Documentaries

Decades of twisty crime dramas and political thrillers have collectively hard-sold audiences on the notion that the truth is never what it seems. And so the overlapping stories, salacious and sordid, which Victoria’s Secret: Angels & Demons put under the microscope create the framework of a jaw-dropping expose.

The onslaught of COVID has already birthed a big surge of nonfiction cinematic pandemic offerings, and future waves are as reliably guaranteed as are real-world spikes in highly transmissible omicron offshoot variant infections. Many such films will, unfortunately, trade largely in carbon-copied tragedy, with only a few details changed.

Will Smith’s shocking assault of Chris Rock at the Academy Awards not only embarrassed himself, but robbed too his King Richard collaborators of their chance at a special evening, and a lifetime’s worth of associated good memories. It would be a compounded shame if, further down the line, that single act also overshadowed the full and true story of the very complex character Smith portrayed in the film, the father of tennis legends Venus and Serena Williams.

He only helmed two feature films in his lifetime, but for those in the know, Jack Garfein remains a venerated and influential figure in the entertainment community, a teacher whose impact was seen in foundational shifts in screen performance and storytelling. Director Tessa Louise-Salomé’s artful new documentary The Wild One, which recently enjoyed its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, lovingly illuminates this loquacious but still somewhat enigmatic artist, a celebrated Broadway director perhaps best known as the co-founder of Actors Studio West.

An official selection of the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival, where it recently made its world premiere, the new documentary Endangered serves up an engrossing and, in many ways, rather dispiriting look at deliberate and coordinated attacks on the fourth estate, and their relationship to the erosion of public faith and trust which has fed a wave of social disorientation. Co-directed by Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, and executive produced by Ronan Farrow, the film unfolds over the course of one year, and takes as its subjects four journalists living and working in ostensibly democratic countries as they face an array of assaults both on their livelihood in general and, in many instances, via very personal targeting.

The adage “write what you know” is such an old saw that many aspiring authors, songwriters, and other artists almost seem to instinctively recoil from it. Filmmakers, especially these days, seem enchanted instead by digital technology that, in both the fiction and nonfiction realms, allows for inexpensive indulgences of far-flung horizons.

The film opens with a simple shot of the sky. Although the image is in black and white, it’s clear that we’re looking at a blue mid-summer day.

“The change we need is so profound that it’s often described as impossible,” says the transgender, non-binary subject of the new documentary Uýra: The Rising Forest. “But the impossible is coming.

The shorthand explanation of Juneteenth, formally established as a federal holiday in the United States in 2021, is that it commemorates the emancipation of enslaved Black Americans, while also honoring their resilience and celebrating the breadth and scope of their cultural contributions. The date itself marks the anniversary of General Order No.

Frances “Franco” Stevens is the founder of the iconic lesbian Curve Magazine, which was launched in 1991 as Deneuve. As a broke young woman, who had been rejected by her family, when she came out as a lesbian and had briefly been homeless, Stevens did not take no for an answer when investors did not believe in her vision.