Lightening Strikes Majestic: Colm Feore's King Lear

Colm Feore as King Lear, at the Stratford Festival.

Colm Feore as King Lear is a force of nature. True, there is artistry behind a performance that ranks among the best of the Canadian actor's career – and given that he has previously played such a variety of roles, from Cyrano de Bergerac to Iago, Oberon, Macbeth and Fagin during his 17 seasons on the Stratford Festival stage, this is no small statement. Other grand men of Canada's theatre scene have worn the mantle of Shakespeare’s flawed and elderly monarch at Stratford over the past decade, among them Brian Bedford and Christopher Plummer whose 2002 performance of Lear a few seasons back was a tour de force, forever etched in memory. But believe it, Feore’s is just as powerful, if not that much better. His Lear, at the Festival Theatre now through Oct. 10, is human-sized, petty but also delicately perfumed with pathos: a King the people can truly relate to.

Hollywood Perils: Ray Donovan and The L.A. Complex

The following contains some spoilers.

It’s a mark of the laziness and myopia of most TV critics and the media that as with some movies, some of the best TV shows, particularly on cable, don’t get the ink and coverage they deserve. It’s as if certain shows are designated the ones that supposedly capture the zeitgeist of the moment and are worthy of consideration and thought and the other, often superior, shows are not acknowledged at all. Thus, True Detective, Mad Men, Fargo and, especially Orange is the New Black dominate the entertainment columns to the degree that you’d be hard pressed to think there were any other options to watch on TV. I can’t comment on Fargo as I wasn’t all that eager to check out a TV series based on a contemptuous movie I loathe, but I’ve seen the others. True Detective’s first season was a truly impressive achievement, graced with excellent acting by Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey (both deservedly recently nominated for Emmy awards) as cops chasing down a serial killer in rural Louisiana and a smart storyline, laden with fascinating, philosophical observations on life, love and death. But it was also too short (running a mere eight episodes) and, finally, a little too gothic, for my taste. (Kudos also to the HBO series for dispelling those backward Southern stereotypes so prevalent on American television.) The first season of Netflix’s Orange is the New Black (I have yet to watch season two), set in a minimum security women’s prison, boasted good performances and a different, fresh look at racial and sexual issues behind bars, minus most of the violence which would likely have been the raison d'être of a show set in a maximum security jail. But it was also singularly uneven, burdened with much one dimensional characterization and ponderous dialogue, courtesy of creator Jenji Kohan, who mucked up the promising Weeds a few years back in a similar crass fashion. And I long ago gave up on AMC’s Mad Men, which after its first season revealed itself to be a show with very little on its mind, despite pretensions to the contrary.

Those shows you’ve no doubt read about. But where are the articles on FX’s The Americans, the savvy, original look at Russian sleeper agents hiding out in the U.S. during Reagan’s presidency? Its first two seasons were gripping, unpredictable and very compelling. And then there’s The Bridge, beginning its second season on FX. It was a scary, disturbing look at the many murdered women of Juarez, Mexico and the complicated relationship between two cops, American Sonya Cross (Inglourious Basterds’s Diane Kruger) and Mexican Marco Ruiz (Demián Bichir) working together to solve a gruesome murder. It may have been a tad too ambitious – I can’t say all its many story threads, which also included the smuggling of Mexicans into the U.S., the realities of the drug trade crossing the border of the two countries, and the endemic corruption in the Mexican police force, completely held together – but it was something new in terms of subject matter and beautifully directed and written, besides. I was very taken with Kruger’s performance as an Asperger's affected cop, a conceit which rings false on paper but is played perfectly by her on the small screen and Bachir’s performance as one of the few honest Mexican cops resonates, too. (James Poniewozik did praise the above two shows in TIME magazine, which does seem to try to cover everything on TV, for their proper use of subtitles, thus adding another layer of authenticity to the proceedings.) And, finally, perhaps the best of the recent cable dramas, Showtime’s Ray Donovan, with Liev Schreiber in the title role, excelling a as a shady Hollywood fixer whose complex, fractured family life is rocked even further when his hated father (Jon Voight), just released from prison, comes back into his life. As a portrait of the excesses of Hollywood, the damage done to the kids abused by priests and of a troubled man, Ray, trying to hold it all together, the series, which begins its second season on July 13, stands out in any number of ways. Yet it, like The Americans and The Bridge, got relatively little of the attention it should have gotten from the press.

