Room 237 (2012)

  This movie is proof that being intelligent doesn't actually mean you're useful.

Five "experts" discuss their interpretations of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining as voiceover interviews play over footage from various archival and other film footage.

These are not dumb people.  They are historians, professors, researchers, and archivists who fall into the trap of very smart people saying very dumb things.  The entire movie feels like an English Literature class in college where you're asked to close read a work for the first time.  The point of the exercise is not to discover the "true intent"; it's to show how varied the interpretations can be.  And yes, if you spend your entire career studying a particular facet of history, like the genocide of the Native Americans in the American West, or the Holocaust, you will then start seeing connections everywhere.  That is how human pattern-seeking works.  It is also how conspiracy theories work, that you've "figured it out" because you're so much smarter than other people, so of course you're going to be persecuted by the Government, as one gentleman dolefully expects to be audited by the IRS as punishment for speaking out about his theory that Kubrick faked the Apollo 11 footage of the moon landing.  

I suppose you could find this documentary entertaining in a "Boy, what won't they think of" kind of way but I did not.  It felt a little mean-spirited considering that some of these people seem genuinely mentally ill, while others were infuriatingly condescending.  I don't find that funny.  And the film itself doesn't question or present a point of view of its own, so it just comes off as a bunch of people ranting.  Again, that is not my thing.  If it's yours or you just really, really like The Shining and/or Kubrick and/or insane conspiracy theories, Room 237 is streaming on Shudder and AMC+.

Diane Warren: Relentless (2025)

Nominated for Best Original Song.  I mean, of course it is.  It would be so funny if this had been nominated for Best Documentary and won.  Like, that would have been the biggest slap in the face.    Content warning:  discussion of sexual assault, animal death (off-screen, cat)

Diane Warren has been writing songs for over fifty years.  Even if you had never heard of her, you know her.  She has #1 singles in every decade, sung by dozens of artists.  She has her own production company, platinum records, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.  But the one thing she did not have was an Oscar.  She has the dubious distinction of being the only woman nominated 15 times (16 this year) without a competitive* win.  She is loud, single-minded, and not particularly personable.  And in an award competition based in no small part on how well your peers like you, that's a major disadvantage.  

The documentary is kind of a puff piece; a look inside the often chaotic world of a neurodivergent creative professional.  It's interesting to see her process and the interviews with her very famous music clients are charming but unless you're super invested in songwriting or a big Oscar fan, there's really nothing else here.  It's streaming on Kanopy.

*She got an honorary one in 2022.

The Perfect Neighbor (2025)

Nominated for Best Documentary Feature  Content warning:  racial slurs, gun violence

Susan Lorencs described herself as a perfect neighbor in one of her numerous nuisance calls to police.  She constantly complained about the neighbor kids playing near her apartment, escalating her verbal rhetoric over the course of a year until it reached an inevitably violent end, documented painstakingly through body cam footage of the police responding to her calls.

This was absolutely infuriating to watch.  It is a portrait of entitlement and racism.  Like, I get being an antisocial curmudgeon.  The sound of children's laughter also grates on my nerves.  Do I feel like the Grinch looking down over Whoville every time children scream with joy as they sled down the embankment behind my house?  Yes.  Do I go out and threaten them or yell racial slurs?  No.  Because I am an adult who recognizes that they are CHILDREN and that it is a fucking privilege to have them feel safe enough to play.  And this bitch destroyed a group of children's safety because they were Playing While Black.

This is streaming on Netflix but I am honestly cautioning you if you are sensitive to children being threatened.  It felt a little exploitative when it lingered on the grieving relatives, but I get it.  They're trying to show the extent of the impact.

Blind Vaysha (2016)/4.1 Miles (2016)

  Here's a couple more shorts.  

First up is Blind Vaysha, an eight and a half minute long animated film based on a short story of a girl whose left eye can only see the past and whose right eye can only see the future.  She can never experience happiness because she has no present.  

I found it overly moralizing and not nearly as clever or provocative as it thought it was being.  Would rather read the folklore, honestly.

  4.1 Miles is a documentary short produced by The New York Times.  It follows a Greek Coast Guard captain who rescues Afghani refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea in overcrowded crafts not designed for the journey.  

I want you to open another tab on your browser and pull up a map.  Find Afghanistan.  Now find Greece.  Consider the level of desperation you have to have to consider crossing that amount of distance with absolutely nothing but a backpack.    

There was a different doc short called Lifeboat from 2018 that covered the exact same thing, except they were a German non-profit.  It was a whole-ass humanitarian crisis and I have no idea if it is still happening because there have been like 20 other whole-ass humanitarian crises since then.  I'm so tired, y'all.

