We are now 20 days from the 2020 presidential election, and, thanks in large part to his historical mishandling of the novel coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed 215,000 American lives and counting, President Donald Trump is trailing his Democratic opponent Joe Biden in the polls. One other reason is that the media—in particular the cable-news media—has learned some valuable lessons from the way they covered candidate […]
Documentary film
50 posts
“Cocaine is a hell of a drug,” proclaimed Dave Chappelle’s Rick James, and the same is true of gambling. For proof, just ask Craig Carton, whose world collapsed in 2017 thanks to an addiction to blackjack and the ensuing fraud he perpetrated to pay off his debts. A counselor featured in Wild Card: The Downfall of a Radio Loudmouth equates playing cards for money with snorting […]
Abraham Lincoln was photographed 130 times during the course of his life. But a new Discovery Channel special asks, what if there’s an additional snapshot of the 16th commander-in-chief—on his deathbed? Even setting aside the debatable importance of such a photograph—which wouldn’t prove anything, or provide insights into his final moments—the likelihood that this image could have remained unknown and hidden for 155 years seems very […]
In making sense of former Olympic and Paralympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius’ story, particularly the February 2013 night when he shot and killed his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, it’s best to assume that you’ll never arrive at a satisfying set of answers. All of the evidence in the case in which he was convicted for culpable homicide—and later, murder—in 2014 was circumstantial. No one alive knows the why […]
Errol Morris is one of non-fiction cinema’s all-time greats, a godfather of modern true crime thanks to 1988’s The Thin Blue Line, which famously got Randall Dale Adams off of death row. So when he says that another murderer is innocent of the crimes for which he’s been convicted, it’s necessary to listen—if not to instinctively believe him. And yet A Wilderness of Error, FX’s five-part […]
We’re so inundated with evidence of Donald Trump’s fascistic villainy—these days, largely related to the pandemic he’s neglected and mismanaged to the tune of 200,000 dead Americans and counting—that it’s sometimes easy to forget that he’s also a traitorous puppet who won the 2016 election with Russian assistance. Enter Agents of Chaos, a two-part HBO documentary from the insanely prolific Alex Gibney (debuting Sept. 23) which […]
Courtesy The New Corporation In 2003, Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott’s acclaimed documentary The Corporation argued that the American impulse to regard corporations as “people” is essentially amoral and psychopathological. The film also emphasized that, in the age of globalization, conferring personhood on corporations is no longer a peculiarly American fetish. The film featured interviews with left-of-center heavyweights such as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn and […]
In October of 2006, the FBI released an intelligence assessment titled, “White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement.” Though the document—culled from FBI investigations and open sources—was heavily redacted, it reached a number of disturbing conclusions. The assessment revealed that white supremacists “have historically engaged in strategic efforts to infiltrate and recruit from law enforcement communities”; that many of these white-supremacist infiltrators are known as “ghost skins” […]
For months, the Conway family’s drama had played out in aggressively public fashion. There was George Conway, the attorney and co-founder of The Lincoln Project, launching daily Twitter barbs at President Trump; Kellyanne Conway, the president’s fiercely loyal counselor, defending his increasingly unhinged behavior; and in the middle of it all Claudia Conway, the couple’s teenage daughter, creating TikTok videos about how hellish all the sniping […]
VENICE—If two hours of shaky footage of a sex-starved 34-year-old Dennis Hopper eating, drinking, and smoking as 55-year-old Orson Welles grills him about everything from communist Catholics to the difference between sex and love or magic and miracles sounds like a great movie, then Hopper/Welles, which debuted at the scaled-down Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, is for you. For everyone else, it borders on painful. The […]
In the history of love stories, few have been as strange and unlikely as the one depicted in My Octopus Teacher. Netflix’s first original South African feature documentary concerns the wholly unexpected, and ostensibly transformative, affair struck between Craig Foster, a South African filmmaker, and an amphibious mollusk that he discovered in the Atlantic Ocean near the small seaside bungalow he frequented as a kid. It’s […]
On the night of June 24, 2009, Michael Jackson finished rehearsing for a set of comeback performances and returned to his rented mansion in Holmby Hills, a posh neighborhood on Los Angeles’ Westside. The King of Pop’s personal doctor, Conrad Murray, arrived at the residence shortly after midnight. Around 14 hours later, Jackson was pronounced dead—with no evidence of foul play. Two months later, the Los […]
