Benjamin Mercer

Bully

Bully Review

Benjamin Mercer
Arriving in theaters on a wave of free publicity — its distributor, the Weinstein Company, butted heads with the MPAA over the R rating; an unsuccessful PG-13-supportive online petition followed — Lee Hirsch's Bully is something of an outlier among awareness docs: It has a clear and calm approach to......
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Norman Review

Benjamin Mercer
Norman (Dan Byrd) is as sarcastically disconsolate a protagonist as you'll see in a movie involving a romance with the new girl in school—his English teacher (Adam Goldberg) at one point refers to him as "Little Camus." Director Jonathan Segal and screenwriter Talton Wingate depict a quickly unraveling home life:......

To Be Heard Review

Benjamin Mercer
On balance, the message stays positive: Two of To Be Heard's four credited directors (Roland Legiardi-Laura and Amy Sultan) co-founded the South Bronx after-school program the documentary revolves around, and the film shows them offering above-and-beyond support to their students. After the brief prologue, which cuts between a spoken-word performance......
Summer Pasture

Summer Pasture Review

Benjamin Mercer
"There is a lot of work to be done in the summer," says Tibetan nomad Yama in Summer Pasture, a documentary directed by Lynn True and Nelson Walker (working with co-director Tsering Perlo). The film bears witness to that fact. Up at 4 a.m., Yama collects yak dung, wrangles pots......