150 Best Releases From the Genre Documentary (Page 6)

Bobbi Jo Hart's energetic documentary shines a light on one of the greatest, most forgotten all-female rock bands in music history. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Hot Docs Festival.) “He was hard as a rock / But I was ready to roll / What a shock to find out / I was in control,” sang Fanny on their 1974 single, “Butter Boy”. The innuendo-laden and not overly flattering song, which peaked at #29 on the Billboard Hot 100, had been written by guitarist Jean Millington about her ex, David Bowie. Continue Reading →

While it occupies an almost fetishistic place in the American mythos as the country’s heart and soul, the small town seems to be another casualty in a globalized world. Plenty of books have been written about the rural and cultural decline of the places that exist between the coasts and major metropolitan areas.  Continue Reading →

There isn’t a lot of revelation to be found in Ken Burns & Lynn Novick’s extensive 3-part documentary on Ernest Hemingway. Those dads and grandpas tuning in will already be well-versed in his adventurous life, his tumultuous relationships, his legacy of violence, and self-aggrandizement. But Burns & Novick manage to put together a narrative that suits the author’s legendary machismo. If there’s one person who’d love Hemingway, it’s Hemingway.  Continue Reading →

Following on from his work on I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck takes a holistic look at imperialism, the construction of whiteness, and how we form narratives about the violence of the past in HBO's four-part documentary series Exterminate All The Brutes. In doing so, Peck covers a lot of ground, moving from genocides to scientific racism to colonization and more, explicating the links between them all. He does a lot of brilliant work here, but the series doesn’t quite have the precision or focus to make it great.  Continue Reading →

After eight years of itchy, bland Catholic School uniforms, I was ready for a change. When I entered high school, I switched to one of the only public schools in the state of Louisiana that didn’t require a uniform. Now that I could dress how I wanted, I needed to make a splash. I wanted to show everyone exactly who I was and what I brought to the table. My 13 year old brain decided the best way to do that was wearing this t-shirt featuring the logo of Mr. Sparkle, the Japanese laundry detergent that uses Homer’s head as inspiration in the Season 8 episode of The Simpsons, “In Marge We Trust." Continue Reading →

The remaining trio of true stories at this year's festival focus on politics and its impact on both individuals and society at large. (This dispatch is part of our coverage of the 2021 SXSW Film Festival.) The final three films featured in the SXSW 2021 Documentary Competition deal with the government at a local, state, national, and even global level. They look at how politicians deal with the issues facing their constituents, how regular people decide to get involved, and how to react when your citizens return home after terrifying times.  Continue Reading →

Chris McKim's documentary about the fiery artist turned AIDS activist is a stirring tribute to voices that were silenced too soon. New York City in the 1980s was shaken to social rubble as the “epicenter” of the AIDS epidemic. Multimedia artist David Wojnarowicz was one such voice among the quaking moans of societal collapse. Director Chris McKim’s new documentary, Wojnarowicz: Fuck You Faggot Fucker, offers an in-depth look at the raging flame that made the artist such a potent critic of his times. Using a dazzling display of archival materials, significantly from Wojnarowicz's huge collection of “tape journals,” McKim and fellow World of Wonder producers Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey piece together the artist’s journey largely in his own words. We hear his storries about a traumatic childhood, being a sex worker, the discovery of himself as an artist, his AIDS diagnosis, and problems with fame all in his characteristically keen and morose drone.  Continue Reading →

From depictions of Black beauty to the ethics of whistleblowing, two female-focused docs out of SXSW struggle to hammer home a central message.  (This dispatch is part of our coverage of the 2021 SXSW Film Festival.) Subjects of Desire, from director Jennifer Holmes, looks at the way Black beauty has changed over the last century. Holmes examines the boxes that Black women have been forced into through the lens of the Miss Black America beauty pageant. Interviewing a range of contestants, coupled with small group sessions of Black women of varying ages, Holmes’ film forces you to reckon with the sexualization of this unrespected and often disregarded group of people.  Continue Reading →