When These Dead Reboot: Deliver Us From Evil & Afterlife With Archie

Eric Bana in Deliver Us From Evil

Has there ever been a good horror movie about demonic possession? A few years ago, there was a reasonably clever little sleeper called The Last Exorcism, in the “found footage” style of The Blair Witch Project. In addition to some impressively athletic callisthenics on the part of the possession victim (played by Ashley Bell), it had a decent comic idea at its core: a fake exorcist (Patrick Fabian) who’s grown sick of exploiting the superstitious fears of gullible rubes agrees to take part in a Marjoe-type documentary exposé (shot by the filmmakers whose footage we’re watching) and stumbles into the real thing. Mostly, though, demonic-possession movies take their cues from The Exorcist and use viewers’ own fearful, unresolved feelings about religion and God and the devil to touch easy nerves while congratulating themselves on their fake seriousness.

The new Deliver Us from Evil was directed by Scott Derrickson, whose previous credits include The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which is very likely the most despicable of all the “inspired by true events” movies. Emily Rose is based on the actual story of Anneliese Michel, a young German woman who died of malnutrition and dehydration while being “cared for” by her parents and a pair of Catholic priests, who interpreted the behavior caused by her temporal lobe epilepsy as signs that she was possessed. Derrickson’s movie treats the priests as heroes who understood that there are things that science cannot explain, and as martyrs to the legal system. (In real life, the priests and Michel’s parents were convicted of negligent manslaughter and given suspended sentences instead of jail time, which is bad enough.)

Deliver Us from Evil is a genre hybrid, a tough-and-gritty New York police drama about a cop—Ralph Sarchie, played by Eric Bana—who encounters supernatural forces in the course of his work and, with the help of a maverick priest (Edgar Ramirez), ends up conducting an exorcism in the interrogation room at his station house, driving demons out of a man who’s been stalking him and his family. There really is a Ralph Sarchie, a 16-year member of the NYPD who, after his retirement from the police department and our reality, co-authored a book about his investigations into the paranormal.

The Secret is Out: Nancy Walker's Til Now Is Secret

Nancy Walker, Ted Quinlan, Kieran Overs, and Ethan Ardelli (Photo by: Greg King)

There’s always been a sense of mystery to music, which can come from secret places, when notes fall together to form a melody. For Canadian pianist and composer Nancy Walker, “a secret is hidden, mysterious, not fully understood.” Walker’s new release, ‘Til Now Is Secret [Addo Records] offers 10 distinctive tracks that offer a soundscape to our sense of mystery. It’s an album rich in colour and texture, and firmly grounded in the language of jazz, which in itself can be a bit unruly. But Walker’s music vocabulary is strong and varied enough to provide an emotional experience that never wallows. It’s music that celebrates itself while including the audience in that celebration. In other words it’s accessible without any commercial compromises.

On this first-rate recording, Walker [piano] is joined by Kieran Overs, Bass, Ethan Ardelli, drums, Ted Quinlan, guitar and Shirantha Beddage, reeds. It’s a great band, well-tuned and confident: ready to play new music. The album opens with the title track that, according to Walker, “is an anagram that reveals when it was written.” That clue offers up a mystery to its origins, but the music opens up even more ideas than location. It’s a marvelous piece that gently brings you into the album. I can’t tell you how many new artists hit you over the head with their opening track. They could learn a thing or two about the art of sequencing from Walker.

