154 Best Releases From the Genre Documentary (Page 7)

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 →

Parker Hill and Isabel Bethencourt's observational documentary takes us through the complexities of awkward teen girlhood. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) Being a teenager is hard. This period of life contains the contradictory belief that you can take care of yourself while also dealing with crippling insecurities. Honestly, Britney Spears said it best when she sang, "I'm not a girl but not yet a woman."  Continue Reading →

Theo Anthony's new documentary threads together film theory, politics, and philosophy to great success. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) Everyone is a filmmaker now. It’s so common that it isn’t particularly special in some regards, but that’s not to say we’ve reached the apex of the art form. In fact, the arc has been going for almost 150 years now since astronomer Jules Janssen created the Janssen revolver and, in the process, created what some consider to be the first film ever. Fast forward to present day and the approach hasn’t completely changed. But it’s not so much a matter of same or different: it’s a matter of more. Ubiquity is one thing, but omnipresence is another. It’d feel incomplete to approach the topic solely from a technological perspective. Thankfully, All Light, Everywhere doesn’t. Theo Anthony weaves history, film theory, philosophy, and politics to explore the limits of perception in cinema, often while playing with the syntax of documentary filmmaking. It’s a dense 105 minutes, but it’s almost always riveting. It’s part tableau and part interrogation. The lynchpin, however, is how its literacy grounds the self-awareness it seeks to deconstruct. If every example of filmmaking here hinges on a god complex, this picture is an agnostic interrogation of those very principles. Continue Reading →

Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson's documentary about the Harlem Cultural Festival is insightful and loving. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) The word “Woodstock” enters consciousness at a young age. It has become synonymous with classic rock, with music festivals, and with a decade of counterculture. With an estimated 400,000, Woodstock cemented itself as a part of popular culture, an ironic shift in its original meaning and its now-reformed image. Continue Reading →

Debbie Lum’s engrossing documentary about scary-smart teens and the arduous college application process will make you both nostalgic for and glad to be done with high school. Back when I was in high school, during the Pleistocene Era, applying for college meant filling out a piece of paper, meeting once or twice with your indifferent guidance counselor, and then waiting for an envelope to come in the mail. It was a solitary experience, where often you didn’t know what schools your classmates wanted to get into until they got into them (or didn’t). Now, however, it’s a far more elaborate process, sometimes starting as early as junior year, and involving essays, interviews, and hours and hours of preparation, at the service of a gradually decreasing acceptance rate. Debbie Lum’s documentary Try Harder! focuses on a year in one high school, as its students muddle through an exhausting, often dispiriting college application experience. It’s surprisingly fascinating, and endlessly charming. San Francisco’s Lowell High School is one of the most highly ranked public high schools in the country, with a student body made up entirely of the future in science and technology. These kids are way smarter than me, and probably you, and probably most adults, with enviable confidence to go with it. They have the poise of people who have spent much of their lives always knowing the answer to the next problem, and never questioning that they have bright and successful futures in front of them. That confidence and poise wavers a bit once they discover just how competitive and disappointing applying for college can be. With college acceptance rates dropping by 50% over the past 15 years, the numbers seem to be stacked against them from the beginning, and that’s even with astonishing SAT scores and endless extracurricular activities on their resumes. Continue Reading →

The Netflix documentary series We Are: The Brooklyn Saints begins with a collection of voiceovers from Brooklyn residents. This narration talks about the misguided perceptions the general public has about Brooklyn and its denizens. “Brooklyn is more than killing and the gangs,” one man says while another notes that the borough is “more than what’s on the news." These lines reflect the thesis of the show, which is to show a whole other side of Brooklyn by following a local youth football team. Continue Reading →

The first thing you need to know about Painting With John is that you won’t come away from it learning how to paint. Host John Lurie admits in the second episode that, because most of his art is intuitive, he doesn’t know how to teach it, nor does he think just anyone can paint. You won’t learn anything about the history of painting, or the process, or even what supplies one needs to pick up painting as a hobby. This show is strictly about vibing, and somehow, it works. Continue Reading →

A Perfect Planet Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JIs6xEYniM&ab_channel=discoveryplus Continue Reading →

Autistic people deal with a lot of stereotypes. Based on everyday public perception, autistic people are emotionless robots who act like Jim Parsons’ Sheldon Cooper. We’re self-absorbed. We’re incapable of being independent. On and on the list of toxic assumptions go. It’s daunting to confront those concepts, but that doesn’t mean autistic people haven’t fought back against them.  Continue Reading →

