150 Best Releases From the Genre Documentary (Page 5)

Avi Mograbi's documentary is a long, strident presentation on the military occupation of Gaza that does a disservice to the oppression he's highlighting. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 New York Film Festival.) A few years ago, during my time at Brandeis University – this country’s premier Jewish institution of higher education – the school’s J-Street club hosted a particularly tense event. The organization had invited a former Israeli soldier to speak about her time stationed in the West Bank and the injustices she had witnessed. Continue Reading →

Angelo Madsen Minax examines his family and their history with care, grace, and impeccable craft. (This review is part of our 2021 coverage of Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival) Loss is a twisting, winding thing. Director Angelo Madsen Minax sets out to trace and retrace the losses he and his family have experienced in his new documentary North by Current. It’s an elegiac and heart-rending meditation on the mechanisms of memory, the metaphysics of coping, and the melodrama of life. Continue Reading →

Alison Klayman's chronicle of the Canadian singer's rise to fame centers around her seminal 1995 album, and the trail it blazed for female artists. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival.) This year’s edition of the Toronto International Film Festival finally got a hint of scandal—albeit of the most well-mannered variety imaginable—when it was announced that rock star Alanis Morissette, the focus of the new documentary Jagged, would not be attending the film’s gala world premiere, reportedly due to what the Washington Post dubbed “unspecified issues with the finished product.” Continue Reading →

Penny Lane's profile on the smooth jazz superstar can't quite muster up enough energy to make its explorations of his notoriety (good and bad) sing. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival.) If you learn nothing else from watching the documentary Listening to Kenny G, you will at least come away from it with the knowledge that the saxophone player who essentially serves as the living embodiment of “smooth jazz” is the best-selling instrumentalist of all time. You will know this because it is a fact that is invoked repeatedly throughout the film by his fans and supporters, generally when pressed as to what it is that they like about him. Continue Reading →

Marie Kondo, the popular tidying-up expert, hit her mainstream stride back in 2019 with Netflix’s Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. Millions discovered the gleeful Kondo as she exclaimed “I love mess” while teaching families her “KonMari” method of decluttering and organizing their homes. Kondo’s back with her new Netflix series Sparking Joy with Marie Kondo, applying her method not only in homes but also in businesses, relationships, and communities, charming us along the way. Continue Reading →

When we think back to actors of the 80s, we often think of the Brat Pack, that group of young charismatic stars whose impossible good looks occasionally compensated for middling acting ability. They were cute, and likable, but often lacked that element that makes certain actors more interesting, that sense of danger and mystery. Those actors, like Mickey Rourke, Sean Penn, and Nicolas Cage, didn’t get “Dream Date of the Month” write-ups in Teen Beat, but were more talented, more versatile, and more compelling to watch.  Continue Reading →

From the second Sabaya begins to play, director Hogir Hirori’s mission is crystal clear: he doesn’t merely want to document what’s happening to the Yazidi women kidnapped by ISIS or the group set on rescuing them. He doesn’t only want to educate you on the conflict. He wants you to feel what it’s doing to these people. And by god, does he ever succeed. Continue Reading →

When someone chooses to end their life, even if they’re open about their mental health struggles, it’s still often a shock to their friends and loved ones, who will then wrack their brains and agonize over whether they missed a sign that it was coming. The question always arises: how could they do that? They had so much to live for. They had so many people who cared about them. We’ve learned some pretty harsh lessons in the past decade about “what kind of person” commits suicide, first with Robin Williams in 2014, and then someone else who truly seemed to know how to grab life by the balls, Anthony Bourdain, in 2018. Morgan Neville’s Roadrunner is a moving film about Bourdain, arguably the most important modern travel documentarian, and his internal conflict over having a life most people only dream of, while feeling like he didn’t really deserve it. Continue Reading →

HBO’s six-part docuseries Catch and Kill: The Podcast Tapes doesn’t have any shocking new revelations or unheard evidence. Some might ask what was the point of rehashing a story that broke in The New Yorker, which then became a book, which then became a podcast. Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato’s take on Ronan Farrow’s already well-trod ground is clearly just for those folks who prefer visual media over books and podcasts (hey, no judgments) or for those obsessed with the investigation into Hollywood monster Harvey Weinstein.  Continue Reading →

The appetite for true crime stories can seem insatiable. Mountains of podcasts, TV series, and movies, the latter two sent directly to streaming services, have been released over the last decade, making it more difficult for these narratives to find a wider audience. Netflix’s newest documentary series, Heist, attempts to cash in on this trend to mixed results, telling three stories over the course of six episodes. Continue Reading →

Not all entertainment is for everyone. Continue Reading →

The New York-based Tribeca festival roars back to post-lockdown life with its usual solid lineup of future award winners and indie gems. While the pandemic didn’t put a complete halt to the film festival circuit, of necessity festival programmers were forced to do complete overhauls, creating user-friendly streaming platforms in just a few months. This year’s Tribeca Festival, after having to cancel entirely in 2020, is the first festival to open back up for in-person screenings, offering a hybrid selection of both theater runs and streaming access. While it was not without its bumps, 2021’s offerings are especially strong, particularly in documentaries and horror. The movies may not quite be back, baby, but they’re getting there. Though you should definitely check out our coverage of some of the bigger buzz titles, here’s a brief overview of some of the hidden gems at Tribeca: Continue Reading →