Blast from the Past: 3 Modern Games Inspired by Retro Classics

A look at DrinkBox Studios' Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition

I was fortunate to have been born during video gaming’s childhood. Had I been born during its infancy, in the mid 1970s, I likely would have been overstimulated before the pastime’s potential had truly revealed itself beyond mere mindless diversion.  Had I been born during its troubled adolescence in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I would have been denied the precious perspective afforded me by having grown up alongside gaming. My introduction to video games was the heady Wild West days of the early 90s, when developers were still finding their footing, but doing so on firm foundations of success. This is the period of gaming history everyone remembers, when gamers forswore the kinetic din of the arcade in favour of the convenience and intimacy of the home console, and it is to this tumultuous era that so many games now turn for inspiration.

Maybe it’s part of the retromania obsession that current pop culture is busy suffering through, full of Hollywood remakes and vintage typewriters. But maybe a decade of collective revisitation, revision and replication have taught us a few things about taking the old, and making it new again. Maybe now is gaming’s true golden age, when we have the tools to apply the wisdom of the past while avoiding its pitfalls in the present. Games like Guacamelee!, Shovel Knight, and Super Time Force certainly make a strong argument: all three are 2-dimensional platformers, drawing inspiration from a cornucopia of 90s material, and serving up classic gameplay with a modern twist. But is their reliance on nostalgia doing a disservice to players in the present?

June Moon, Jersey Boys, The Mystery of Irma Vep: Pop

Timothy Shew, Jason Bowen, Chris Fitzgerald, Nate Corddry, Rick Holmes in June Moon (Photo by T. Charles Erickson)

The Williamstown Theatre Festival has opened its season with a buoyant revival of June Moon, the only collaboration between George S. Kaufman and sports columnist and short story writer Ring Lardner. It’s a comedy that, like Kaufman and Moss Hart’s Once in a Lifetime, has an irresistible dolt at its center: Fred Stevens (an immensely likable performance by Nate Corddry), a rube from Schenectady who moves to the Big Apple to become a Tin Pan Alley lyric writer. Kaufman and Lardner based it on Lardner’s ingenious epistolary tale, “Some Like It Cold,” in which an aspiring songwriter keeps up a correspondence with a girl he met on the train en route to New York; what begins as a flirtation becomes more for the girl, who – under the guise of banter – thrusts herself forward as a candidate for marriage, while distance and the lure of a Manhattan vamp pull the boy farther and farther away from his pen pal. In its prologue June Moon dramatizes that parlor-car encounter between Fred, as he’s now called, and – also bound for New York – sweet, naïve Edna (“Eddie”) Baker (Rachel Napoleon, who suggests a cross between Lauren Graham and Michelle Lee: daffy but guileless). During the roughly two months’ time frame of the play, Fred and his songwriting partner, Paul Sears (Rick Holmes), come up with a hit, “June Moon,” and Fred becomes the plaything of Eileen (Holley Fain), the sister of Paul’s wife Lucille (Kate MacCluggage), who’s on the rebound from the music publisher, Mr. Hart (Timothy Shew), and determined to spend as much of Fred’s money as she can get away with. The cheerful, rhythmic use of vernacular (Lardner’s specialty) and the playwrights’ satirical take on Tin Pan Alley mark the play as a hard-boiled comedy, but it’s a much gentler one than Once in a Lifetime – it’s entirely sympathetic to Fred, who wriggles like a butterfly caught in Eileen’s net, and to Edna, who we know has to wind up with him. Corddry gives the poor, struggling, flat-footed bastard a soul, but we’re primed to love him; we even like his fatuous love song. (Lardner wrote the music and lyrics for “June Moon” and the handful of other songs we hear in the course of the play.)

Arab Springs Eternal: G. Willow Wilson's Alif the Unseen

Author G. Willow Wilson (Photo by Amber French)

"They're marching together," said Alif, half to himself. "All the disaffected scum at once. I probably know a lot of them."

