The 95th Academy Awards Race: Best Original Song
The Nominees are . . . • "Lift Me [...]
Documentary
Conversations With a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes (2022)
I never really thought much about John Wayne Gacy. That’s largely because I don’t spend a lot of time delving into the lives of serial killers – when you’ve seen one serial killer documentary, it seems like you’ve seen them all. Gacy in particular is troublesome to me; not just his crimes but his legacy. […]
Return to Space (2022)
Netflix’s SpaceX documentary Return to Space is a work of love and hope and wonder – at least when it’s not stroking the fevering dreams of Elon Musk. Here is a documentary for and about one of the wealthiest men in the world, a man whose dreams of returning to space dance in his eyes as […]
Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off (2022)
Needless to say, every sport has a hero who rises beyond the competitive arena and becomes a household name even to those who don’t follow it. Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth, Venus and Serena, Shaun White, Tiger Woods, Muhammad Ali, Walter Payton, Wayne Gretzky, Michael Phelps all have names their defy their discipline and are known […]
Babi Yar. Context (2022)
The approach is sort of striking at first, if not a touch off-putting. Babi Yar. Context sets itself apart from your standard documentary by simply giving us images, video, faces, snatches of dialogue and interspersed are helpful pieces of text so that we know where we are without gobs of commentary. Sergei Loznitsa’s film is […]
How to Survive a Pandemic (2022)
As a frequent visitor to the trough of the documentary format, I knew instinctively as the pandemic was ringing alarm bells early in 2020, that this would be the landscape of the genre for the next few years, maybe decades. There is no end to the stream of documentaries dealing with this scourge but what […]
The Automat (2022)
A smart documentarian could do themselves no better favor then to gateway their work with an interview with Mel Brooks, and indeed The Automat opens with a narration by the comedy legend that sets off a subject that he knows all too well. In fact, he not only gives his thoughts and ruminations, but Brooks […]
Lucy and Desi (2022)
Early in the Amazon Prime documentary Lucy and Desi, there is a photograph of the famous couple in a dress rehearsal for “I Love Lucy.” It is a black and white photo of Lucy looking guilty and Desi looking suspicious. As I looked at this photo, I realized that these two people have always felt […]
What Happened, Brittany Murphy?
I’ll admit it, I’m a little late to the door with this one. What Happened, Brittany Murphy? came out in mid-October and I’m just now getting around to it, and that’s for good reason. The outward reason being that when I saw the ads for this, I kind of already knew what I was in […]
