Better Living Through Circuitry

Intelligent and engaging, this documentary about rave culture overcomes the challenge inherent in its subject; rave's appeal is by nature nonanalytical and experiential, while documentary films play to the intellectual observer. Filmmaker Jon Reiss, whose extensive music video experience includes Nine Inch Nails' "Happiness Is Slavery," started out a hired gun and became a true believer without abandoning his investigative perspective. And while produced by a record company, the film doesn't soft-pedal the rave aficionados thorough disdain for the commercialization of music and other aspects of youth culture. Like Iara Lee's earlier MODULATIONS, it's a little bit o...