82nd Annual Golden Globes® LIVE COVERAGE.

Documentaries

  • Film

Docs: “Word Is Out” (1977) Restored

Word is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives debuted in 1977 as the first feature-length documentary about lesbian and gay identities and lifestyles, made by openly gay filmmakers. The Mariposa Film Group, comprising Peter Adair, Nancy Adair, Andrew Brown, Rob Epstein, Lucy Massie Phenix (Winter Soldier) and Veronica Selver, sought to create a film that would be free of political didactics, one that would simply tell the stories of what it means to grow up gay in America.
  • Film

Docs: The Times of Harvey Milk (1984)

Though better known, Gus Van Sant's 2008 Golden Globe and Oscar winning biopic, Milk, starring Sean Penn, was not the first feature about the gay pioneering politician Harvey Milk, or about the socio-political era in which he rose to power as the first openly gay man elected to office. In 1984, Robert Epstein and Bob Friedman made the The Times of Harvey Milk, a feature, which, among other things, prepared the background for other features about AIDS, such as Parting Glances (1986) Longtime Companion (1990), and Poison (1991), to mention just a few titles.
  • Film

Docs: Faceless

A recent world premiere at the Hot Docs Film Festival, Faceless is a vital slice of 21st-century dissent portraiture, a nonfiction work that paradoxically locates a reservoir of humanizing empathy chiefly through its focus on masked protestors. An engaging directorial debut from Jennifer Ngo, the movie provides a gripping look at the 2019 Hong Kong demonstrations against a controversial Chinese extradition bill, as seen through the eyes of various young women and men seeking to protect what they view as their way of life.
  • Interviews

Docs: Justin McConnell on “Clapboard Jungle” (2020)

Justin McConnell’s Clapboard Jungle: Surviving the Independent Film Business is a film about the harsh realities of indie filmmaking as we follow McConnell’s trials and tribulations while he endeavors to get his project greenlit through a five-year process. Navigating the current film business is more difficult now than ever before: rapidly changing technology and an overcrowded marketplace have led to an industry in which anyone can make a film, but few can make a living.
  • Film

Docs: 8 Billion Angels (2019)

Ever since director Davis Guggenheim's nonfiction distillation of former American Vice President Al Gore's deeply personal slideshow about the dangers of global warming, 2006's An Inconvenient Truth, galvanized viewers en route to racking up $50 million in the worldwide box office and two Oscar victories, environmental documentaries have had to grapple with its enormous cultural footprint. Previously seen as a niche market cinematically speaking, environmentalism has now gone mainstream.
  • Film

Docs: Hysterical (2021)

Fully ceding the microphone to its loquacious subjects, both onstage and offstage, Hysterical shines a spotlight on female comedians in a manner that illuminates both the occupational similarities they share with their male counterparts as well as the many unique challenges they face in carving out a career in stand-up comedy. Unflaggingly earnest and positive-minded, and undergirded by a deceptively simple structure, Hysterical nevertheless achieves a lot simply by giving expanded voice to a wide range of highly articulate creative types whose observations carry punchy, trenchant emotional truth.
  • Film

Docs: The Lost Sons (2021)

Drama rooted in tabloid-worthy family secrets meets colorful labyrinthine plotting of the type which might be at home in a Carl Hiaasen or Elmore Leonard novel in the documentary The Lost Sons, which recently enjoyed its world premiere at the SXSW Film Festival. A stranger-than-fiction slice of investigative self-discovery, director Ursula Macfarlane’s movie serves in many ways as a complementary bookend to the earlier Three Identical Strangers – no great surprise, given that it is produced by RAW Productions and slated for release via CNN Films, the same company and distributor, respectively, behind that Emmy-nominated 2018 movie.
  • Film

Docs: Playing With Power: The Nintendo Story

At one time regarded as a fad, and then a niche industry, videogames have boomed to a $135 billion-plus annual business, on par with the cumulative total of the global film box office and home entertainment businesses. And when final numbers from 2020 are tallied, aided no doubt by last year’s pandemic stay-at-home orders, MarketWatch indicates that the global videogame revenue is expected to further surge an astonishing almost 20 percent over 2019 figures, to more than $179 billion.