"We did this, akh. Computer geeks did this. We told these ruffians they could all have a voice, but they had to share the same virtual platform. And now that the virtual platform is gone--"
"They have to share the real world."
"IRL."
"In real life."

– G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen

The classification of speculative fiction is self-consciously broad – including within it straight fantasy novels of the classic sort, hard and soft science fiction, alternate history, magical realism, and probably modes of storytelling still unimagined. And yet there is probably no book better suited for the label than G. Willow Wilson's Alif the Unseen (Grove Press, 2012). Winner of the World Fantasy Award and the Woman's Prize for Fiction, both in 2013, the novel tells the story of Alif – a skilled young hacker of mixed Arab-Indian descent who is more at home online than on the streets of the unnamed Middle Eastern city of his birth. Our hero – his self-given name taken from the first letter in the Arabic alphabet, which is nothing but "a straight line—a wall," he tells us – is young, naive in the way only someone who lives primarily that unseen realm of cloud servers and 1s and 0s can be, a citizen of everywhere and nowhere... but mainly nowhere. Alif's relatively safe world in front of his keyboard explodes into the streets and beyond when the love of his life – a beguiling woman of means and status who he could never, except in the anonymous world of chat rooms and aliases, be with – puts an ancient book in his hands. Dark forces from all realms – some very human, and some very much not – want the book and Alif goes on the run, compelled to peer into the city's shadowy mystical history and even shadowier political realities.

Set against the background of the Arab Spring, Alif the Unseen weaves Muslim theology, contemporary political realities, and the unmoored life of a computer coder into a compelling modern fable that transcends its geographic and religious content. Wilson – an American-born convert to Islam – successfully mobilizes her own singular background with a simple talent for storytelling to create a novel that effortlessly crosses cultural and spiritual boundaries. A delightful and often horrifying mixture of legend, religion, history, and politics – including a genuinely affecting love story – Alif the Unseen is the kind of book you will be recommending to friends even before you finish reading it.

Law & Order: An Actor’s Paradise

Back in 1998, Susan Green and I wrote the only companion book on the popular legal drama Law & Order. Besides being in the rare and charmed position of having the show's creator, Dick Wolf, give us complete access to cast and crew, we were also allowed complete autonomy to write what we wanted. With that freedom in mind, we both opened up to the possibilities the book offered in terms of content. For instance, we thought why not have other voices besides ours. We quickly conceived a chapter which would include a number of other people who also had an intelligent and probing perspective on the program. After soliciting a number of people, we were thrilled to see that all of them agreed to take part. They included civil rights attorney William Kunstler, former Ontario Premier Bob Rae and theatre and film critic Steve Vineberg. Unfortunately, our publishers didn't share our enthusiasm for broadening the scope of the book and all the pieces were turned down. Speaking with Steve Vineberg recently on the phone, however, he reminded me that he still had that piece he wrote, which was about how a number of great performers provided what he termed an actor's paradise on the show, and it was still unpublished. Since Steve now writes for Critics at Large, that terrific essay has now finally found the home it was once denied.

Kevin Courrier

Editor-in-Chief

Critics at Large.

Acting Naturally: An Interview with Ringo Starr

Ringo Starr (Photo by Kevin Winter)

Does the world’s greatest drummer really need an introduction? Not really. Who hasn’t heard of Ringo Starr? The one-time Beatle? The charismatic actor of A Hard Day’s Night and The Magic Christian? The Fab who right out of the gate, following the break-up of The Beatles at the end of the 1960s, defied all expectations by having, at least for a while, the best solo career of his fellow band mates? Despite a dark period marked by drug abuse, alcoholism, and artistic shiftlessness (while simultaneously being a decadent globe-trotting European playboy in the late 1970s through to the end of the 1980s), The Ringed One’s glory days are many, continuing even now, with the 25th anniversary tour of his All-Starr Band which kicked off at Casino Rama in Ontario on June 5. 

