The straightforward, very American, talking-head "expose" approach to documentary, cribbed from television shows like "Dateline NBC" and "20/20," has become the norm - and, in exploitative dreck like Capturing the Friedmans and Crazy Love, efficiently transformed real human lives into sound bites and greatest-hits packages. The recent Crazy Love comes across as especially derivative and tasteless in its poking and prodding at a woman's painful experience, preferring stringing together cute soundtrack cues and tabloid gossip to deconstructing the social black holes that created its central psychosexual bond in the first place. This form of documentary, wedded to personal narratives of rise-and-fall, destruction-and-reconciliation, is now prevalent in multiplexes. So seriously has it detracted attention from the groundbreaking traditions of direct cinema that it's hard to imagine a mainstream audience knowing what to make of French filmmaker Olivier Meyrou's superlative Beyond Hatred.

Click here to read the rest of Michael Koresky's review of Beyond Hatred.