Not terribly long ago, vinyl was considered a dead medium. Then hipsters discovered it and made it viable again. The same could happen (or at least should) to letterpress printing — that is, the near-lost art of pressing inked blocks of metal type onto paper. Created by Gutenberg (not Steve), this process — the Xerox of centuries long ago — may be archaic in these days of instant gratification, but it remains achingly beautiful.

So, too, initially, is Pressing On: The Letterpress Film, an indie documentary that serves as a clarion call for the technique’s continued life. Clearly letterpress fanatics themselves, first-time feature directors Erin Beckloff and Andrew P. Quinn do a fine job of conveying its enduring appeal, with an emphasis on its tactile pleasures, from selecting the type and slotting their blocks together like a puzzle to rolling out the finished product on a gloriously textured sheet of paper. The process can be slow and tedious, but so is cooking, with the end result of both satisfying multiple senses of the human body — in this case, touch, sight and, yes, smell.

With a history lesson and a mechanics tutorial, the doc covers the bases of backstory, but the emphasis is on the personalities and places (and even college programs) keeping letterpress alive, most notably Nashville’s famed Hatch Show Print. Lovingly told, Pressing On could be better organized and more concise; the main points are repeatedly hammer-struck, but Beckloff and Quinn are so kindhearted, I cannot imagine anyone wishing the film ill will.

I also cannot imagine anyone not already attracted to typography and design seeking it out. Like the proverbial pastor preaching to the choir, Pressing On is made — and Kickstarter-backed — by a passionate community speaking to a passionate community, with considerable overlap. Hopefully, its goodwill can engender a few more members. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

• Number of albums by The Dandy Warhols I have owned: 3
• Number of albums by The Brian Jonestown Massacre I have owned: 0

And in part, the reason can be found in the scrappy rockumentary Dig!, a funny, sad, warts-and-all, good-cop/bad-cop portrait of two bands on the rise — and one’s fall — over seven years’ time and captured by the camera of Ondi Timoner (We Live in Public).

In the mid-’90s, our nation had not heard of The Dandy Warhols or The Brian Jonestown Massacre, no matter how hard those puns tried. But that was soon to change. What begins as a friendly rivalry between the bands’ respective leaders (Courtney Taylor and Anton Newcombe) devolves into outright jealousy on the Massacre’s part when the Warhols taste some major-label success — and, to their credit, apparently with relative levelheadedness.

Newcombe, meanwhile — due to either mental illness, drug addiction or just plain stupidity — sabotages each and every chance of his band achieving the same. By the film’s midpoint, he seems to expend more energy trying to badmouth or crash the Warhols than he does working on his own music. And perhaps that’s because he keeps beating them — and the occasional audience member — up during shows, some of which become riots.

Personally, The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s music never has done anything to perk my ears, while several of The Dandy Warhols’ power-pop cuts stuck in my brain like spilled soda — and this was before knowing the backstory of either. But as one watches Dig!, which is entertaining even when your heart aches for Newcombe’s ravaged soul, it becomes clear that Newcombe has talent. It’s just buried under a lifetime of painful memories, self-destructive behavior and a general unwillingness to do something about it, making this tale all the more tragic. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Here now, something you may not mind the Russians for doing: The Road Movie. For the problematic-to-Google documentary, “director” Dmitrii Kalashnikov has assembled a shapeless smorgasbord of vehicular wrecks and yuks, all captured by his country’s drivers’ dashcams. To say Comrade Kalashnikov has plumbed the depths of YouTube so we don’t have to is no exaggeration; as the end credits reveal, the clips indeed come extracted from that digital rabbit hole.

Like the Jackass-ery of this generation’s narrative-free docs, there exists an undeniable rubbernecker quality to the proceedings, as cars and trucks and the occasional pedestrian careen into one another before our eyes. Oddly, amid all the chaos, the one element the pic lacks is pacing. In a likely effort to take his Frankensteined project over the one-hour mark, Kalashnikov lets many clips drift too long on both ends, whereas other bits arrive mercifully brief (read: those in which passengers had to have perished).

Context is nonexistent; even with bumper-to-bumper English subtitles, you’ll wish The Road Movie addressed the one burning question its mere existence raises — no, not “WTF is wrong with this country?” but “Who is recording all this footage? And why?” For the upvotes and the ad revenue, one assumes.

While not the slam-bang demolition derby of a flick as the clickbaiting trailer sells, it’s an ADHD-friendly mix of the hilarious and the horrifying. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

If you know just one name from the 1966 University of Texas Tower shooting, it’s probably Charles Whitman, the deranged assailant who gunned down 49 people — killing 14 — in an hour and a half’s time. It’s one of the (many) unfortunate realities of these mass shooting-crazed days: We remember the villains, their horrific acts of violence, but know next to nothing of their victims.