This time around, his group of ace musicians and former hit-paraders includes Todd Rundgren, Greg Rolie of Journey and Santana, Electric Light Orchestra drummer Gregg Bissonnette, Toto’s Steve Lukather and Mr. Mister’s Richard Page. Ringo plays the skins, but he also sings, often standing solo in front of his band with a microphone in hand, his once awkward vocal performance (John Lennon and Paul McCartney used to write songs for him to suit his limited range) now polished through years of practice and professional coaching. An old dog who is more than capable of learning a new trick. Just how old is he? Well, next week, on July 7, Ringo turns (gulp!) 74. And yet as the millions who saw him on television this past February, performing as part of the Grammy’s 50th anniversary tribute show honouring the Beatles where he was accompanied by Sir Paul, the only other surviving Beatle, can attest, age has not withered Ringo Starr, neither his drive or appeal. Not only is he touring, performing in Dallas tonight, Vancouver on July 15, Los Angeles on July 19 and other dates in between, he is presently working on a new record which he is producing himself and planning to release in early 2015. 

He is also the subject of an exhibition of self-portraits which opened at New York’s Soho Contemporary Gallery on June 19, with additional exhibitions of his art work on display now at the Hard Rock Cafe in Chicago and the Ocean Gallery in Stone Harbor, N.J. There’s also an upcoming TV special, Ringo Starr: A Lifetime of Peace and Love, a tribute concert featuring performances by Joe Walsh, Ben Harper, Ben Folds, Brendan Benson, Bettye LaVette, Peter Frampton, Kenny Aronoff and others that will air July 13 on AXS TV. Taped in January in Los Angeles, according to a report in USA Today, the concert launched the Ringo Starr Peace & Love Fund , a division of the David Lynch Foundation, “which provides Transcendental Meditation instruction to tens of thousands of at-risk students in underservedschools, women who are survivors of domestic violence, and veterans with post-traumatic stress.” How does he do it? What is the secret of his success? A good attitude for one thing, he tells Deirdre Kelly in a rare one-on-one interview. A belief in the power of love, for another. Speaking of which, for his birthday on July 7, Ringo is asking fans to pause at noon, local time, to share in a “peace and love” moment. He’ll be participating in one of those himself, in front of the Capitol Records Building in Los Angeles. The reason? “I really do believe in all you need is love.” Here’s more of that conversation.

Cradle of Lust: Baby Doll (1956)

Eli Wallach and Carroll Baker in Baby Doll (1956)

Last week, in my roundup of movies set in Mississippi, I left out one of my all-time favorites, the Elia Kazan-Tennessee Williams collaboration Baby Doll (1956). The oversight fell all the more stinging when, the day before my piece appeared, Eli Wallach died. Wallach, who was 98, appeared in well over a hundred movies and TV shows, in addition to his legendary stage career; a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn, he was probably best remembered by general moviegoers for having played Mexican bandits in The Magnificent Seven and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. But he made his screen debut in Baby Doll, as a Sicilian whose fiery temper and sense of justice are tempered by his suavity and sure knowledge that, in rural Mississippi, he is surrounded by people who will do business with him so long as it suits their purposes but who regard him as The Other. It may have been the biggest star performance Wallach ever gave in a movie; it was almost certainly the sexiest.

A Borealis of Canadian Talent

James Gordon performing at Kitchener's Registry Theatre in 2010.

There’s a gaggle of geese, a pride of lions, a murder of crows, and (wait for it) a flock of seagulls! But what does one call a whole bunch of Canadian artists? Well, I’d like to make a pitch for a borealis! That’s right, a “borealis of Canadian musicians.” Why? Because the aurora borealis is the name for the Northern Lights, and Canada is…northern; and because Borealis Records is responsible for so many of the records released north of the 49th parallel! You shouldn’t really call what these people do ‘Americana’ but no-one seems to have affixed the ‘Canadiana’ tag to anything, so we’ll just call them ‘roots’ music and be done with it. But ‘roots’ could mean anything couldn’t it? I mean, we all have roots in something or another and so, too, do these releases. First up Linda McRae.

