Jacob Burns

"Capitalism: A Love Story is a searing outcry against the excesses of a cutthroat time." (Entertainment Weekly)

Academy Award–winning director Michael Moore (Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 911, Sicko) is back. This time he’s using his provocative approach to examine the global economic meltdown and what he has described as “the biggest robbery in the history of this country”—the massive transfer of US taxpayer money to private financial institutions. “It will be the perfect date movie,” he says. “It’s got it all—lust, passion, romance, and 14,000 jobs being eliminated every day.” Opening nationally on Oct. 2—a year and a day after the Senate voted to approve the $700 billion bailout—it’s sure to generate more than its share of controversy.
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“Li articulates, spins, and weaves reality to extract the kind of truth found in great novels.” (Film Comment)

Chinese director Ying Li takes on the hot-button issues of Japanese war remembrance and militarism in this award-winning documentary. Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine honors 2.5 million Japanese war dead, more than 1,000 of whom are war criminals—including General Tojo and others sentenced to death at the Tokyo Trial (Japan’s Nuremberg). It’s a slowly unfolding, unflinching look at the reactionary and xenophobic factions that are aggressively unapologetic in their support for Yasukuni as the repository of Japanese history and valor. Due to nationalist outcry it has been shown in Japan only rarely, under tight security.
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"A tart, brilliantly acted fable of life’s little cosmic difficulties." (Chicago Tribune)

The Coen Brothers' (No Country for Old Men) signature humor and cinematic imagination take on questions of faith, familial responsibility, delinquent behavior, dental phenomena, academia, mortality, and Judaism in their hot awaited new film, A Serious Man. It’s the story of Larry Gopnik, a suburban Jewish physics professor who is plagued with a dysfunctional family, a vindictive neighbor, and a grade-grubbing foreign exchange student who is threatening his long-nurtured chance for tenure. In a moment of existential desperation, he turns to three rabbis for help. Can anyone help him cope with his afflictions and become a righteous person—a mensch—a serious man?