VENICE—When Martin Scorsese can give hours of his precious time to talk about shoes, you know this is about more than what’s underfoot. In Luca Guadagnino’s new documentary about the life of Salvatore Ferragamo (Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams), we see much more than a story about shoes. It is a story about desire, immigration, and heartbreak. All that’s missing is a full-on admission that this is […]
Matt Furie, the cartoonist and creator of the Pepe the Frog character (though crucially, not the meme), reminds me of quite a few of my male friends growing up in Eastern Pennsylvania, and even more of them now that I live in California. He’s carefree, weird in a fun way, queer-adjacent, creative, and a vessel of good vibes. It’s this personality type that draws people in: […]
We’ll likely never know exactly how Osama bin Laden personally reconciled his many jarring contradictions, but we can be reasonably certain he would have loathed Bin Laden’s Hard Drive, National Geographic’s deep dive into the cache of digital and written materials that were confiscated by the Navy SEAL team that stormed his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2, 2011, and ended his life on the […]
Robin Williams’ self-inflicted death on Aug. 11, 2014, at the age of 63 shocked the world, not only because few knew that the acclaimed actor had been suffering in any way, but because despite his history of substance-abuse problems, his effusive, uninhibited, hyperactive spirit was so joyous and infectious that it simply didn’t gibe with suicide. With no concrete explanation for why he’d taken his own […]
On a nondescript April night in 1990, 21-year-old Dale Wayne Sigler walked into a Brazoria County, Texas, Subway shop and robbed it of $400. When the man behind the counter, John William Zeltner Jr., attempted to flee into the back room, he was shot six times. The “overkill” nature of the crime implied that the two weren’t mere strangers, and the ensuing revelation that Sigler knew […]
I dare you to examine the 1989 murder of Yusuf Hawkins and tell me America has changed. Yusuf Hawkins was a 16-year-old Black teenager who, along with three friends, went to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, one summer night to look at a used car his buddy Troy had found for sale in the newspaper. Yusuf didn’t know anyone in Bensonhurst, but he and his friends found themselves surrounded […]
“This is like Scientology. It’s a cult where the leader is keeping people through fear and dependency and now, blackmail,” offers Sarah Edmondson in The Vow. Edmondson, 43, is one of several former members of NXIVM, the Albany-based sex cult masquerading as a self-help group, whose testimony illuminates HBO’s nine-part docuseries. Before serving as a whistleblower, she was indoctrinated into the secretive NXIVM sect DOS, standing […]
On more than one sunny day during my childhood, my friends and I took a drive down to Vernon, New Jersey’s Action Park, which was advertised incessantly on tri-state area TV as a venue of non-stop good times courtesy of “75 of the wildest, wettest family rides in the world.” While its commercials promised family fun, however, Action Park really delivered a traumatizing sort of excitement, […]
The aliens aren’t coming—they may already be here! Or, at least, that’s what recent news suggests the U.S. government suspects. Just this past week, the Pentagon announced it was creating a new task force to look into the existence of UFOs that may have been witnessed flying around and over U.S. military bases. That development was spurred by a New York Times report that, despite previous […]
Any ‘Gay and Lesbian History’ college course will dive into closeted white suburban gay male representations. In fact, this group of men, sneaking around in mid-century America, have received a fair bit of Hollywood attention in recent years. There was fashion designer Tom Ford’s adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s haunting novel A Single Man, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Oscar vehicle The Imitation Game, and Luca Guadagnino’s take on André […]
Though I might like to claim otherwise, I’m no expert on big-screen T&A&D. Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies, however, makes a bid for being the definitive documentary on the subject. Driven by a cornucopia of film clip and talking heads—led by actors, directors, historians and critics—it delivers a thorough chronological timeline of cinematic nakedness. Too bad, then, that when it comes to actually […]
Ramona Diaz’s latest documentary, A Thousand Cuts, stars former CNN correspondent and Rappler co-founder Maria Ressa, a formidable Filipino reporter who was born in the country yet spent much of her youth, as well as her college years, in the U.S. Ressa became famous herself when she began being targeted by the violent populist government of President Rodrigo Duterte and its online followers. The attacks have […]