The immigrant experience, ad-man hagiographies, and scrappy homespun productions of Alien mark SXSW's documentary spotlight. (This dispatch is part of our coverage of the 2021 SXSW Film Festival.) The final day of SXSW’s Documentary Spotlight section showcases movies about collaboration, creativity, and a hope and dream for achieving new heights. This slate featured a movie about a Latinx teenager working on a strawberry farm hoping to one day go to college and buy a house, a group of scientists pushing human achievements in space towards a new frontier, an ambitious and heralded graphic designer who believes his projects and field can help save the world, and a group of ragtag Englishmen who are inspired to put on a stage production of Ridley Scott’s Alien. Continue Reading →

Bradley Bell and Pablo Jones-Soler assemble a freewheeling look at the artistic process from soup to nuts. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 SXSW Film Festival.) A good number of the films on display at this year’s SXSW festival are works that are inextricably tied to the COVID-19 pandemic, either by using at as a part of the plot or because of the limitations to the production process instilled by quarantine procedures. Alone Together, which had its world premiere at the festival, takes those approaches one step further by serving as a documentary watching an artist—in this case, avant-pop queen Charli XCX—as she goes about her work under the new restrictions brought on by the current reality.  Continue Reading →

A look back at a '90s star, the opioid crisis, and the weird world of domino art mark SXSW's docs in competition. (This dispatch is part of our coverage of the 2021 SXSW Film Festival.) The subjects of the eight films included in the 2021 SXSW Documentary Competition slate vary greatly in intensity and relevancy. The three major films in the festival are documentaries as well, highlighting musicians Demi Lovato, Tom Petty, and Charli XCX. With several first-time filmmakers, the slate has potential with stirring topics, but can easily flame out, due to a lack of experience, immediacy, and understood closeness to the current status of a world that has recently felt like its ripping at the seams.  Continue Reading →

Mary Wharton's assemblage of lost footage from the artist's Wildflowers recording sessions celebrates his life and works, but the lack of conflict makes it hard to latch onto. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 SXSW Film Festival.) Released in 1994, Tom Petty’s Wildflowers, the second solo project that he recorded away from his longtime band The Heartbreakers, has gone on to assume a place of prominence in the discography of the late rocker with many—Petty among them—regarding it as the finest work of his career. And yet, for as laid back and relaxed as the final product sounded, it was recorded during an especially tumultuous period in his personal and professional lives, one that included the dissolution of his first marriage, his parting of the ways with original Heartbreakers drummer Stan Lynch and his departure from longtime label MCA in order to sign with Warner Brothers. Continue Reading →

Curious tales of lost children, doomed startups, and the pressures of being a female stand-up stud Day 1 of SXSW's documentary offerings. (This dispatch is part of our coverage of the 2021 SXSW Film Festival.) The first batch of documentaries premiering at SXSW Film Festival’s Documentary Spotlight section were high profile stories with a cultural relevance to America today that forces audiences to rethink truth and tradition. It’s a readily packaged set of docs to start out, all of them already picked up for distribution and with nationally engaging stories. While they each have their little quirks and flaws, they manage to get at a significant shift in thinking and outlook on our lives as Americans, for better and for worse.  Continue Reading →

The first feature-length documentary dedicated to Tina Turner leaves out too much to be truly engaging. “This film, and the musical, are a kind of closure” says executive producer Erwin Bach, who's also partner to Tina Turner for over three decades. The music icon has, in many ways, been asked to tell the same story over and over again. Even when Turner attempted to silence the nagging questions by “journalists” about the abuse in her past by writing a biography (the now infamous I, Tina), the story of her life remained outside of her control.  Directors Daniel Lindsay and T.J Martin attempt to bring an end to the unceasing cycle of questions with their new documentary, Tina. Featuring new private interviews with Turner and those closest to her, along with a stunning array of archival footage, this is the definitive documentary on the pop and soul legend. Most of her, anyway. Continue Reading →

