In addition to Frownland, The New Year Parade, and Flow (see related articles on this page), the Dryden is flush in new independent and foreign documentaries and features in the weeks leading up to the holiday season.

First up in documentaries and just in time for Election Day will be two screenings of Frontrunners on November 1. A compellingly suspenseful new documentary by Caroline Suh, Frontrunners covers the four-candidate race for class president at Stuyvesant, New York’s most competitive high school. The latest film from Werner Herzog is the filmmaker-adventurer’s hypnotic South Pole travelogue, Encounters at the End of the World (November 14 & 15). Patti Smith: Dream of Life (December 5) captures the essence of this rock icon, poet, and activist. Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine (December 6) is an intimate portrait of the nonagenarian artist whose massive spider sculptures have been exhibited throughout the world. On the fiction side, we have the first area screenings of Kent Mackenzie’s remarkable 1961 feature The Exiles (November 21 & 22). Recently restored, this chronicle of a day in the life of Native Americans who have left their reservation to live in a decaying Los Angeles neighborhood is one to discover.