Donald Trump does not want you to see Immigration Nation. In fact, according to filmmakers Christina Clusiau and Shaul Schwarz, his administration tried to strong-arm them into delaying their Netflix docuseries on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) cruel implementation of the president’s zero-tolerance immigration policy until after the 2020 election. “There were so many asks that just were completely out of line,” Schwarz tells The Daily […]
There will be dogs. So many strange, wonderful, extraordinary dogs. MYSTICAL MERMAID Dog: Hero (Standard Poodle) The mermaid design was planned out over a span of about 2 years. For this design to work as planned, I had to grow Hero’s hair on his topknot for over two years. My idea was to make the dog completely disappear into the design. All the colors used were […]
A portrait of the way in which our lives are shaped not only by our parents and the examples they set—and values they instill—but by the traumatic events we’re forced to endure, Father Soldier Son is a quietly incisive and moving Netflix documentary about a military family beset by hardship. Prepare to cry more than once before its opening credits roll, and then make sure to […]
Try having a debate about religion. Go ahead. I’ll wait. How did it go? Poorly, I bet. For whatever reason, religion is often “off the table” when it comes to the serious examination of its impact on society. If one does attempt to debate religion’s place in the world with the devout, it often unravels into combative condescension and eventually ends with clenched fists topped off […]
Of the many things we’ve (temporarily) lost thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, late nights at the local bar are one of the most dearly missed—unless, of course, you’re a knucklehead in Florida, Texas, Arizona, Georgia or California who continues to visit watering holes without wearing a mask or practicing social distancing, personal and public safety be damned. For those responsible Americans pining for the beloved and […]
I’m an immigrant—and I’m not alone. Padma Lakshmi opens each episode of her new Hulu series Taste the Nation with that mantra, and it’s one that’s powering the food author and TV host during the Trump administration’s all-out war on immigrants, from the “Muslim ban” and separating children from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border to the recent suspension of immigrant-worker visas through 2021. “I find […]
When I was 19 years old, my family moved to Cali, Colombia, for my father’s job. His name was Tom Hargrove, and he was an agricultural journalist working in rural communities to fight hunger and famine. Driving to work on Sept. 23, 1994, he was waved off the road, pulled from his car at gunpoint, thrown into the back of a pickup truck and driven deep […]
On Tuesday afternoon, TIDAL, the Jay-Z-owned streaming service that announced its arrival with one of the more embarrassing public displays in recent memory, provided a millions-strong platform for an alleged serial rapist. In since-deleted social media posts, TIDAL hyped the latest episode of its podcast Drink Champs, hosted by the rapper N.O.R.E. and DJ EFN. The topic of conversation was Black Lives Matter and the fight […]
Bryce Dallas Howard thought she was making a comedy. She quickly learned, however, that when men talk about their fathers and fathers talk about their children, they cry. A lot. In Dads, the documentary that the actress, whose career has traveled from The Village to Jurassic World, directed about modern fathering around the globe, Judd Apatow cries. Will Smith cries. Jimmy Fallon cries. The men from […]
Though he wears the wooly red cap that Jacques Cousteau transformed into the emblem of deep sea divers, the figure whom famed oceanic photographer Amos Nachoum most closely resembles in Picture of His Life is fictional: Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab. Possessed by an obsession with a creature of the deep that holds, for him, profound symbolic meaning, Nachoum is a man driven to risk life and […]
This week, Soledad O’Brien releases the documentary Outbreak: The First Response—a look at how public health cared for its most vulnerable in the place where COVID-19 first arrived in the U.S. The documentary airs on Hearst Television’s NBC and CBS stations at 8 p.m. on Friday, and on Hearst Television’s ABC stations on Wednesday at 8 p.m. America is burning. Or, more correctly, America has been […]
In 1986, Ricky Powell was selling Frozade lemon ices on the streets of New York City, he never imagined he’d become a legendary hip-hop photographer. But that year, Powell ditched the cart and joined opening act the Beastie Boys on Run DMC’s “Raising Hell” tour across America. He eventually became the Beastie Boys’ photographer of choice, capturing the trio (Adam Horovitz, Adam Yauch and Mike Diamond) […]
From one vantage point, the death of Akai Gurley was a familiar story. On Nov. 20, 2014, while walking down a darkened stairwell with a companion in Brooklyn’s Pink Houses projects, the unarmed 28-year-old black man was shot by a New York City Police Department officer. Though ambulances were called to the scene, Gurley didn’t survive. At a present moment in which George Floyd’s murder has […]
