How Injustice Infects Democracy - The New York Times Opens on Friday in Brooklyn. Directed by Raoul Martinez and Joshua van Praag 1 hour 17 minutes; not rated Raoul Martinez and Joshua van Praag's cinematic lecture "The Lottery of Birth" belongs to that breed of discourse that suggests that if you patiently and succinctly outline why everything's awful, change can happen. Such implicit optimism is to some extent almost more compelling than the arguments in this stripped-down film, which uses primarily behavioral psychology to explain, with varying success, systemic injustice and public complacency in democratic societies. The historian Howard Zinn, the linguist Steven Pinker, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, the activists Vandana Shiva and Michael Albert, and others lay down the need for education, the perils of blind obedience and the insidious perpetuity of big problems. They are photographed in high definition, which bestows a relatable warmth against soothingly fathomless black backgrounds. Beyond that, there are scads of B-roll, always riveting highlights from the Milgram experiment on obedience to authority, quotations by Orwell, and a voice-over with yet more bad news. The film is, in other words, an attempt at instilling awareness of ideology (and so can recall a formative, eye-opening conversation with a progressive college professor). On its own terms - setting aside the likelihood of knee-jerk political objections to its mission - it's more convincing than many films pegged to specific causes. But its ambitions are also head-clutchingly broad, its theories at times incompatible or overreaching in ways that go unacknowledged, and its line of argument alarmingly free of vast swaths of human experience. Still, even as a varnished revival of 1960s-era activist cinema for the age of TED talks - in which political activity is ultimately flatteringly described as artistic - "The Lottery of Birth" would be a bore if there weren't something to it.