Like the best social justice documentaries, the outspoken Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was able to speak truth to power in ways that got peoples’ attention and showed us how we got into our current state, and what could be waiting for us in the future if we’re not careful. Continue Reading →

It feels like a lifetime ago that I saw Ariana Grande perform at Toronto’s Sound Academy, a now-defunct venue that held just a few thousand people. The fact that it was actually as recent as 2013 makes excuse me, i love you, a new Netflix film anchored by one of her 2019 shows at London’s O2 Arena, particularly awe-inspiring.      Continue Reading →

The smell of buttery popcorn and the sounds of shuffling of plastic cases only paints a partial picture of the era of a trip to a video rental store. During the '90s, the video store reigned supreme, and there was one giant that ruled them all: Blockbuster. There was once a store opening every seventeen minutes; now they’re reduced to one lone outpost in Bend, Oregon. The rise and fall of this entertainment empire is the subject of Taylor Morden’s documentary The Last Blockbuster. This quirky documentary follows the nostalgia trail, taking us on a journey from Blockbuster’s glory days to its last stand in Bend, Oregon. Continue Reading →

Since its premiere at this year’s Berlinale film festival, much of the press around Viktor Kossakovsky’s involving, subtly radical Gunda has fixated on the intimacy of its form. Presented without any narration, subtitles, or extraneous context and shot in stark but crucially un-distracting black and white photography (Kossakovsky has been forthright about not wanting to draw attention to beauty), this is pastoral portraiture that’s keenly aware of reflecting — but not exerting its purpose. Continue Reading →

FX's true crime documentary examines one man's obsessive search for the truth about his birth father. Is there more to belonging than being told you belong? Is there truly a feeling that we are out of place, out of sync, out of favor with those who surround us? Or is it a lie that gets repeated so often it becomes true? For Gary Stewart of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, these questions are what drive him beyond a simple desire to know and to belong. FX’s new four-part documentary miniseries, The Most Dangerous Animal of All, explores Stewart’s quest for understanding and the fallout of his obsession.  Told in a quiet, confessional style, Stewart stares directly into the camera, his voice occasionally choking with emotion. Abandoned as a baby, Stewart’s trust issues are understandably deep-rooted—and they’re as much a part of his identity as the color of his eyes. Despite being adopted at three months old into a loving family who raised him with strong values, he struggled with the feelings of being unloved, of not belonging anywhere and to anyone. He even has a string of broken marriages to prove it.  One thing that series creators Ross M. Dinerstein and Kief Davidson make clear from the beginning is that identity is a slippery concept. Do our genetics determine who we are or does our environment? Would Gary Stewart have been a more stable adult if he’d never discovered that his birth parents were once a sensational news story, or would the wound of not knowing where he comes from continue to fester?  Continue Reading →

A touching, sensitive documentary traces actor Mark Patton’s journey from horror icon to self-imposed obscurity and back again. Somehow, a whole lot of people missed what A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge was about the first time they saw it. I certainly did as a small-town teenager in the mid 80s, having met exactly one (1) gay person up to that point. We all like to smugly claim that of course we knew it the whole time, but most of us didn’t, not back then. All we knew was that it had an odd vibe for a slasher movie, and that it was unusual for its young male protagonist, Jesse (played by Mark Patton), to be treated like a Final Girl, hero and victim at the same time. Roman Chimienti and Tyler Jensen’s documentary Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street is an insightful, sensitive look at how Patton’s role in the film first destroyed his career, then became an touchstone for gay horror fans years later. It also touches upon the AIDS crisis, and how we’ve only barely begun to scratch the surface when it comes to Hollywood’s casual homophobia. Patton was a promising young actor who had worked with no less than Robert Altman when he was cast in Freddy’s Revenge. Though it was a modest hit, critics and audiences alike had no idea what to think of the “subtext” of Jesse being picked up by his leather-clad gym teacher at a gay bar, or that same teacher being whipped bare-ass in a shower before Freddy kills him, or the delicate, rather effete Jesse often being filmed wearing little more than his underwear, or Jesse uttering the line “He’s inside me! And he wants to take me again!” There was a certain level of having one’s cake and eating it too, particularly by director Jack Sholder and screenwriter David Chaskin, in that Freddy’s Revenge sold itself by trying something new and different, but coyly refusing to articulate what that something actually was. However, Patton knew, and grew increasingly uncomfortable with the amount of “subtext” in the film. Closeted at the time, and with a live-in lover who presented as straight in teen fan magazines (Timothy Patrick Murphy of Dallas), he knew what playing a gay character (or even one that just coded as gay) could do to one’s acting career, let alone actually being gay. As if facing a potential lifetime of typecasting before his career had barely started wasn’t bad enough, once Freddy’s Revenge was proclaimed to be “the gayest horror movie of all time,” Sholder denied it, and Chaskin blamed it on Patton. Dejected, disillusioned, and thrown under the bus, Patton abandoned his career to move off the grid to Mexico, becoming “the Greta Garbo of horror movies” for many years. Continue Reading →

