It’s difficult not to compare this Academy award-nominated documentary about singer Amy Winehouse with Montage of Heck, the documentary on Kurt Cobain. Both tell the stories of young popular artists who were undone by drug abuse and depression. Both individuals suffered childhood ruptures and significant medical problems (Winehouse suffered from bulimia while Cobain had serious stomach issues). Both killed themselves, Cobain actively, Winehouse as close as you can without actually pulling the trigger.

The comparisons, however, end there. Cobain’s raw talent was nowhere near that of Winehouse. Winehouse’s voice was so powerful, nuanced and unique, it was staggering, and as evidenced by the documentary, she was a beautiful lyricist as well (thankfully, as she sings, we get to see her lyrics in print). Winehouse also comes off as extremely sympathetic, a sweet and vulnerable girl too fragile for this world (pardon the cliché), someone desperately looking for unconditional and protective love in the hard environs of celebrity. Conversely, Cobain was angry, spit at his success and pretty much made drug addiction a career goal, a decision very difficult to pigeonhole into tragedy.

Director Asif Kapadia uses the ample footage of Winehouse to guide us through her rise and fall (the advent of camera phone video gives us the paradox of Winehouse plagued by paparazzi but constantly videotaped even in private), and while he maintains a veneer of dispassion, he ties her self-destruction in part to a passive mother, an absent and then craven father (it is almost unbearably painful to watch him arrive in St. Lucia as she convalesces from an overdose with a camera-crew for his own reality TV show), an opportunistic boyfriend (if you have even an atom of chivalry in your bones, the moment you meet the creepy, clingy Blake Fielder is the moment you want to beat him senseless) and the cruelties of the press. Indeed, Kapadia is so skillful in communicating his thesis that my own bullshit meter senses oversimplification, and in pressing his case, he flirts with casting Winehouse as victim, when, in fact, she was a willing driver of the ills that befell her (she died of alcohol intoxication at 5 times the legal driving limit). Still, the film as portrait of an artist remains vibrant even if the thesis is hokum. Winehouse’s unfairly or accurately maligned father may have said it best, “Half of me wants to say don’t go see it. But then the other part of me is saying maybe go see the videos, put your headphones in and listen to Amy’s music while they’re watching the videos. It’s the narrative that’s the problem.”

I loved Tower Records and so did my father, a classical music nut.  His apartment was littered with the ubiquitous yellow bags and his visits to its D.C. location (the store was a few blocks from his apartment) were long meanders through the aisles and aisles of inventory.  Colin Hanks has done an admirable job of evoking the nostalgia of Tower, which rose from a small shop selling singles in Sacramento to an international conglomerate in a matter of thirty years.  In the process, he recounts not only an incisive story about the music business from a retail and merchandising standpoint, but of a family business, where all of the early stock boys and clerks who got stoned and drunk in the back grew to become VPs and store and district managers.  The fall –  a combination of technology, overreach and a bit of profligacy – is sad, but not tragic.  Every one of the individuals interviewed extols the organization, its singularly decent and quirky founder Russell Solomon, and the positive impact working there had on them.

Not an apologia, nor a self serving justification, but rather, an opportunity to listen to the methodology, nuance and capacities of one of the more influential policymakers of our generation. Documentarian Errol Morris is astute enough to let Donald Rumsfeld roll with little interruption, with only occasional prodding, to attempt to reach his core. Unlike with Robert McNamara in The Fog of War, who eventually reached an acknowledgment that seemed near confessional with regard to his failures in Vietnam, Rumsfeld is not of the same mindset. He is not prideful in his cheery resistance to apology: he’s quite capable of admitting error and does so often. But he refuses to accept the premise that in the commission of error, there necessarily lies moral failure or self-serving, political calculation.

Morris is a little cheap on occasion, and with someone who is as careful with his words as Rumsfeld, it is problematic. For example, Morris goes “gotcha!” when he juxtaposes Rumsfeld’s denial that the Bush administration cast Iraq as a major player with al Qaeda in the direct planning of the 9-11 attacks with his statement in a press conference that al Qaeda and Iraq certainly had a relationship.

Mostly, however, Morris is flummoxed by Rumsfeld, which is actually a good thing. Morris approaches Rumsfeld as a provocateur, asking “why obsessed with Iraq?” and “why not just assassinate Saddam?”  He receives answers, albeit answers you can tell he feels are not deception so much as unsatisfactory.

There is no neat wrap-up, no target hit, no successful gotchas, but rather, just a rumination on Rumsfeld’s peculiar process and recollection.

There is a nifty exchange where Morris advances that Shakespeare wrote about large personality-filled power struggles; Rumsfeld replies that those struggles are really just people with different perspectives; Morris counters, “Did Shakespeare get it wrong?”; and Rumsfeld thinks about it, shrugs, and suggests maybe Shakespeare got it right . . . for his time. In that same vein, Morris pushes Rumsfeld for lessons between Vietnam (the end of which Rumsfeld oversaw serving President Ford) and Iraq, and Rumsfeld parries that while one hopes to heed lessons in history, the primary lesson is “some things work out and some don’t.”

Morris wants Rumsfeld to answer, “How do you know when you are going too far?” and Rumsfeld is literally the last person on this earth equipped or inclined to provide him a satisfactory response.  Are you saying, “Stuff just happens?”, Morris asks in exasperation.  Rumsfeld looks back at him with the look of someone who has just been asked “Are you saying you breathe air?”

Morris conceded his agenda, and perhaps the thwarting of same, in an interview: “You’re left with a strange anxiety about [Rumsfeld].  I suppose if I was Mike Wallace or David Frost or whoever, I’d back [him] into a corner. But I love those moments, because I don’t even know where I am anymore. I don’t know whether he’s in any way self-aware, whether he is lying, whether he’s just in some strange alternate universe, the Rumsfeld universe. . . . There’s a ‘j’accuse’ there, but it’s my ‘j’accuse’.”

The consensus from the dummy contingent of film critics is that Rumsfeld was given the rope with which to hang himself, or his artful dodging is in and of itself proof of the indictment as to his treachery, but what Morris has actually accomplished is a demonstration of the incongruity between the needs of artists, or those who see the world through a Shakespearean lens, and policymakers, who take it one memo at a time.