Raucous Reich – Wolfenstein: The New Order

My colleague and fellow SF enthusiast Shlomo is an avid aficionado of alternate-history fiction, relishing stories in which significant historical events are given the “what if” treatment: what if Lincoln or Kennedy had survived their assassinations? What if Russia had been the first to land on the moon? What if the September 11th terrorist attacks had never happened? Perhaps the most well-known example is the enduringly fascinating question of “What if the Nazis had won World War II?”, which has been explored in countless books, films, graphic novels, and video games – notably in the last case through the classic first-person shooter (FPS) series called Wolfenstein. The latest incarnation, Wolfenstein: The New Order, is the most well-equipped of the series to tackle this intriguing premise, and does so with intensity, humour, polish, and no small amount of teeth (though I’m not sure it would be up Shlomo’s strasse, so to speak – I expect his review of the game would be altogether different).

Cole Porter, Late and Early

Paul Anthony Stewart and Elizabeth Stanley in Kiss Me, Kate at Barrington Stage (Photo by Kevin Sprague)

Any short list of great American musicals would have to include Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate, with its witty, ingenious book by Bella and Samuel Spewack. The Spewacks turn The Taming of the Shrew into a backstage meta-musical about a musical-comedy version of Shakespeare’s comedy starring a once-married pair of gigantic egos whose behavior around each other suggests a modern variant on Petruchio and Katherine’s. You can’t do much to bury the misogyny in Shakespeare’s comedy – unless, like the great English company Propeller, you make it the critical focus of the show, i.e., deconstruct it – but Kiss Me, Kate gets away from it by making the two main characters, Fred Graham (who is also directing the musical within the musical) and his leading lady Lilli Vanessi, equally foolish and equally culpable. They hark back to the protagonists of Twentieth Century (and the musical based on it, On the Twentieth Century), played memorably in the sensationally funny 1934 Howard Hawks movie by John Barrymore and Carole Lombard, and those of the lesser known but also funny 1937 comedy It’s Love I’m After (played by Leslie Howard and Bette Davis).

When Faith Becomes Dangerous: Philip Kerr’s Prayer

Over two years ago, Lawrence Krauss posted an article in The Guardian about the vehement animosity expressed toward individuals who were not believers. A 16-year-old atheist from Rhode Island had to take time off from school after being threatened and targeted by an online hate campaign for requesting that a Christian banner be removed from her school. She is even described on the radio by a state representative as an "evil little thing." Krauss also alludes to a study that suggested that atheists were among the most distrusted groups in society on par with rapists. The article goes on to suggest that science itself has become suspect among believers. The most chilling implication of this piece is the length that believers will go to disparage and demonize unbelievers, including scientists. It convinced me that Philip Kerr’s Prayer (Putnam, 2014), his latest standalone novel, has an unnerving basis in reality. Kerr, who is probably most well-known for his historical crime novels featuring the sardonic German detective, Bernie Gunther, has now turned his attention to the role of faith in modern society and to its dark underbelly. Faith in God – or not – initially appears to be the underlying theme throughout Prayer.