Be formless, shapeless like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend. — Bruce Lee The philosophy of being water first originated from Bruce Lee’s teenage training as a martial […]
Amongst those who know, Diana Kennedy is understood to be the English-speaking world’s authority on traditional Mexican cooking. But not many people—particularly not many people outside of Mexico—know. In the documentary Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy, digitally streamable now and available on demand June 19, director Elizabeth Carroll, a foodie herself, pays close attention to the woman who has for decades evaded celebrity status while carefully and […]
Leave it to Netflix to drop a Jeffrey Epstein docuseries in the midst of a global pandemic that’s left many Americans trapped indoors with lots of free time to binge. On May 27, the four-part series Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich will premiere on the streaming behemoth. Based on the book by James Patterson, it details the harrowing stories of Epstein’s (mainly underage) victims, from his sexual […]
Norma McCorvey never knew who to trust. She was declared a ward of the state at 10. Then her father walked out, leaving her in the hands of an alcoholic mother and first cousin once removed, who she said raped her numerous times. By 16, she was married to Woody McCorvey. When he allegedly began abusing her, she left, giving birth to their daughter a year […]
In its final 20 minutes, the documentary film AKA Jane Roe delivers quite the blow to conservatives who have weaponized the story of Jane Roe herself—real name, Norma McCorvey—to argue that people with uteruses should have to carry any and all pregnancies to term. McCorvey, who died in 2017, became Jane Roe when, as a young homeless woman, she was unable to get a legal or […]
Dinara Kasko, a Ukrainian baker and an architect by training, used a 3D printer to create cake molds with motifs inspired by plasterwork in the Palace of Versailles. She stacked three layers of berry biscuit crumb of various shades of red, which contrasted the white mousse on the outside. Sheer elegance and a mastery of both flavor and design. Sam Bompas, of the British duo Bompas & […]
On Oct. 28, 2015, Amel Alzakout embarked on a boat from the western coast of Turkey, destined for the Greek island of Lesvos. A Syrian refugee, Alzakout was hoping to join her partner in Germany, where he, a filmmaker, had been invited for the Berlin International Film Festival and had subsequently applied for asylum. Alzakout tried to obtain a spouse’s visa, then a work visa, but […]
In the early hours Friday, those braving tourist-free Times Square were treated to an arresting sight: a white billboard projecting the words ‘Trump Death Clock’ in big black letters; underneath, a counter in red reading ‘44,809.’ These are the deaths that, according to two of the world’s leading epidemiologists, could have been avoided had the Trump administration acted just one week prior to March 16, when […]
Bernie Blackout, a new VICE TV documentary directed by Pat McGee examining the mainstream media’s alleged bias against the Sanders campaign, is rooted in independent and alternative journalism instead of the corporate cable news outlets like MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN. While McGee’s film straightforwardly breaks down the cynical function of corporate media (that is, to turn a profit, not to tell the truth), the documentary […]
In the feature documentary Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics, now streaming on Netflix, celebrities ranging from the Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz to comedian Ben Stiller recount their experiences tripping on drugs, ranging from the wild (rapper A$AP Rocky claims “a rainbow shot out of my dick” while having sex on acid) to the scary (actress Rosie Perez ended up topless at a nightclub before […]
Thank G-d my mother is already dead. I catch myself saying that a lot these days. Nine years ago, her cancer diagnosis and inevitable death were the most harrowing experiences I could have ever imagined. And for as long as I could, I didn’t. Until days before she died, I found the words to ask her: “Mom, how do you live without your mother?” I didn’t […]
Remember Quibi? The mobile-optimized streaming service for attention-deficit entertainment? Well, it seems like it has finally found a niche. Sports documentaries have recently become a focal point in television programming, particularly now that docuseries are widely available via streaming. ESPN has so far been at the forefront, with its 30 for 30 series and, most recently, The Last Dance. But Quibi is making a bold entrance […]
With a title like Trial by Media, you’d naturally expect Netflix’s true crime series—executive produced by CNN and The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin, alongside George Clooney and Grant Heslov—to focus on the multifaceted ways print and TV reporting affected, for better or worse, high-profile legal cases. Like a student term paper that sporadically forgets to relate all of its evidence to its thesis statement, the streaming […]