Neither Hollywood grifters nor smooth-talking David Mamet racketeers, four pathological opportunists form the rotten core of Con Man Confidential, a revealing, infuriating journey into the dangerous minds of real life fraudsters. Often gloating, occasionally remorseful, the documentary’s subjects confess to their crimes of deception with a common disdain for the greedy and bourgeois. They’d make great characters in a Michael Haneke movie if only they weren’t seduced by the colour of money themselves. Ironically, the foursome also try to con us with the rationale that if you’re gullible, you deserve to be cleaned out. This time, they’re fooling nobody.

As the landscape of cinema becomes increasingly miniaturised and digitalized, it’s heart-warming to know that movies in their purest form – on a big screen, projected up large – still have the power to mobilize audiences and exhibitors alike. Documenting the modest-to-fevered trade of four independent theatre owners – from Burkina Faso, to the hoards in India, to small town Wyoming – Comrades in Dreams makes no concessions in its valentine to celluloid’s role in globalisation (the proliferation of Titanic, included). Only in North Korea are they immune to the romance of Jack and Rose, where cheesy propaganda films are the pictures of choice. It’s a side of the communist republic we’ve rarely seen before, and Gaulke humanises not only his subject’s enthusiasm for cinema, but for country, beloved leader, and indeed life itself.

Still Life’s companion piece, Dong, converges on many similar instances of cultural shock and global craving: cellphones, Kylie Minogue, and the country’s insatiable appetite for change, symbolised in the Three Gorges Dam, an engineering behemoth scheduled to displace over one million citizens adjacent to the Yangtze River. As a documentary, it is ultimately less about artist Liu Ziao-dong than it is about the milieu he paints: firstly, more semi-naked men in the foreground of a disintegrating concrete-wilderness malaise; secondly, Thai models (or should that be prostitues?) in confined, but equally artificial surroundings. Reprising passages from Lim Giong’s hypnotic scoring of The World, Jia’s film is otherwise indistinguishable from Still Life, and an indispensable third act at that.—Tim Wong