Dir. Rodney Ascher I refer back to this moment in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix a lot, partly because it’s funny and mostly because it’s useful. Harry has just given an interview to The Quibbler about the return of Voldemort, and it’s selling like hotcakes and creating a fair amount of mail… Read More A Glitch in the Matrix (2021)
Dir. Caroline Laskow and Ian Rosenberg I’d basically given up on Welcome to Kutsher’s long before hitting the forty-five minute mark of the film. This is a short documentary, barely seventy minutes long, and it’s pretty clear that it’s being stretched to the brink long before then. Welcome to Kutsher’s is made for people who… Read More Welcome to Kutsher’s: The Last Catskills Resort (2012)
Dir. Kurt Kuenne This is a genuinely unusual film, even though much of its trappings are pretty typical for a documentary. Talking heads, personal reminiscences, home videos, police reports, news clippings, all that stuff. It begins as the story of Andrew Bagby, a recent medical school graduate who was murdered by an ex-girlfriend named Shirley… Read More Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (2008)
Dir. Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky As a damn Yankee—a Yankee merely visits the South but a damn Yankee stays—I have been occasionally amazed at the inability of even highly educated Southerners to name what states make up New England and which ones they are. And as a person who was born and raised in… Read More Brother’s Keeper (1992)
Dir. Jamie Roberts In 2017, the documentary LA 92 was released for the 25th anniversary of the riots resulting from the verdict in the case which found the four officers who beat Rodney King not guilty. The film nods at some of the causes of the riots which created a fever pitch in Los Angeles… Read More Four Hours at the Capitol (2021)
Dir. Seth Gordon “Remember the first rule of politics,” Jim Broadbent says as Boss Tweed in Gangs of New York. “The ballots don’t make the results. The counters make the result.” The counters in Gangs of New York have a simple goal: ensure that Democrats win every election in 1860s New York. It doesn’t matter… Read More The King of Kong (2007)
Dir. Chris Charles Scott and Seth Porges Directors of documentaries frequently look for ways to make sure that their words reinforce the images they’ve chosen for the screen, whether it’s by writing a narration or appearing in front of the camera. If you’re Michael Moore, at the far end of both qualities for intrusiveness, it… Read More Class Action Park (2020)
Dir. Ema Ryan Yamazaki There are more than 350 Division I men’s basketball programs in the United States. The 68-team March Madness tournament remains one of the great unifiers of offices across the nation, as even casual observers get pushed into pools to submit their brackets. Its randomness is its calling card, and for three… Read More Koshien: Japan’s Field of Dreams (2019)
Dir. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman It’s about as simple as a documentary gets. A few ambient shots of something like birds flying or a sunset, occasional home movies, more photographs, pans across quilt squares, some footage of people reading names, talking heads. I use this a lot, but I don’t think I’ve ever meant… Read More Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989)
Dir. Travis Wilkerson Another day, another documentary that is a better story than a film. Wilkerson is very much the central character in this documentary, more so than his great-grandfather, S.E. Branch, or the Black man who Branch murdered, Bill Spann. I suppose in any documentary where the filmmaker has this close a connection to… Read More Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? (2017)
Seeing Things Secondhand 