Rob Lowe and Robert Wagner, Looking Backward

Rob Lowe’s second book of memoirs, Love Life (Simon & Schuster, 2014), has an affable rambling quality. He told his story in a linear fashion in his earlier book, Stories I Only Tell My Friends, and this time he elects to linger on a few select items loosely gathered around the title, which he translates broadly. Much of the book focuses on the things he loves: his wife of nearly a quarter of a century, Cheryl; his two sons, Matthew and John Owen; acting. But he also talks about sex, and about alcoholism, as a way, both for him and for the people he met when he went into treatment, of recovering lost life. (Lowe stopped drinking in 1990.) It’s a lovely little book – much better, I think, than the conventional Stories I Only Tell My Friends, which isn’t terrible by any means but has a sanctimonious side and (perhaps inevitably) a starry side, and practically drowns in superlatives. Love Life feels more relaxed, and the qualities in Lowe that come through in the first volume – his intelligence, his down-to-earth-ness, and his willingness to own up to his own follies – anchor the second one. Liking and trusting the author’s voice are key when you settle down with a memoir; I was utterly charmed by Diane Keaton’s in Then Again, and I became very fond of Lowe’s in Love Life, though God knows he’s not the person I’d consult for movie or TV recommendations. (In both Lowe’s and Keaton’s books the process was underscored by the fact that I listened to them on CD read by the authors.)

As the Spirit Moves You: Interview with Bobby McFerrin

Photo by Carol Friedman

Bobby McFerrin is performing at the TD Toronto Jazz Festival tonight (June 27) and what a gift that is. The singer of the hit single, "Don't Worry, Be Happy," has fans around the world. And justifiably so. McFerrin is a unique vocalist. He uses his voice to create its own music, using a range of octave-climbing sound to hit his audience where it matters most – way deep, in the verdant valley of the soul. Born in New York City in 1950, the son of classical singers, McFerrin, grew up surrounded by all types of music, from gospel to Sly and the Family Stone. But no matter the source, for McFerrin music uplifts. It inspires, bringing listeners closer to an understanding of what it means to be alive. It's a belief born of belief. A devout Christian, Even when whistling a happy tune McFerrin he thinks of music as a conduit to the spiritual life. That's the gift of song, he explains in an interview – one of the few he grants – touching on God and good vibrations. Here's more of that conversation:

Magnolia: The Celluloid Ghosts of Mississippi

Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger in In the Heat of the Night (1967)

August is the Mississippi of the calendar. It's beastly hot and muggy. It has a dismal history. Nothing good ever happens in it. And the United States would be better off without it.

– David Plotz, Slate

I grew up in Mississippi. When people who come from other parts of the United States hear that their old stomping grounds are in the news, they may feel a twinge of nostalgia and even pride.When Mississippi is in the news, as it’s been this past week, due to a high-profile Senate race, exiles from the Magnolia state are more likely to cringe. (The election in question pitted a long-time pork-barrel conservative hack against an unhinged Tea Party challenger who, in order to clarify the difference between himself and the old-style Republican who had sent barrels of government money home to rebuild after Katrina devastated the area, promised crowds that, once elected, “I’m not going to do anything for you!”) There was a time when the name “Mississippi” was connected to carefree rural pleasures—mint julips, ridin’ the steamboat down the Big River, that sort of thing—as typified in the 1935 movie Mississippi, starring W. C. Fields and Bing Crosby, and boasting a score by Rodgers and Hart. A hugely entertaining movie, Mississippi had never been officially released on home video in America until it became available through one of those online DVD-R services last year. Is it paranoid of me to suspect that the big companies didn’t want to touch it because they figured most people would assume from the title that it showed Larson E. Whipsnade and Der Bingle hanging African-Americans up by the their feet and roasting them alive?

Costly Grace: The Immigrant

Joaquin Phoenix and Marion Cotillard in The Immigrant

In director James Gray’s previous full-length feature film, 2008’s Two Lovers, a dejected, thirty-year old, bipolar Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix) comes home one night to his parents’ Coney Island apartment after a failed date with his shiksa goddess neighbor, Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow). But his evening takes a surprising turn when Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the daughter of his father’s business partner, shows up unexpectedly. They share some nervous tension and giggles over his family’s ancestral photos at first. Yet their initial tentative kiss soon turns soft, and they make love in his bedroom until morning. Gray underscores the entire scene with arias from a CD of Leonard’s, the Puccini beautifully matching the rhythms of the lovers: Crescendo, climax, diminuendo. The operatic current runs strong in this director. Even his 2007 crime drama, We Own the Night, with its ‘80s club scene and Russian Mafia, had a redemptive arc to it right out of classical melodrama. The Immigrant, the new film he also wrote (with Ric Menello), brings that operatic impulse unabashedly to the fore. And the result is as luminous and affecting as its imitated art form.