Nearly a year after the series aired on HBO, there is a new episode of I’ll Be Gone In The Dark, a docuseries based on Michelle McNamara’s book of same name. This time around, the epilogue serves as a coda, bringing the story of The Golden State Killer (and the root McNamara’s obsession) full circle.  Continue Reading →

Typically, when we talk about a documentary, we mean a film that captures, preserves, documents a subject. With her new film Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation, director Lisa Immordino Vreeland turns the genre on its head and becomes a nonfiction work about documents themselves. Painstakingly compiled from libraries and archives of all kinds, it gives us profound insights into the lives of two famous twentieth-century literati frenemies, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, told exclusively in their own words. Continue Reading →

The documentary delivers a well-made case for Will Vinton as an underappreciated titan of animation. When it comes to legends of the animation industry, we all know the names of Walt Disney, Lotte Reiniger, and Nick Park. But what about Will Vinton? He may not be a household name, but Claydream makes a solid case for him being someone who should be. Vinton left his mark not just on the Claymation figures he designed but also on an entire artform. Claydream chronicles Vinton's career as a scrappy outsider. Establishing his art and his eventual studio in Portland, Oregon rather than in Hollywood, Vinton’s Claymation works also eschew the clean-cut perfection of so much mainstream animation. On the contrary, the figures in his works (including, perhaps most famously, the California Raisins) have a distinctly imperfect look to them. There’s an endearingly inventive quality in the designs of these works that suggest how Vinton’s shorts and films are more about imagination rather than replicating reality.   Continue Reading →

Jeremy Elkin's documentary is a love letter to the skater culture of the '90s, and the punks and rebels that filled it. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Tribeca film festival.) It took me towards the middle of Jeremy Elkin's documentary All the Streets Are Silent to realize that Eli Gesner, the videographer behind much of the New York skateboard culture in the 90s, was the prototype for the character Fourth Grade in Jonah Hill’s mid90s. Fourth Grade was the kid I identified with the most, being the shy and silent observer to the antics and adventures of a tight-knit crew of talented skaters and artists. All throughout that film, he captured it all with his trusty palmcorder, only to eventually debut the footage in a video mixtape at the end. Such an expression that I also didn’t realize until All the Streets Are Silent was inspired by Gesner’s work as a kid with a camera. Continue Reading →

The Patton Oswalt-narrated Netflix docuseries tells a compelling story about the endangered birds' life during their molting and mating season. “Six hot months! One wild colony! No rules!” With this reality show-esque tagline, Netflix’s Penguin Town appears to be a quirky, comical twist on nature docuseries. They even pulled in comedian Patton Oswalt to narrate. Penguin Town follows the adventures of a wild cast of African penguins. As the series progresses however, dramatic events unfold, pulling the audience in for an emotional trip alongside the endangered birds. The series follows the journey of African penguins as they hit land on the shores of Simon’s Town, South Africa. Here the birds live it up amongst the “giants” (aka humans) of the town, molting their feathers, hooking up with their mates, and hopefully raising some hatchlings before they depart. This may sound like spring break for penguins, but their time at the beach is anything but a vacation. These penguins fight off predators on land and in the sea, attempt to survive catastrophic weather events, all in the hope their species will survive and thrive. Continue Reading →

KinoKultur is a thematic exploration of the queer, camp, weird, and radical releases Kino Lorber has to offer on physical media and video on demand. Watched in conversation with one another, Derek Jarman’s final films, especially The Garden, Wittgenstein, and Blue offer a fascinating and deeply personal exploration of queerness, cinema, and legacy. Though he would die of AIDS at the age of 52, a mere 5 months after Blue premiered, these three film present this vibrantly queer artist at his most experimental. Currently all available to rent via KinoNow, they are a testament to Jarman’s boundless imagination and the perseverance of the creative spirit. The Garden (1990), like the vision of life Jarman presents within it, is a journey with no telos, “no sweet conclusion.” It’s an anarchic montage of images, sounds, and dialogue that presents Jarman’s final indictment of organized religion. Loosely following a gay couple as the navigate a netherworld of prejudice, Jarman recurringly uses religious imagery, particularly that of The Madonna (played by his muse Tilda Swinton), to highlight the ways queer people have been emotionally, symbollically, and culturally oppressed and the havoc this has wrought upon the earth. Continue Reading →

Despite it being mid-May, the first signs of summer are already upon us. No, I’m not talking about rising temperatures or the release of tentpole blockbusters, I’m talking about my local PetSmart setting up its pride section. In recent years, gay pride month has gone from niche celebration to a new sort of corporate holiday, with major brands such as Target, McDonald’s, and the aforementioned PetSmart creating advertisements and apolitical merchandise designed to invoke a sort of fun that’s a far cry from the anger that sparked the Stonewall riots. (And let’s not forget how many corporations spend money on both pride floats and homophobic politicians.) Continue Reading →

A running joke in early episodes of The Simpsons was McBain, an action hero parody. In one scene, a group of rich people celebrate their new product SWANK (a product 10 times more addictive than marijuana), and end with a toast: “To human misery!” After watching Alex Gibney’s two-part documentary, The Crime of the Century, it’s hard to not think this scene was based on Purdue Pharmaceutical’s owners, the Sackler family, toasting the creation of OxyContin. Continue Reading →

In 1945, the release of Italian neorealist classic Rome, Open City pulled Roberto Rossellini and his family out of poverty and catapulted them into the international limelight. The Rossellinis, a new documentary from one of his five grandchildren, Alessandro, grapples with living in the famed filmmaker’s shadow.   Continue Reading →