Documentaries

An autobiographical self-portrait and the feature film debut of Rebeca Huntt, Beba generated considerable buzz ahead of its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. A defiantly uncommercial filmic essay that sifts through questions of mental health, family history, racial identity, and general late-Millennial occupational uncertainty from the perspective of a young Afro-Latina woman of Dominican and Venezuelan parentage, this documentary is unlikely to connect with a mainstream audience; it honestly feels like an act of cinematic self-care as much as anything else.

It is impossible to overstate the extraordinary success or impact of Dionne Warwick, the music superstar who for 44 years was one the biggest hit-makers in the world, with 56 singles making the Hot 100. Though there have been many recordings of her TV performances, Dionne Warwick: Don’t Make Me Over, which is directed by David Heilbroner and Dave Wooley, is the first comprehensive documentary about the legendary crossover singer and political activist.

Oscar and Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker Eva Orner was visiting her family in Australia in the summer of 2019/20 when catastrophic bushfires broke out across the country. Australia has always been a continent ravaged by fire.

Julia opens to the raucous, back-and-forth guitar licks of Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire” — a decidedly unanticipated and seemingly outside-the-box choice for co-directors Julie Cohen and Betsy West’s genial nonfiction assaying of author and celebrity chef Julia Child, which otherwise trades largely in traditional rhythms, and unfolds in expected ways. But then again, maybe, given its lyrical evocation of “only one burning desire,” it appropriately captures the singular passion of its subject.

In awards season speeches for his lauded performance in Joker, in 2020, Joaquin Phoenix first thanked the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for recognizing the link between animal agriculture and climate change by serving a plant-based meal at the Golden Globes. One month later, in his Academy Award acceptance speech, he condemned speciesism (and specifically the dairy industry taking baby calves from their mothers), connecting the issue to broader fights against injustice and the belief that any one nation, people, race, or gender has the right to dominate, control, use, and exploit another with impunity.

The opening credits of the new documentary Fauci alternates between footage venerating Dr. Anthony Fauci and heated news and radio clips suggesting the world-renowned immunologist and Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases should be fired, jailed, or even executed, and have his head “put on a pike to serve as an example to other bureaucrats.

Despite, or perhaps also because of the restrictions of Fidel Castro’s regime, in the 1980s Cuban heavy metal band Zeus became quite popular – and a target. “They hated us because we were different.

The title of the new Netflix original documentary Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed, produced by Melissa McCarthy and her husband Ben Falcone, seems to augur the heady examination of a blend of jostling, at-odds impulses. And it’s true that there is a good bit of lurid legal wrangling in the movie, which details the battle over the estate of the genteel-voiced host of the instructional show The Joy of Painting, an Emmy Award-winning television series that ran for 31 seasons across 11 years before Ross died at age 52 in 1995 from Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

On March 12, 2020, all 41 theaters in the famed Broadway district of midtown Manhattan shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nearly 18 months later, with the reopening of the majority of live stage shows slated to take place starting in September and stretching into October, director Oren Jacoby’s On Broadway arrives as a perfectly timed valentine.

The passionate subjects are the stars of director Ashley O’Shay’s Unapologetic, a thought-provoking new documentary opening on August 27 in New York City and Toronto, and September 3 in Los Angeles. If its loose structure renders this timely look at the movement for Black lives and dignity something of a sermon to the choir, the film possesses at least one attribute which marks it as a worthwhile offering of nonfiction advocacy for those interested in current events and public affairs: a hardwired connection to the unswerving, electric moral certitude of youth.