Documentaries

Jeffrey Schwarz, like most cinephiles, has a special love for the film Sunset Boulevard. While the award-winning documentarian thought he knew everything about Billy Wilder’s 1950 Hollywood masterpiece, which introduced the world to Norma Desmond, an aging actress brilliantly played by Golden Globe-winning Best Actress Gloria Swanson, he was surprised to discover a unique afterlife to the cinematic classic.

An easygoing and consistently engaging if somewhat staidly told documentary biopic, Barbara Lee: Speaking Truth to Power benefits from both the considerable charisma and ongoing relevance of its subject, and the important lessons to be drawn from her fight for positive societal change. With interviewees including Alice Walker, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cory Booker, Van Jones, Danny Glover, and the late John Lewis, among others, director Abby Ginzberg’s movie, receiving a nationwide theatrical release alongside digital distribution on iTunes, Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video, shines a light on the 12-term Congresswoman, and how her personal experiences connect to her public service.

Around the globe, football is far and away the world’s most dominant and popular sport. In the United States, though, it’s known as soccer, and American football (that oddly named game which actually involves very little kicking) is the cultural king.

While advances in treatment have bolstered the cumulative cure rate, incidences of childhood cancer have spiked roughly 30 percent since the 1970s, and it seems not unreasonable to assume some causal link between this statistical climb and a fairly sustained pattern of environmental deregulation and degradation. Phosfate, an investigative documentary newly available on streaming, uses Florida as a compelling case study for this premise, resulting in an agitative work that sounds like a clarion call for greater citizen involvement in protecting water and natural resources.

In January 2019, outside the Lincoln Memorial, cameras captured an interaction between a group of teenage boys from Kentucky’s Covington Catholic, in Washington D. C.

Born in 1931, Alvin Ailey Jr. , the pioneering African-American dancer, director, and choreographer, who helped change the landscape of modern dance, would have been 90 this year.

An engaging, candid documentary look at award-winning Swedish auteur Roy Andersson as told chiefly through the lens of his work on his self-proclaimed last film, Being a Human Person is a movie that gives ample consideration to its subject’s primary professional thematic preoccupations: vulnerability, insecurity, and the weight of mortality. It also serves to celebrate more broadly humanity’s inherent need for art, and its use as a salve for what burdens us.

Oliver Stone’s latest project JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, is a documentary which explores the factual side of the events he dramatized in JFK (1991), which earned him a Golden Globe exactly 30 years ago. JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, narrated by Donald Sutherland and Whoopi Goldberg, premieres at the Cannes Film Festival on July 11, while JFK will be screened on the giant Plage screen.

In his new documentary, The Velvet Underground, the quintessentially indie filmmaker Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven, Carol) tells the story of the legendary, seminal rock 'n' roll band, led by Lou Reed and John Cale, by situating their work in the broader cultural contexts of New York City of the 1960s.   The feature world-premiered out of competition at this year’s Cannes Fest, ahead of its October 15 release by Amazon in select theaters, and later on Apple TV+.

In today’s culture, where endless virtue signaling and the perpetual outrage machine of social media co-exist alongside authentically distressing news stories, it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish between considered, sincere disapproval or agitation and performative offense. But in 1995, Larry Clark’s Kids, starring a blend of unknown and non-professional actors, provoked genuine scandalous reactions.