154 Best Releases From the Genre Documentary (Page 4)

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 South by Southwest Festival) Continue Reading →

The story of Sarma Melngailis seems tailor-made for tabloid headlines. The former queen of New York’s vegan scene went on the run after embezzling millions of dollars and stiffing employees and investors. A year later she was captured after the police traced an order she made to the emphatically un-vegan Domino’s pizza.  Continue Reading →

There shouldn’t be anything more to say about the New York City art scene circa 1965 to 1985. True, it’s an exciting subject, depicting an era that was a unique combination of glamorous and trashy, inclusive and deeply snobby, and something we’ll never see again. Nevertheless, it’s been exhausted, a tragic, oft-told tale of excess decimated by drug use and AIDS. And we certainly seem to know all we could ever know about Andy Warhol, the father of that scene, who made superficiality and detachment seem fashionable. The Andy Warhol Diaries, however, is a rare, moving look at the person behind the carefully cultivated persona, who craved traditional domesticity while being drawn to the frenetic downtown party circuit at the same time. Continue Reading →

One marker of a great documentary is a tangible and infectious passion for its central subject matter—an underlying commitment to a topic or idea that drives the very existence of the project. It’s hard to figure out what’s motivating Icahn: The Restless Billionaire, beyond a not-so-faint sense of people wanting to defend why they like an ultra-wealthy capitalist. Though the word restless creeps into the title, the lack of vibrancy in this documentary’s filmmaking indicates that lifeless should’ve been used instead.  Continue Reading →

As the old adage goes, "With age comes wisdom." But as Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, and the rest of the Jackass gang have refreshingly proven, sometimes the best way to stay forever young is to just stick close to your childhood buddies and keep doing the same dumb shit to each other over and over again. And since Jackass aired its first episode on MTV in 2000, that's exactly what they've been doing, finding ever more creative ways to kick themselves (and each other) in the balls, sic wild animals and insects on them, and generally flaunting the rules of polite society and personal safety. With Jackass Forever, the fourth anthology movie in the series, Johnny and the rest are a little older, but no more wiser, and we're all the more thankful for it. Continue Reading →

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Festival) Continue Reading →

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Festival) Continue Reading →

One of the most gut-wrenching moments of the documentary Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America comes during interactions between ACLU deputy legal director Jeffrey Robinson and Josephine Bolling, daughter of Elmore Bolling, a man who was killed as part of a racial hate crime. During their interactions, she takes Robinson to the ditch where she found her father’s corpse years earlier. Rather than just hearing about these horrors, the camera bears witness to the land where a human being was discarded like he was nothing. Continue Reading →

30 years after the series’ creator passed, what remains of his message as Star Trek is bigger than ever. For Star Trek fans, there are two very important dates decades before the very first episode of the original series ever aired. On August 2, 1943, the B-17 “Yankee Doodle” overshot its runway in the Pacific nation of Vanuatu and crashed, killing two crewmen. The pilot went on to be a crash investigator, serving stateside through the end of World War II, but it wouldn’t be the last time he narrowly escaped death in plane crash. On June 19, 1947, a Pan Am flight crashed in the Syrian desert after a catastrophic engine failure, killing most of the crew and passengers. One of the few survivors was the flight’s third officer, the very same man, a then-35-year-old Texan named Gene Roddenberry. The world knows Roddenberry as the man who invented Star Trek and gave the world decades of deep space adventures. When you look at all of that in context with the early morning when he narrowly avoided death, there’s the obvious takeaway that Kirk and Spock and Picard and Data and all the stories and faraway worlds that spun off from them are a kind of miracle. For me though, it’s impossible not to think of that biographical detail every time the Enterprise-D (or the Defiant, or the Protostar) is being dragged into a singularity or scrambling to restore shields in a fight with the Borg, klaxons blaring and crew members gritting their teeth as stuff combusts around them. The miracle, I think, is that Roddenberry survived something like that and then went on to create a story like Star Trek, a story with plenty of ships on the brink of disaster that isn’t really about disaster, but rather overcoming it. Continue Reading →

In Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero, moral ambiguity runs rampant through the life of imprisoned Rahim Soltani (Amir Jadidi). Locked away for a debt he could not repay, Soltani has two days of leave to get his creditor, a family friend, to drop the charges. He owes the man a large sum, given as a pseudo-loan for a failing small business. A father to a young boy with a speech impediment, Rahim is understandably anxious to negotiate his freedom. When his girlfriend finds a lost bag filled with 17 gold coins, the moral conundrums begin, multiplying throughout the film with “nice” deeds and public interference.  Continue Reading →

KinoKultur is a thematic exploration of the queer, camp, weird, and radical releases Kino Lorber has to offer. Beneath the great Kino Lorber distribution partner family tree, there are a few classic presents worth opening this holiday season. Below is a brief guide to four films that offer interesting things to contemplate during this time of year, films that—in the spirit of the season, invite the audience to consider charity, capital, and country as they were when these pictures were new and today. Kino Lorber Pocketful of Miracles Continue Reading →