For the month of March, we look back at the vibrant, confrontational, incisive work of one of American filmmaking's most iconic figures. It's hard to say where American filmmaking (especially African-American filmmaking) would be without the impact of one ambitious Brooklynite named Spike Lee. At this point, he's been making films for over twenty-five years, from stone-cold classics like Do the Right Thing and 25th Hour to misguided misfires like She Hate Me and Oldboy. But whether you love or hate a Spike Lee film, you always feel some kind of way about it, which is a testament to Lee's incredible passion. There are no half-measures in Lee's work; it'll either change your life, or make you cock your head in confusion. But even if he doesn't have a perfect batting average as a filmmaker (and who does, really?), Lee's explosive breakout into the American independent film scene, and subsequent longevity, are impossible to deny. One of the most prominent African-American filmmakers in film history, his early successes with She's Gotta Have It, School Daze, and Do the Right Thing (all of which are deeply entrenched in Black culture, relationships, and sociopolitical concerns) turned him into a symbol for Black excellence, and helped usher in a wave of new Black filmmakers to achieve more wide-reaching appeal. What makes Lee's film so divisive -- so easy to celebrate when they're good, so noxious when they're bad -- is his admirable capacity for provocation. There's no room for white comfort, no 'one of the good ones' layering that often allows crossover audiences to distance themselves from the racism and prejudice he explores in many of his works. Characters practically (and often literally) shout their grievances right at the camera, from the montage of racist rants performed by Do the Right Thing's characters partway through the film to Edward Norton's incendiary monologue in the mirror during 25th Hour. They're practically in your face, in the most fitting sense of the word. Continue Reading →

Alexandre O. Philippe sits down for a long, insightful chat with the legendary filmmaker in Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.) Memory: The Origins of Alien, Doc of the Dead, The People vs. George Lucas -- Alexandre O. Philippe has built quite the reputation as a chronicler of the history and sociology of genre film. His documentaries hew more toward the style of the cinematic essay, straightforward but insightful interrogations of his subjects rather than narratively-structured tales in their own right. Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist is no exception: from a distance, it's less of a fully-featured documentary in its own right and more the kind of bonus feature you'd find on an Exorcist Blu-ray. But within those confines, there's plenty of insight to be found, both on the film it's discussing and on the sensibilities of one of Hollywood's most idiosyncratic (and old-school) directors. Continue Reading →

In detailing Pepe the Frog's journey from meme to monster, Feels Good Man charts the corrosive nature of creative ownership. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.) For San Francisco-based artist Matt Furie, it was always just a frog. But for legions of people on the Internet, Pepe the Frog means so much more: a source of joy, a catalyst for hate, and a million things in between. Pepe's been around almost as long as the modern Internet; he caught on in 2005 when Furie uploaded his first digital comic about Pepe (part of the gang in his irreverent slice-of-life comic Boys' Life) to MySpace. It wasn't long before he took off, the frog's carefree, half-lidded expression becoming an avatar for a generation of disaffected, directionless youth finding refuge on social media -- and later, finding himself on the Anti-Defamation League's list of hate symbols. Arthur Jones, an illustrator and animator in his own right, wanted to chart the meme's descent from innocent mascot to icon of the alt-right, and Furie's Sisyphean attempts to reclaim his creation. In Feels Good Man, he manages to accomplish quite a bit more than that: Furie and Pepe become the poster children for the consumptive, corrosive nature of the Internet, and the complications that come from the democratization of art. Continue Reading →