Both films are available on YouTube.

No Other Land (2024)

Nominated for Best Documentary Feature    The last of the nominees I managed to watch (32 in total this year!) before the ceremony and it was the winner of its category.  Content warning:  dead people, gun violence

A young Palestinian man and his Israeli friend document the ongoing destruction of Palestinian homes in the West Bank of Gaza by the Israeli army.

I'm glad this won.  Even if it feels like too little, too late.  It will be an important record in the future, the way the documentaries about Syria and Ukraine will be.  I'm not going to go on a long-ass rant about it.  

It has no distribution in the United States so dust off that VPN.  Maybe an Oscar win will overcome some cowardice, maybe not.  It's worth searching out.

Black Box Diaries (2024)

Nominated for Best Documentary Feature    Content warning:  description of rape

Journalist Shiori Ito documents her legal and social battle after publicly accusing a prominent news anchor of raping her.  

Every year we have to have this conversation.  And every year it is just as infuriating.  Please realize that women put their lives at risk to call out rapists, especially prominent ones who can weaponize police forces and have government leaders on speed-dial.  Civil suits are often the only way to get any kind of justice but there is literally no amount of money that can un-rape someone.  

Anyway, it's streaming on Paramount+.

Elton John: Never Too Late (2024)

Nominated for Best Original Song    Content warning:  descriptions of child abuse, domestic partner abuse

Elton John reflects on the highlights of his career as he returns to Dodgers Stadium for his final touring performance.

There's really nothing here that you couldn't have gotten from Rocketman except archival footage and more in-depth coverage of his friendship with John Lennon.  And that Elton John has a podcast on Apple Music where he promotes new artists.  That was news to me.

This feels like a PR puff piece that will get trotted out with a sad music overlay when Elton John dies.  It's not interested in challenging any narratives or delving into the psyche of the artist.  It is a broad overview of a narrow time period.  Anything remotely approaching a rough edge has been sanded down to a glossy shell.  

The original song was written by Brandi Carlisle (among others) and she duets on it.  It will be a nice moment during the Oscar ceremony and that's about it.  Don't bother with the film, just listen to the song on the radio.  Never Too Late is streaming on Disney+.

Three Identical Strangers (2017)

  I had my eye on this documentary for a while but it was on/off various streamers and I couldn't get a hold of it.  I think it overplays the "mystery" angle but it's still worth watching.  Content warning:  suicide (discussed)

Bobby Shafran grew up in upstate New York and went to a local community college, only to be completely confused his first day by how well-known he seemed to be.  Turns out he was a dead ringer for a guy named Eddie Galland who had dropped out the previous year.  The two met, compared backstories, and discovered that they were twins separated at birth and adopted into two different families.  The local news picked up the story as a feel-good piece and it made its way through the wire to David Kellman, living in Long Island, who picked up the paper and saw his own face in duplicate.  The three young men met, instantly connected, and began building their lives around one another.  Their respective families hit the roof and initiated proceedings to sue the adoption agency for failing to disclose that the boys were a matched set but were stonewalled.  It took a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist to break open the real story.

I don't want to spoil it for anyone because the movie does go to some lengths to tease this out.  I don't agree with this choice, I think it weakens the ending, but that's me.  It's currently streaming on Tubi with ads.

Too Funny to Fail (2014)

  Well, I got in one documentary this year, at least.  

The Dana Carvey Show was a prime-time sketch comedy show that ran for seven episodes in 1996.  It starred Dana Carvey, coming off an incredibly successful run on Saturday Night Live, Robert Smigel, one of SNL's head writers, and then-unknowns Stephen Colbert and Steve Carrell.  It was intended to be edgy comedy that pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in prime-time network TV but was hamstrung by network interference (ABC had just been bought by Disney), advertiser desertion, and struggled to find its audience after a lead-in of Home Improvement.

Obviously, the documentary is full of comedians so it's very funny.  Personally, I never liked Dana Carvey's comedy, I was slightly too young for his SNL days and none of his movies have particularly wowed me.  He does seem like he's very funny in person, though.  I have no memory of ever coming across The Dana Carvey Show.  I think all the episodes are on YouTube if you want to check them out.  The documentary is on Hulu.  Which also got bought out by Disney.  Which is darkly funny.

Killer Legends (2014)

  You made it through Memorial Day weekend and it's officially summer.  You know what that means:  only five months until Halloween!  In honor of that, here's a documentary about spooky things.  Content warning:  real police crime scene photos, some gore, clowns

Documentarian Joshua Zeman and his partner Rachel Mills explore the real crimes that lie underneath the mythic trappings of some of the most famous urban legends:  the hook-handed man, the killer clown, and the "call is coming from inside the house" babysitter murderer.

