As contests go, this sounds easy: Just compete with two dozen other folks to see who can keep his hand on a pickup truck the longest. The promotional event known as the “Hands on a Hard Body Contest,” hosted by Jack Long Nissan every year in the east Texas town of Longview (125 miles east of Dallas, 60 miles west of Shreveport, Louisiana), turns out to be a surprisingly grueling event.

Click here for the full review by David Loftus.

Opening shot: the rear of a large trailer, doors opened wide to show a red velvet curtain at the tailgate and lining the rear wall, with four large, shiny, uneven vertical pipes just inside. A tall, wiry, balding man walks up, steps over the red velvet front, sits down, and begins to play. Yes, it’s a calliope, and he pumps out a sweet, jaunty tune.

As the scene slow fades and the blurred images of children on a carousel replace it, a voice says, “I saw the ferris wheel for the first time when I was a kid and I knew … I wanted to chase ferris wheels until they threw the dirt on my face.”

Click here for the full review by David Loftus.

Arguably more cinema vérité than documentary, D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back follows four weeks of Bob Dylan’s solo acoustic tour across England in 1965. Virtually absent are the standard documentary conventions of archival or interview footage. Nor is the film a concert picture, with very few live numbers captured in their entirety, and more than half of the film following Dylan backstage and between gigs. Instead the camera acts solely as a fly on the wall and for 96 minutes the viewer watches Dylan ongoing evolution as performer and personality. Here’s hoping he’s evolved since.

Click here for the full review by Mark Nichols.