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One hundred seventy features have been submitted for consideration in the Documentary Feature category for the 90th Academy Awards. That’s 25 more than 2016. Assuming they all book their qualifying runs in New York and Los Angeles, the members of the documentary branch have just a few more weeks to see as many films as possible and file their votes for the shortlist of 15 to be announced in December. They’re each supposed to watch an assigned list of about 20 films, plus as many more as they can.

Read More:2018 Oscar Predictions: Best Documentary Feature

It’s possible for documentaries to also vie for Best Picture, although it is rare. Among this year’s most lauded features are “City of Ghosts,” “Faces Places,” “Jane,” “Kedi” and “One of Us.”

The submitted features, listed in alphabetical order, are:

“Abacus: Small Enough to Jail”

“Aida’s Secrets”

“Al Di Qua”

“All the Rage...

One hundred seventy features have been submitted for consideration in the Documentary Feature category for the 90th Academy Awards. That’s 25 more than 2016. Assuming they all book their qualifying runs in New York and Los Angeles, the members of the documentary branch have just a few more weeks to see as many films as possible and file their votes for the shortlist of 15 to be announced in December. They’re each supposed to watch an assigned list of about 20 films, plus as many more as they can.

Read More:2018 Oscar Predictions: Best Documentary Feature

It’s possible for documentaries to also vie for Best Picture, although it is rare. Among this year’s most lauded features are “City of Ghosts,” “Faces Places,” “Jane,” “Kedi” and “One of Us.”

The submitted features, listed in alphabetical order, are:

“Abacus: Small Enough to Jail”

“Aida’s Secrets”

“Al Di Qua”

“All the Rage...

Documentarian Mary Mazzio has met several women and girls who survived the sex trafficking industry — and one thing that surprised her was how many of them were willing to go on camera to share their stories.

“Every one of them looked at me and said, ‘So it won’t happen to my little sister or my friend,’ ” Mazzio recalls.

Another girl looked her in the eye and said, “‘I’m doing this so it doesn’t happen to your daughter.’ ”

Their collected accounts are the focus of Mazzio’s documentary I Am Jane Doe, which opens Friday. The title is...

Tom and Nacole were frantic — desperate — when their 15-year-old daughter disappeared in the spring of 2010. They were afraid to think of what could be happening to the teen, who had rarely been away from their suburban Washington home for more than a day.

The truth was beyond even their fears.

Their daughter, J.S., was a freshman honor student who played the violin and ran with her high school’s track team — but she was also an adventurous spirit. Unknown to her parents, she decided to run away to check out Seattle.

Within days, J.S. met a man twice her age,...

Welcome back to the Weekend Warrior, your weekly look at the new movies hitting theaters this weekend, as well as other cool events and things to check out.

This Past Weekend:

Bomb, bomb bomb bomb, Boooooomb! Things just kept getting worse and worse at the box office as this past weekend saw more new releases not meeting up to their potential. The horribly-reviewed horror movie Rings (Paramount) ended up around where I predicted with $13 million, taking second place to M. Night Shyamalan’s Split. The sci-fi romance The Space Between Us (Stx Entertainment) didn’t make much of a mark, opening in ninth place with just $3.8 million with about $1,300 per theater. Robert De Niro’s The Comedian (Sony Classics) tanked worse than many recent movies, making less than a million in 848 theaters or about $1,000 per theater. By comparison, the doc I Am Not Your Negro made about 78% of that amount in 800 less theaters.

There are two outrages at the investigative heart of I Am Jane Doe: the horrifying truth that a market in child sex trafficking is thriving, and the persistence of a legal loophole that protects the websites where children are sold. Zeroing in on what one victims’ advocate calls the public square for a modern-day form of slavery, Mary Mazzio’s eye-opening documentary reveals that the buying and selling of tweens and teens, long recognized as a plight in some developing nations, is also very much a domestic problem, and one that’s significantly enabled by a 20-year-old piece of American law.

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