The stories are fascinating and as always, real crime is both weirder and more terrifying than fictional crime.  If I have a complaint, it's that the documentarians seem a little ghoulish in their enthusiasm.  There's a breathless quality to their reporting that I don't love.  

But if you're looking for something to whet your appetite for all things horror, this isn't a bad starting place.  It's currently streaming on the Roku Channel.

20 Days in Mariupol (2023)

Nominated for Best Documentary Feature    Content warning:  war violence, graphic injury, dead bodies, dead children (including infants), and dead animals (cat)

An Associated Press journalism team embeds with local military group inside a hospital for 20 days to witness the siege of Mariupol, Ukraine, by Russian forces.  

If you've been following the on-going war in Ukraine, you likely saw some of the footage uploaded to news sites.  It is a graphic witness to war crimes committed, including the bombing of indiscriminate civilian targets, that will likely go unpunished for years, if not forever.  But the record remains.  

Since this is going up on Monday, you already know this won in its category.  I'm not mad at it.  It's an extremely professional documentary and important evidence.  I am a little annoyed that this exact playbook happened already in Syria and nobody gave a damn about it.  Vladimir Putin used the Middle East as a test run for re-colonization and nobody in the wider international community put a stop to it.

20 Days in Mariupol is streaming for free on YouTube on the PBS page as part of their Frontline series.

The Eternal Memory (2023)

Nominated for Best Documentary Feature    Did you like No but wish it had a sub-plot like Amour?  You are a crazy person but here's a movie for you anyway.

Augusto Góngora was the reporter of record during the tumultuous regime change from dictator Pinochet to democratic elections.  He covered the disappearances, the murders, the daily terror of the citizens, shining a spotlight on the atrocities and refusing to let them be continued in darkness and ignorance.  He and his wife, Paulina, have had a twenty-year love affair, building their lives out of the chaos and uncertainty that surrounded them.  In one of God's little ironies, the man responsible for crafting the national memory of Chile has Alzheimer's and his beloved wife and partner has to watch chunks of his personality be eaten away until he doesn't even know her face.

This movie is just designed to make you feel bad.  That's all I got out of it.  Augusto and Pauli are the kind of cute old couple that give you hope that love is real and then show you the consequences of that love.  

Man, I can't even be funny about this.  This is the third depressing-ass documentary I've watched in like two days.  At this point, I don't know who is going to win because they're all absolutely tragic.  It's currently streaming on Paramount+ if you enjoy crying.

Bobi Wine: The People's President (2023)

Nominated for Best Documentary Feature    It's this year's Navalny.  Content warning:  gun violence, attempted assassination

Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu rose to fame under his pop star alias, Bobi Wine, releasing songs criticizing the corruption of President Yoweri Museveni.  In 2018, Bobi Wine successfully ran for a seat in Uganda's congress, where he fought against a bill that would remove the age limit for presidential terms, accurately stating that Museveni was trying to become dictator-for-life.  The bill passed but Bobi was not deterred.  He campaigned and became head of the opposition party.  During the pandemic, Museveni announced a general election.  This film chronicles the strong-arm tactics used to cow and discourage Bobi Wine's entire party, including fake charges, theft, political arrests, and torture.

This is an important film but God is it depressing when you see how much effort it takes to stand up to fascism.  Especially when it's had 30 years to consolidate power.  If you remember God Loves Uganda, a documentary from a decade ago, you'll recall that Museveni is being backed by Christian fundamentalist money for pushing hate against the LGBT community.  Which adds another horrible layer to this film and brings it all back full-circle.

Bobi Wine:  The People's President is currently streaming on Hulu and Disney+, because they are about to become the same service.

Four Daughters (2023)

Nominated for Best Documentary Feature    Content warning:  discussion of spousal abuse, child abuse, CSA

Olfa grew up in Tunisia in a house of only daughters.  She learned to dress as a boy to defend herself and her mother from men looking to hurt them, only to be sold in marriage to a man she didn't love.  She had four daughters, Ghofrane, Rahma, Eya, and Tayssir.  Terrified of them coming to harm at the hands of violent men, she encouraged the older two when they became interested in wearing the hijab, but was unable to stop their descent into radical fundamentalism.

This is a strange documentary because it involves hiring actors to recreate certain scenes.  On the one hand, I think that's great because it gives the real people a break from having to go through their particular traumas over and over, but on the other, it's kind of stretching what the definition of a documentary is.  I think it works here because Olfa, Eya, and Tayssir are so heavily involved but it does blur some lines.  I wouldn't like to see it become the standard format.