Extra Lives: Four Documentaries on Gaming

Billy Mitchell in King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

As a window into the fascination of global life and the odd and wonderful stories that course through it, documentaries are ideally suited to the subject of gaming. There are fewer subcultures more passionate, more insular, more enduring, and more compelling than “those who play games.” I view video game documentaries, whose numbers seem to have swelled considerably in the past five years, with twofold appreciation: I identify with the culture they depict, being a lifelong gamer myself, surrounding myself with other enthusiasts, and now working with those people to create games; and I believe they buzz with the same electric fascination for the casual viewer as, say, a documentary about tribal Amazonian natives. Gamers are imaginative, competitive, and wildly varied, so the scope of such a film can be as wide as human diversity itself. Simply put, video game documentaries can make for an enthralling watch, even if you’re not a gamer, and there are four I particularly recommend.

I can personally attest to the high-pressure atmosphere of game development. Games – especially those made with the technologically-staggering consumer hardware of the modern gaming age – are almost indecent in their complexity. Many work with all the intricacy of film, requiring scripts, directors, producers, actors, composers, technicians, etc, overlaid with the added architecture of interactivity. It should be fairly obvious that it’s monumentally more complicated to allow someone’s input to influence what happens on a screen than to charge them twelve bucks to sit down and be silent. But not all games are triple-A blockbusters. In fact, digital delivery has not only nearly rendered the physical game disc obsolete, but allowed an influx of independently-made games to flood the global market. Pretty much anyone can make a game these days. So what happens when an independent developer – usually one or two programmers, working from home – takes on the kind of challenge that a massive studio, with a thousand-strong staff, endures every day?

Tinghir-Jerusalem: Songs from Dislocated Hearts

A scene from Tinghir-Jerusalem: Echoes from the Mellah

Tinghir-Jerusalem: Echoes from the Mellah (Tinghir-Jérusalem: Les échos du Mellah, 2013) is the first film by Moroccan-French filmmaker Kamal Hachkar, and seemingly a product of a journey he's been on for much of his adult life. In Tinghir-Jerusalem, we join Hachkar as he travels from the foothills of Morocco's Atlas Mountains, to Israel, and back again. Born in Tinghir, Morocco, of Muslim Berber descent, Hachkar emigrated to France with his parents at the age of 6 months. Growing up, mainly in France, he was inculcated with strong ties to his birth place, but when he sought to flesh out those stories himself, one recurring and unasked question haunted him: What, after millennia of living side-by-side, happened to the Jews of Tinghir? This is the question that drives him – and the movie – forward.

The film has been honoured at numerous film festivals, including winning Best Film at Morocco's Rabat International Film Festival for Human Rights and Best Documentary at Israel's Jewish Eye Festival, both in 2012. (This diversity of acclaim is the first and strongest indication of the sincerity of the young filmmaker's voice.) Armed with a cameraman, a book of published photos, and a seemingly uncharted wealth of natural charm, Hachkar knocks on doors and in minutes finds the kindred exiled hearts of his subjects. (One unplanned encounter with a Jewish Berber woman specifically will live long in your memory after viewing. Her pleasure, and her anguish, in recollecting her Muslim neigbours – from Casablanca in her case – is palpable and affecting.) Like the best film documentaries, Tinghir-Jerusalem paints a powerful portrait of a complicated historical and political moment, with humility and without didactism. Hachkar is as much a subject of his film as the numerous individuals he gathers together: a searching voice more interested in bringing people together than in resolving any big questions of history.