Dorian "Doc" Paskowitz and his nine children spent the '60s and '70s traveling the country in a beat-up RV, living hand-to-mouth while surfing as much as possible. This may sound like the elusive boarder's dream of an endless summer, but in Doug Pray's tense, intimate, revelatory documentary Surfwise (Magnolia), the reality isn't always pleasant. As with his excellent previous films, Hype! and Scratch, Pray covers a lot of ground without rambling aimlessly or sacrificing his artful, rhythmic editing and image-gathering…
Writer-director Stefan Ruzowitzky strings a lot of emotional threads throughout The Counterfeiters (Sony), a based-on-real-life story about a Nazi project to forge Allied money and erode their enemies' economies. The story would benefit from less pointed button-pushing and less Holocaust-film cliché, but it finds a new perspective on that part of history, and it gets a boost from terrific performances and a gripping thriller of a story…
As Chinese culture has evolved over the last two decades, documentary filmmaker Sue Williams has captured it, first in a four-part series of films about 20th-century Cinema from pre-Mao to post-Tiananmen, and then in another series about contemporary life. The fascinating Young & Restless In China (Zeitgeist) is the first in a planned quintet that will follow nine diverse Chinese citizens over the course of 20 years, including a shirt salesman, an Internet-café owner, a factory worker, and a rapper, among others. It's an ambitious project, but it gets off to a strong start.
