salvation, people feel healed and touched by this agent of Heaven. By all account, Marjoe looks and sounds like the real deal.

Afterwards, he urges people to show their love for God by donating money for his help-the-homeless program, raking in thousands of dollars. Then Marjoe gleefully pockets all the money and picks up cute stewardesses to bang in motel rooms.

His story is an interesting one. At the age of 4, Marjoe became the youngest ordained preacher.

Emerging Pictures, the New York-based digital cinema network co-founded by Ira Deutchman, Giovanni Cozzi and Barry Rebo, has joined forces with Brazil's RAIN Network to form RAIN US, a collaborative venture for the digital distribution and exhibition of independent and international art house films in the U.S. The new company, to be based in New York, will use the Kinocast software system to distribute programming to 400 theaters during the coming three years. The program launches Friday with a rerelease of the 1972 documentary Marjoe at New York's IFC Film Center.