Garbage Dreams is a documentary film which sheds light on how much the world needs to refocus its values. This film proves that modernization is not always the best idea. The film introduces us to Cairo’s most influential, but highly underappreciated, social group, Christians known as the Zaballeen. Their livelihoods are centered on collecting and recycling Cairo’s trash. This is all they know, but now foreign garbage companies want to strip them of their livelihood. The Zaballeen live on the outskirts of Cairo, where hey recycle 80 percent of everything …

Also see Rosalee’s review of The Age of Stupid.
With ice caps melting in the Arctic and the rising of global temperatures, how many more years do we really have on Earth? The Age of Stupid is a documentary which combines fiction, personal accounts from real people, and animation to illustrate how our ignorance will lead to our demise. The Age of Stupid opens in the United States on September 21, 2009, as part of the United Nations’ Climate Week. The producers want us all to take action against climate change …

Also see Betty’s review of The Age of Stupid.
The Age Of Stupid is a movie that blends documentary techniques and fiction to focus on the effects of climate change. The producers, two young women who devoted five years to making the movie, say that they are not interested in awards, but rather mobilizing young people to combat climate change.
The movie opens in the year 2055 after nothing has been done to stop climate change. The narrator looks back to 2008 and tries to figure out why …

We wonder whether we’re alone in the universe. The science fiction movie District 9 shows what might very well happen if aliens visited Earth. It tells the story of creatures who are refugees from their homeland, trying to find shelter on earth. The mother ship lands in Johannesburg, South Africa, and the aliens are confined to a slum called District 9.
Even so, the aliens have advanced technology, and we meet three aliens, including a child, who are scientists and technically adept. A private arms dealer, …

There’s a lot of buzz about antimatter and whether the threat it poses in the movie Angels and Demons is real. But less has been said about the character Vittoria Vetra, an Italian scientist played by Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer. Maybe that’s good. I remember when Barbra Streisand accepted an award for best woman director in the early 1990s. In her speech, she said the award was “very nice,” but that she hoped soon such a qualification would not occur to anyone. Perhaps we’ve arrived at that moment with regard …

Between the Folds, a new documentary about origami, the Japanese art of paper folding, is a gorgeous cinematic experience. I was so captivated by the documentary that halfway through I felt intense admiration for humanity, the same tingling I feel when listening to music so exquisite it’s almost painful. Many people portrayed in the film—artists, mathematicians, scientists––have devoted their lives to creating paper art objects for the pure fun of it, to satisfy their curiosity, to communicate. It was glorious to behold their energy and originality.
Director Vanessa Gould says her …

People tell their doctors personal information that no one else knows- these clipboard wielding strangers know so many details about us that maybe it’s time we get to know them a little better. One could look to prime time to learn more about the secret lives of doctors- ABC’s Scrubs is hilarious, ER is a classic, and there’s about a dozen more doctor shows. These shows might be so popular because they tell the story from the other side of the stethoscope… with a little more glam. Well, a lot …

To view Naturally Obsessed is to be extremely engrossed. This new documentary by Sloan-Kettering Institute Chairman Emeritus Dr. Richard Rifkind and his wife activist Carole Rifkind invites audiences into the molecular biology lab of Dr. Larry Shapiro of Columbia University’s medical school. Here’s the link to the film’s site.
We meet three graduate students and experience their day-to-day travails and triumphs as they try to isolate proteins and try to determine their structures. The most senior grad student is Robert Townley, who has already hit a scientific roadblock at a previous …

By Ben Lillie
Recently I attended the opening of The Atom Smashers, a documentary by
Clayton Brown and Monica Long Ross from 137 Films. It was held,
appropriately, at the Museum of Science and Industry. Unfortunately,
this had the effect of providing us with what is probably the smallest
screen in the city of Chicago. That can easily be forgiven because the
film itself was exceptional.
In blurb form, The Atom Smashers is about scientists at the Tevatron,
a 4 mile diameter machine hosted at Fermi National Accelerator
Laboratory (Fermilab) in the suburbs of Chicago and currently the
worlds largest …

Last night, at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan, I attended a screening of a wonderful documentary by Richard and Carole Rifkind entitled “Naturally Obsessed: The Making of a Scientist“. This film documented the path and travails of 3 graduate students who were lucky enough to be in the laboratory of Dr. Lawrence Shapiro at Columbia University’s College of Physicians & Surgeons in New York City. The beauty and clarity with which the film was shot made the graduate student experience feel as real as any film could. As someone …