The Anarchist Cookbook

Writer-director Jordan Susman's smart, scrappy first feature doesn't really have much to do with The Anarchist Cookbook, the notorious how-to manual which, since 1969, has offered would-be radicals an assortment of recipes for homemade explosives and drugs. Susman is more interested in what the book represented: an ideological shift away from peaceful protest to a "by any means necessary" embrace of violence as the only effective method of fighting social injustice. And though the film is set in contemporary Texas, Susman sees a relevant parallel with the dark end of the 1960s and puts a simple but important question to the next generation of radicals: Is ther...