I will say, I felt like there had been kind of a bait and switch throughout the majority of the movie **SPOILER ALERT** because they make it seem like Ghofrane and Rahma are dead and they are very much not, just in prison **END SPOILER**.  It's not a deal-breaker but it does feel a little anticlimactic.  

It's an emotional movie, very raw in parts, with extremely charismatic subjects.  If that is your bag, it is currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Kanopy.

Life, Animated (2014)

  Whoo boy, I hated this movie so much.  Yikes.  

As a child, Owen Susskind started becoming increasingly withdrawn and non-verbal.  His parents took him to specialist after specialist and finally one diagnosed him with Autism Spectrum Disorder.  The communication breakthrough occurred when the Susskind's realized they could relate to Owen through animated Disney movies.  Now at 23, Owen is ready to move into a halfway house designed to gently introduce him to the overwhelmingly neurotypical world.  

As an autistic adult, this was the most sanitized, coddling infantilization of neurodivergency that I have ever seen.  It was fucking infuriating.  Everything revolved around the parents and how tragic their struggle has been dealing with an autistic child and how brave and understanding they are for everything they've done to improve his quality of life.  

Now, every single autistic person is different.  Sometimes wildly so.  Spectrum.  And there seems like a lot this documentary is leaving out in order to focus on its feel-good message.  We don't see Owen struggle, break down, lash out.  We only see him awash with wonder and repeating lines from Disney classics.  Good PR for Disney, bad for anyone with ASD hoping to be taken seriously.  It's an incomplete portrait that has been massaged into a roughly 2-hr commercial for a megacorp.  Avoid.  

Nope?  Want to see for yourself how bad it is?  Streaming on Kanopy and the Roku channel.  Don't say I didn't warn you.

Jane (2017)

Happy Veteran's Day!  Here's a completely unrelated movie!  Having just come off a month of horror movies, this was the kind of quiet palate cleanser I was looking to see.  Unfortunately, it feels like only half a story.

Jane Goodall dreamed of going to Africa from a young age.  When famed scientist Louis Leakey was looking for an unbiased research assistant, Jane jumped at the chance.  She had no training, no degree, but boundless enthusiasm, patience, and interest in studying chimpanzees in their natural habitat.  She became a pioneer in the field, the foremost expert on chimp behavior, and a global ambassador for conservation.

This documentary, produced by National Geographic and Disney, was so sanitized and watered down it was basically pablum.  It focused on Jane: Wife and Mother instead of Jane: Scientist, which feels a little one-sided and patriarchal.  It glosses over any and all negative experiences, barely touching on the polio epidemic that wiped out a number of her original subjects, or the war that took out a second wave, or even her divorce.  The result is a fluff piece for a trailblazing woman who frankly deserved better.

It's currently streaming on Disney+.

Grey Gardens (1976)

  The Cinema Club pick of the week was Grey Gardens.  I had already reviewed the 2009 movie, and thought it would prepare me for the documentary.  I was wrong.

In the early 70s, Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Little Edie, made the papers when their East Hamptons mansion, Grey Gardens, was revealed to be a crumbling wreck filled with garbage, stray cats, and wildlife.  The press shamed their famous relative, Jackie Kennedy, into organizing a clean-up, getting the house into at least a livable state and paying for a caretaker.  Documentarians Albert and David Maysles followed the news clippings and planned a video follow-up, discovering that there was more under the surface of neglect amongst the upper class.

A movie is one thing.  You expect a little artistic license, some embellishment for the sake of drama.  A documentary is uncompromising, actual, observable truth.  And it's so much worse than the movie.  Big Edie and Little Edie each have their version of events, which they pronounce at full volume over each other, neither having much relation with reality.  The casual cruelty is astonishing, but the willful dismissal of their surroundings is horrifying.  The house is filled with trash, feral cats, and local wildlife, and remember this is AFTER the major clean-up, which can be seen mostly by its absences.  Gone are the antiques, the furniture, the glassware, the carpets, the wall hangings, presumably sold to pay debts or "rescued" from their imminent destruction.   But the Edies don't seem to notice or care, gamely continuing to play hostess to the documentary crew and whatever local handymen come around.

This is a camp classic.  Little Edie's DIY fashion and need for dramatic expression speak to a lot of people.  There's something unutterably sad and yet somehow admirable in the Beales' ability to soldier on, despite their (self-inflicted) circumstances.  They are clearly co-dependent and most likely mentally ill, which makes the movie feel a little exploitative, but the Maysels aren't filming for shock value (well, at least not for that shock) or to be cruel.  If anything, they are neutral leaning towards sympathetic.

