Steve James

"At the Death House Door," premiering tonight on the Independent Film Channel, tells the story of Presbyterian pastor Carroll Pickett, who for 15 years was chaplain at the Walls Unit prison in Huntsville, Texas, where he shepherded 95 condemned men to...

Rev. Carroll Pickett didn't start out as an anti-death penalty activist. In fact, Pickett began his ministry in favor of capital punishment and took the final statements of 95 men when he served as their Death Row chaplain in Texas. "At the Death...

CAREERS have been made, awards have been won, but when it comes to making a documentary, a filmmaker's job is never finished. With the release of the academy's documentary shortlist last month, 20 directors of 15 films received the chance to wrap up years...

"Hoop Dreams," the 1994 film about two African American teenagers pursuing basketball stardom, has been voted the best documentary in movie history by the International Documentary Assn. To help celebrate its 25th anniversary, the organization polled its...

REEL PARADISE (unrated). Movies are so central to indie-film guru John Pierson in the daily struggle for existence that when he transplanted his wife and two kids to a remote part of the Fiji Islands to run the local cinema for a year, he saw himself as...

There's a scene in Steve James' entertaining documentary "Reel Paradise" in which John Pierson, a pioneering independent film producer's rep, aptly compares himself to Allie Fox, Harrison Ford's bespectacled, slightly mad visionary in the Paul Schrader-...

3½ stars (out of four) The highly engaging documentary "Reel Paradise," edited and directed by Steve James of "Hoop Dreams" fame, begins as a diary of an American movie geek who decided to take on the role of sole movie theater programmer and raging...

Whenever the topic of the war in Iraq comes up most people go out of their way to say that they "support the troops," whatever that's supposed to mean. "The War Tapes," arguably the most vital and eye-opening documentary yet made regarding the United...

4 stars (out of four) At one point in the gripping documentary "The War Tapes", a National Guardsman doing his bit for Operation Iraqi Freedom explains what a certain wail on the soundtrack signifies. It's "the all-clear" siren, he says, even though...

"American Splendor," a sly film biography that stars Paul Giamatti as churlish underground comic-book writer Harvey Pekar, won the grand jury prize, the top dramatic honor at the Sundance Film Festival. Sundance jurors gave the documentary grand prize to...

The Sundance Film Festival's selection for its dramatic grand jury prize, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's "American Splendor," reflects the complex new realities of the independent film scene. As a warm, playful and visually inventive biopic...

When the Oscar nominations come out Tuesday, there are bound to be cries of injustice -- and in many cases, those charges will have merit. Can anyone really defend the exclusion from the Oscar nominee list in various years of movies such as "Some Like...