A Night of Knowing Nothing is a fascinating work of formal and intellectual hybridity. Beautifully dispatched through its entanglement of formal hybridity, Payal Kapadia’s A…
Flee is inoffensive and sweet enough, but also a totally blunt object that fails muster much actual power under the influence of its overt messaging.…
Julia doesn’t cover a lot of new territory for the already initiated, but it’s still a delightful bio-doc made with plenty of love. In a…
A Cop Movie is a clever deconstruction that doesn’t add up to much more than a grab bag of meta elements, but it at least…
The Velvet Underground proves an interesting resting place for a litany of period detritus, but stumbles when foregrounding its titular subjects. Todd Haynes, a noted…
The Rescue is a moving work a immersion and stitch-work, crafting an empathetic documentary from its headline-grabbing story. Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin have…
Faya Dayi is the best kind of documentary, one that eschews prefab forms and instead finds mesmerizing beauty in the quotidian. Programmed as part of…
A documentary whose goofy, DIY sensibility matches its endearingly amateur subject matter, Lucy Harvey and Danielle Kummer’s Alien On Stage is the quintessential homegrown…
In the Same Breath boasts plenty of charged imagery and emotion, but its pat dialectics and dangling theses undermine its intellectual power. For a…
Roadrunner doesn’t revolutionize the portrait documentary, but it does execute its essential elements with pathos and formal precision. The late culinary connoisseur Anthony Bourdain…
Questlove’s debut film as a director is a success, defined as much by its outrage as its joy. Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, drummer of the…
All Light, Everywhere is a Herculean effort meriting praise, but one in which the parts prove more impressive than the whole. If it hadn’t…
In 2017, former NSA contractor Reality Winner was arrested by the FBI and charged under the Espionage Act for leaking documents pertaining to Russia’s…