Also, and this just occurred to me, if I was a grieving widow of an assassinated president and my asshole relatives got me dragged in the press and publicly shamed, I would never fucking speak to them again, much less pay for their upkeep.  Holy shit.

Grey Gardens is streaming on Criterion Channel and (sigh) Max.

Navalny (2022)

 Nominated for Best Documentary Feature    Getting into the first documentary of this year's Oscars!  

Alexei Navalny is a vocal opponent and opposition leader to Vladimir Putin.  He has campaigned for years to improve democracy in Russia, arguing for free and fair elections, using his YouTube channel to call out corruption in government, and rallying the people of Russia to expect better from their elected officials.  In 2017, on the plane back from shooting a segment in Siberia, Navalny collapsed and was rushed to a hospital.  Kremlin-backed doctors and cops blocked any inquiry into his condition and refused to release him until international pressure forced their hand.  A hospital in Germany determined that Navalny had been poisoned with a nerve agent.  In 2020, a Belgian researcher reached out to Navalny with evidence that not only pointed directly to Putin, but to the specific government-funded assassins sent to do the job and the specific lab from which the poison originated.  Navalny, who never lost his sense of humor during his ordeals, decided to use social media and put Putin on blast, coordinating an exposé through multiple international outlets, YouTube, and TikTok.  

This is a breezy documentary that just skirts the line of hagiography.  Navalny is charismatic, good-humored, and witty with a beautiful family, a tailor-made protagonist to Vladimir Voldemort.  It's an easy story with an almost cartoonishly dumb group of villains, including a henchmen who talks too much.  But the real hero here is Christo Grozev, the "nerd with a laptop" who pieced the entire plot together and presented it to Navalny on a silver platter.  He's basically the entire Leverage team rolled into one guy.

Navalny is currently streaming on HBO Max.

Tim's Vermeer (2013)

  As far as Rich Guy Vanity Projects go, recreating a Vermeer from first principles is harmless, verging on useful.  Unlike, say, tanking a microblogging platform because people made fun of you...

Tim Jenison is a millionaire inventor of 3D computer imagery software.  He becomes interested in/obsessed with determining how Johannes Vermeer, 17th century Dutch painter, created photographic quality oil paintings.  Conventional scholarship dictates that Vermeer was a savant, but Jenison believes that Vermeer was an innovator and inventor.  Tim goes on a multi-year journey to meet with experts, build his own replica of Vermeer's studio, and learn a half dozen disciplines from carpentry to glazing to grinding his own paints and lenses, in order to paint a copy of Vermeer's The Music Lesson with no artistic training.

It's almost more impressive to see the single-minded devotion (and accompanying funding) to proving a theory than seeing a non-artist paint Vermeer.  Is it world changing?  No.  Is it interesting?  If you like the intersection between art and science.  Produced and directed by professional skeptics Penn & Teller, Tim's Vermeer is light, engaging, and funny.  It's currently streaming on Starz.

The Salt of the Earth (2015)

  I feel like Wim Wenders is the anti-Werner Herzog.  Like, they just have two completely different outlooks on humanity.  

Content warning:  starvation, child death, animal death (tribesmen shoot monkeys with arrows), genocide

Okay, so those are objectively terrible things to warn you about but you should make time to see this documentary if you can.  And as an aside, fuck the MPAA that gave this a PG-13 for nudity but didn't mention all of the corpses.

Photographer Sebastiao Salgado has spent a lifetime behind the camera, traveling the world to capture intimate portraits of humanity at its humblest, most vulnerable, and forgotten.  Gold miners in Brazil, flood-displaced Nigerians, famine-stricken Ethiopians, and the victims of genocide in Yugoslavia, Congo, and Rwanda.  The last sickened him so much he retreated to his family farm in Brazil, now a wasteland of erosion.  His wife, Lelia, came up with the radical idea of replanting the Matá Atlantica, the Atlantic rain forest that had been cut down for cattle grazing.  Two million trees later and Salgado was inspired to create a photo project documenting pockets of hope, places around the globe that still retained their natural, almost primeval state.

Wenders is already one of the most empathetic filmmakers.  His sense of humanism, of the capacity for joy, and his sensitivity with his subjects is matched and hightened by Salgado's bottomless reserves of empathy.  As a person who struggles with even identifying emotions, much less expressing them, seeing the depths of feeling on display in this film was nothing less than revelatory.  It is delicate and powerful all at once.

It's currently streaming on Starz, which I get through Amazon.  If you need to remember that all hope is not lost, give it a try.