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Up in the Air (2009) NYT Critics' Pick

George Clooney and Vera Farmiga in “Up in the Air.”
Neither Here Nor There
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: December 4, 2009

For most people there’s no joy in sucking down recycled oxygen while hurtling above the clouds. The free drinks and freshly baked cookies in business might be nice. (I wouldn’t know.) For most of us, though, air travel largely invokes the indignities of the stockyard, complete with the crowding and pushing, the endlessly long lines, hovering handlers, carefully timed feedings, a faint communal reek and underlying whiff of peril. The skies rarely seem friendly anymore, but to Ryan Bingham, the corporate assassin played by George Clooney in the laugh-infused stealth tragedy “Up in the Air,” they’re so welcoming, he might as well be home. More

Big River Man (2008) NYT Critics' Pick

Martin Strel, an endurance swimmer, in a documentary by John Maringouin that tracks Mr. Strel's 2007 Amazon conquest, which began in Peru on Feb. 1 and ended in Brazil on April 7.
Swimming With Crocodiles, but Well Oiled
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: December 4, 2009

Of all the strange creatures in the documentary “Big River Man,” including the slithering snakes, watchful crocodiles and something called the penis fish (you don’t want to know), few seem as weird or wondrous as its title character. Otherwise known as Martin Strel, the big man here is an outsized Slovenian who, well into adulthood, decided to swim — for reasons he can’t truly explain — the length of some of the longest, most perilous rivers in the world, including the Mississippi. An eccentric worthy of Werner Herzog, Mr. Strel was born to swim, at least on camera: he’s a bobbing, at times foundering star attraction. More

Until the Light Takes Us (2008) NYT Critics' Pick

The Music of Church Burning
By MIKE HALE
Published: December 4, 2009

Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell’s absorbing, low-key documentary “Until the Light Takes Us” recounts how a few Norwegian musicians hijacked an obscure offshoot of heavy metal and made it world famous, by moving from clown paint and anti-Christian imagery into vandalism, church burning and killing. Between interviews, it illustrates the Norwegian context — cold and dark, liberal but ultra-conformist, increasingly globalized — in which these diffident, smart, polite young men came to feel alienated and racially and culturally oppressed. More