When Jennifer Venditti was casting Carter Smith’s Sundance award-winning Bugcrush, a gay-themed horror short about small town teens, she scouted a high school in rural Maine for weeks, sitting in the cafeteria and observing students, startled by the enduring strength of the social cliques. One time she sat with a group of bullies, and they […]

As a native New Yorker, I loved what director Aaron Katz and his tight crew accomplished presenting Brooklyn in their new film Quiet City – they found solace. The film follows a simple story – a young woman visits New York but can’t find her friend, and ends up spending the weekend with a slacker […]

I’m not going to tell you too much about Michael Jacobs’ doc An Audience of One, because I’d rather focus on the stunning Q & A that followed the screening at SXSW today. But quickly: this charming, wild, astonishing film follows Richard Gazowsky, a Pentecostal minister from San Francisco, who has raised $600,000 from his […]

Hanna Takes the Stairs is something of a miracle. Director Joe Swanberg took a bunch of non-actors, camped them out on a living room floor in Chicago for a month, and improvised a delightful, insightful and nuanced film. The title, Joe told a packed and enthusiastic house, comes from a sketch of the plotline Joe […]

At the premiere of Big Rig, director Doug Pray said that he set out thinking he would make a doc about the myth of the wild trucker life-style: high speed and danger, dodging cops and taking drugs, lot lizards and madmen. But once he got to know American truckers – over the course of five […]

Macky Alston and Andrea Meller’s powerful documentary Hard Road Home exposes one of the most difficult and tragic issues facing the United States vast and growing prison population: what to do when you get out. You have become used to a static and structured life, where meals, clothes and shelter are provided for you. You […]

Got a new undistributed short or feature film to recommend? Know of a rooftop that might be good for a show? Send an email to dan*at*rooftopfilms*dot*com.

Every now and then there are moments when the folks at the Anthology Film Archives remind you how uniquely valuable they are. Friday night was just such an evening as Al Maysles and the good guys at the Maysles Institute came downtown to present a batch of rarely (or never) before seen clips from the […]

I walked over to the screening of Third Ward, TX, taking in some warm Texas atmosphere before checking out this lovely documentary. The Third Ward is a neighborhood in Houston that was historically populated by African-Americans. In the 1960s, the city ran a highway through the area, removing 30,000 people, isolating and dividing the area, […]

There are a few films I’ve already seen, and I highly recommend: King Corn (Aaron Woolf, Ian Cheney, Curt Ellis) The Prisoner (Michael Tucker & Petra Epperlein) Fish Kill Flea (Brian Cassidy, Aaron Hillis, Jennifer Loeber) When Adnan Comes Home (Andrew Berends) Kamp Katrina (David Redmon & Ashely Sabin) I plan on writing up a […]