Tower, Keith Maitland’s Indiegogo-funded documentary, admirably upends that narrative. Through a radical mix of archival footage, rotoscopic re-enactments and firsthand accounts, the Austin, Texas-based filmmaker chronicles the day’s events through the words of basically everyone but the shooter — people like Aleck Hernandez Jr. (Aldo Ordoñez), a teenage paperboy shot on his route; officers Houston McCoy (Blair Jackson, Varsity Blood) and Ramiro Martinez (Louie Arnette, #Slaughterhouse), who ultimately killed Whitman in a standoff; and Claire Wilson (Violett Beane, TV’s The Flash), an 18-year-old anthropology student who lost both her fiancé, Tom Eckman (Cole Bee Wilson) and her unborn baby.

Forgoing any examination of the massacre’s broader, macro-level impact, Tower instead recounts the poignant internal conflicts of its characters — like the powerless torment of bare skin on blistering pavement, or the cowardice one feels when realizing they lack the courage to help the wounded. All the while, intermittent gunshots ring out in the middle of the sound mix and double down on the unease — an effect that puts you squarely on campus and in the line of fire.

The animation, equal parts dazzling and distracting, doesn’t serve much purpose beyond the visual replication of what wasn’t captured on camera in ’66 (amazingly, though, a lot was). But even if these spritzes of eye candy seem garish next to the gritty historical footage, Maitland’s inventive approach to tragedy and storytelling make Tower essential to our understanding of what really goes on during the panic and chaos of mass shootings, and serves as a poignant reminder of the heroism we don’t often remember. It might not tell the whole story, but it tells the ones that needed to be heard. —Zach Hale

The day before the 1968 Republican National Convention, the ceiling of the ABC News studio stationed at the Miami Beach Convention Center collapsed, temporarily shambling the struggling network’s control room and set. Nobody knew it at the time — especially not ABC — but the resulting disarray proved to be a prophetic metaphor for the fractured fate of broadcast journalism. For better or worse, political punditry and slanted cable news commentary are 2015 America’s de facto information resources. And it all started with ABC’s televised debates between William Buckley and Gore Vidal, portrayed with appropriately crafty and captivating fashion in Best of Enemies.

The documentary depicts Buckley and Vidal’s contentiously off-the-cuff (and wildly entertaining) discourse through rare archival footage and interviews, many of which articulate the broader, far-reaching effects they had on today’s political climate. At the time, ABC was playing third fiddle to NBC and CBS, networks that had established their network news dominance through fact-based, down-the-center reporting — the standard in 1968. But by pitting Buckley and Vidal — who already detested one another prior to the debates — ABC subsequently surged in the ratings, with millions tuning in each night of the convention to watch the two pummel each other with personal jabs and snidely delivered one-liners. It was shockingly candid television unlike anything the American people had ever seen, and they couldn’t stop watching.

But Best of Enemies is most absorbing in its examination of the individuals themselves: their worldviews, motivations, weaknesses, differences, and ultimately their similarities. Buckley — a self-described conservative, Republican, Christian libertarian — founded the highly influential National Review, a publication renowned for its unabashedly conservative, Republican, Christian libertarian news. Vidal — a liberal, radical, forward-thinking sexual deviant — was a highbrow writer known for his uncommonly edgy novels and plays (including the notorious Myra Breckenridge), many of which were adapted for the silver screen. Despite their existence on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, Buckley and Vidal had one very important thing in common: a relentless affinity for their own pride and intellect.

As often happens in a battle of egos, their conviction turned to hate, with both even going so far as to believe, in their heart of hearts, that the other threatened not only the advancement of their ascribed political doctrine, but the fate of humanity as a whole. Naturally, their debates became less about issues or party platforms and more about pummeling their opponent, about winning, and eventually devolving into a battle of who can dig deepest under the other’s skin. This manifested in a television meltdown for the ages after Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi,” to which Buckley replied, “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face.”

Moments like these carry consequences that need no explanation. And outside of their subtle use of editing to inject a leisurely buoyant tone, directors Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville know good and well to let the images and sound bites tell the story — until the end credits, when they needlessly tack on what the preceding 85 minutes had already explicitly implied. It’s an unfortunate “allow me to explain what you just watched” moment, overly simplistic in its insinuation that Buckley and Vidal, conservatives and liberals, Fox News and MSNBC are merely two sides of the same coin.

The prevailing theory that the truth always lies in the center should satisfy those who already ascribe to it, much like it would if it implied that the truth lies on the right or left. What is indisputable, however, is that the story of Buckley and Vidal is as historically relevant as it is fascinating. And for 85 minutes, Best of Enemies is the most compelling glimpse into one of history’s great rivalries that you’re likely to ever watch. That we can all agree on. —Zach Hale

Get it at Amazon.