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Every week there are great movies released in theaters, but they get no attention and never have a chance to reach an audience. They are rarely released on more than ten screens, only in New York City and Los Angeles, and have no advertising, but they are works of art that deserve to be seen. That’s why I started this column. It’s a way for me to spread the gospel about the great independent films, foreign films, and documentaries that don’t get the attention they deserve from the movie-going public. So while you're waiting for news about the next crossover sequel Cowboys vs. Aliens vs. Smurfs, you can find out about some great movies that aren’t getting talked about on Entertainment Tonight or, really, anywhere else… ever. Until now!

Movie studios are obesssed with “high concept” films, meaning stories with concepts and ideas that will immediately grab a viewer's attention. While robots beating the crap out of each other and guys trying to kill their obnoxious bosses certainly qualify as “high concept,” I think that the film that wins easily in that category this summer is Errol Morris's newest film Tabloid. I mean, come on, how can you hear “a beauty queen kidnaps a mormon missionary so that she can chain him up and rape him” and not immediately want to go see that movie? Maybe because you, the hypothetical reader of this article, are stupidly biased against documentaries. If that is the case, then grow up, hypothetical reader, get your butt to whatever theater nearest you is showing Tabloid (it might be really far away, but that's no excuse) and see this movie.

Errol Morris is one of the goliaths of the documentary - I would argue only Werner Herzog and Agnes Varda are currently in his league - having made such powerful, political films as The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War. With his latest, Morris takes on a very different kind of subject, but the results are no less powerful or exciting. The subject of Tabloid is Joyce McKinney, a former winner of the Miss Wyoming beauty pageant. Living in Utah she met a young Mormon man, Kirk Anderson, with whom she began a relationship. When Anderson vanished, McKinney discovered that he had been taken to London by leaders of the Mormon Church. Enlisting the help of a pilot and two bodyguards, McKinney made it her goal to track down and retrieve Anderson.

As insane as that story sounds, it gets even crazier from there. And yes, it's quite a fascinating and ridiculous story, and McKinney is an entertaining interview subject, but that's not what makes the film so intriguing. Morris's take on the subject matter is to focus not just on the story, but on the way the media reacted to and presented the story. I don't know if you've picked up on this, but our media culture could be described as “that stuff that bats expel from their rectums after eating” crazy. Morris is not solely concerned with McKinney's travails, or her trial after she is arrested and charged with kidnapping, but with the way both she and her case were represented by the major British newspapers at the time.

In addition to extensively interviewing McKinney, Morris also interviewed one of the reporters from The Daily Mirror, one of the newspapers that seemed to make it their mission to smear McKinney. The reporter showed no embarrassment or remorse for his treatment of McKinney, unabashedly admitting the lengths that he and his colleagues went to find dirt on her. At one point he even admits that McKinney actually tied up her husband with rope, not chains, but that chains sounds so much better that the editorial staff chose the embellishment over the truth. I'll mention, now, that this case is still referred to as the “Mormon Sex-in-Chains” case, all because some reporter decided not to let the truth get in the way of a good story.

McKinney's story is certainly outrageous, but in viewing the media's treatment of her, we can understand how our culture has evolved into its current state of insanity. This story takes place in the '70s, before the internet and the 24-hour news cycle. You don't need to imagine what it would be like if this had all happened today, because you can just look at the ridiculousness of the Casey Anthony trial. There is something seriously wrong with our media, when Sarah Palin's vacation gets more press than nuclear meltdowns in Japan, and Morris does a perfect job of making that point clear without ever preaching or hitting you over the head with his message (you know, the way this paragraph has). What's more, he does it through a fascinating story that will keep you so enraptured you might not even notice you're learning something.