If you’re like me, you may be surprised to find that one of Netflix’s most enduring original franchises is Last Chance U, a documentary series chronicling football players as they juggle sports and academics. Though the show ended after a four-season run last year, Netflix isn’t one to let a recognizable brand name rest. Last Chance U has returned in the form of Last Chance U: Basketball, which shifts the focus from the Friday night lights of football to the indoor basketball fields of East Los Angeles Community College. Continue Reading →

When Billie Eilish met with director R.J. Cutler to discuss her documentary Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, she had an odd request: “I want it to be like The Office.” Eilish, known to be a stan of the NBC comedy (she sampled dialogue from the show in her song “my strange addiction”), wanted to drop the audience into the world of her and her family as she rises from a 13-year-old viral video sensation to a 18-year-old Grammy winner. Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry is an epic journey of the on and offstage life of the musical prodigy. Continue Reading →

Pelé is the kind of sports figure it feels like you’re just sort of born having some knowledge of. I couldn’t tell you why I know who Pelé is, particularly as an American with a serious aversion to sports, but I knew he was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, soccer players of all time. I seemed to have absorbed the information out of the ether. But the new Netflix documentary Pelé (not to be confused with the 2016 biopic) corrected that. Continue Reading →

The most profound thing that’s shared in Rodney Ascher’s latest mind-expanding documentary comes at the beginning. One of the film’s “eyewitnesses”, Paul Gude, gives a brief history lesson on how humans understand themselves based on the highest form of technology at the time.  Continue Reading →

Young millennials and xennials appear in slow motion, one after another, in front of a bright pink wall—tossing their heads back in faux laughter, leaping into the air, resting hands on their hips—all to capture the perfect pic for the ‘gram. Narration lets us know that all these people snapping all these pics in front of the perfect Pepto-Bismol pink wall have made it one of the single most popular tourist attractions in Los Angeles. That’s right. A wall. Not a wall like the Great Wall of China or the Berlin Wall, but the wall of a Paul Smith, a boutique that sells $700 blazers and $150 T-shirts. Continue Reading →

The gimmick to Kevin Macdonald's worldwide snapshot of 24 hours has lost its novelty this deep into the social media age. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) A little over 10 years ago, Kevin Macdonald & Zillah Bowes directed a documentary fully comprised of footage that people across the world recorded over one day. That was July 24, 2010, and the documentary, Life in a Day, premiered that following January. On July 25 of last year, the same production method went into effect to create Life in a Day 2020. Of course, 2020 was a much different year. Hell, it’s still going on now, and some even turned it into a meme of a year. What a difference a decade makes. The big shift here isn’t just the time. It’s the fact that the approach isn’t special at this point. We all know what 2020 was like because we all lived it, sure, but on top of that, the entire world documented it ad nauseum. There’s no reason to consolidate all of this into a movie. It doesn’t even quite feel like a movie at this point. This gimmick may have worked 10 years ago, but that’s because it was a specific time when people recorded a lot, not quite everything. The sliver of novelty is gone now. Continue Reading →

Marilyn Agrelo’s documentary soaks you in the warm bath of nostalgia for Jim Henson's long-running Muppet masterpiece. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) For most people—yours truly included—it will be impossible to look at Street Gang: How We Got To Sesame Street in a completely objective manner. From the moment it debuted in 1969, it has changed and influenced the ways in which children learn—largely for the better—and continues to do so more than a half-century later. Who among the show’s generations of fans wouldn’t want to see a film charting how the show came to be and featuring a generous helping of beloved clips and behind-the-scenes footage to boot? Marilyn Agrelo’s documentary provides all that and more. While the end result may not revolutionize the documentary form in the way that the show shattered notions of what could be accomplished in children’s television, viewers will presumably be too content to soak in the warm nostalgia bath in front of them. Continue Reading →