Annette Leos Carax and art-rock sibling duo Ron and Russell Mael (of Sparks) join forces for this sometimes lovely sometimes harrowing sometimes both musical. Marion Cotillard and Adam Driver are a creative couple (an opera singer and a scathing comedian) who love each other so much. Carax and Sparks trace what happens when that love curdles—when a person's idea of themselves eats their real self and anyone they care about. And those who don't get eaten? They're still left with scars, none more than the primarily-a-puppet title character. Carax's screen craft is daring, whether biting, sweeping, or gleefully absurd. Cotillard and Driver's dives into how love turns sour and wrath makes beasts of people are splendid both individually and as a duet. And the tunes rule, from Driver and Cotillard’s swooning to Simon Helberg laying out his duties as an accompanist. The earworms. They abound. [Justin Harrison] Continue Reading →

Evil (Paramount+) Frightening, funny, and ffffffffff…Mike Colter in those sweaters! Continue Reading →

Across the rugged state of Uttar Pradesh in Northern India, a team of women journalists is bustling. Khabar Lahariya (‘Waves of News’), India’s only women-run newspaper, takes its responsibility to the community very seriously. These dynamic women are out amongst the people, documenting their stories, sharing them, and seeking answers on their behalf, often at great personal risk. Continue Reading →

The story of Kevin Smith certainly sounds like fodder for an inspirational movie. A film geek from New Jersey cobbled some money together, grabbed a camera, and filmed a movie at his convenience store workplace.  Continue Reading →

The very idea of reviewing something like Procession is a task in and of itself. It’s not that it’s particularly difficult; it’s that it runs the risk of coming off less as reviewing a film than reviewing people and their realities. Am I, myself a rape survivor, to laud the subjects’ humanity that propels Robert Greene’s documentary? Of course.  Continue Reading →

Cathryne Czubek & Hugo Perez's endearing doc about Ugandan filmmaking group Wakaliwood is both accessible and specific. (This review was originally written as part of our coverage of titles set to premiere at the canceled SXSW 2020; We're reposting around the doc's world premiere at DOC NYC 2021 on November 12th and 17th.) Indie filmmaking tends to be inspiring. Who doesn’t have their hearts warmed by filmmakers bringing their visions to life on shoestring budgets? But the filmmaking group known as Wakaliwood chronicled in Once Upon a Time In Uganda are the scrappiest of scrappy indie directors. Located in the Ugandan slum Wakaliga, this gaggle of artists, led by the director known as Nabwana I.G.G., creates super-violent action movies such as cult sensation Who Killed Captain Alex? on budgets as minuscule as $200 USD. Their productions may not be super polished, but the obvious passion they have for their craft dwarfs the minimal artistry of far more expensive Hollywood tentpoles. Once Upon a Time In Uganda follows New York film festival organizer Alan Hofmanis as he joins Wakaliwood to try and help Nabwana I.G.G. not only make films but also get his productions greater visibility worldwide. In the process, he and Nabwana become like brothers, though the relationship has its fair share of challenges. The story of Hofmanis has its fair share of intriguing moments, particularly an amusing scene where he chats with his stunt double for a cannibal movie Nabwana is filming. Of course, Hofmanis isn’t in Wakaliga forever. This introduces a subplot of Hofmanis as he struggles to maintain long-term relationships, but it ends up making up the weaker part of Uganda’s story. Continue Reading →

On April 14th, 2019, Pete Buttigieg announced his campaign for President of the United States of America. This came as a surprise for the public at large. He had little experience--his previous government position was Mayor of South Bend-- and a minimal national profile. Additionally, he was young--just 37 at the time-- and the first openly gay presidential candidate in American history.  Continue Reading →

It’s common to think about each of us having a “role” in society, with costumes, positions, stages, and actions to be performed. Mexican director Alonso Ruizopalacios (Gueros, Museo) deputizes this idea in A Cop Movie, which investigates policing and the line between fiction and documentary with political precision. Continue Reading →

If Universal released Halloween II under virtually any other name—The Hospital Murders or ICU or even Leo Rossi’s Bare Ass—it would most likely be remembered today as just one of countless early ’80s mad slasher films to hit theaters. And that’s despite being made with a little more style and technical finesse than most of its el cheapo competition. You know, the kind of film that might one day receive a semi-special edition Blu-Ray from Shout Factory to satisfy its mild fan base.  Continue Reading →

To listen to the Velvet Underground today is to marvel at how very much its own thing it was. Their droning, dirge-like songs, often accompanied by the discordant squeaking of a viola, addressed such unsavory subjects as drug addiction and sadomasochism, and seemed to be designed for listeners who neither identified with hippie folk or rebellious rock and roll. They were so far ahead of their time that even more than five decades later no one else has sounded quite like them yet. Todd Haynes’ documentary, just called The Velvet Underground, captures their lightning in a bottle moment in music history, eschewing the tropes of the genre in favor of a dizzying sound and visual landscape. Continue Reading →