The makers of “Elton John: Never Too Late” wisely didn’t try to be completists. After a half-century-plus of touring as well as recording approximately eleventy thousand albums and musicals, attempting a complete survey of Elton John’s output in one film is a fool’s errand. However, the film ends up covering enough of his career that the resulting gaps are more noticeable than they should be. Viewers will leave the movie with a good-enough appreciation of his work, but not necessarily any deeper an understanding of the man than could be gleaned from viewing “Rocketman.”

READ MORE: TIFF 2024 Preview: 21 Must-See Films To Watch

The documentary is ostensibly bracketed by a pair of massive concerts at Dodger Stadium.

Continue reading ‘Elton John: Never Too Late’ Review: Music Doc Wraps Searing 1970s Concert Footage In Ho-Hum Valedictory Package [TIFF] at The Playlist.

It might be challenging for some viewers to take activists seriously when they are speaking in tongues. But that is exactly what Petra Costa does in her edgy yet empathetic documentary ‘Apocalypse in the Tropics.’ Overlapping somewhat with the events chronicled in 2019’s ‘The Edge of Democracy,’ her epic account of Brazil’s recent whipsawing political battles, this film takes a step back from the action to investigate how the nation’s governance devolved into a near-permanent state of crisis.

Continue reading ‘Apocalypse In The Tropics’ Review: Petra Costa’s Pulse-Pounding Documentary About Brazil’s Anti-Democratic Evangelicals Is Gloriously Cinematic [Telluride] at The Playlist.

You wouldn’t want a documentary about Tom Wolfe to mimic his style. That could be challenging (just imagine all the on-screen exclamation marks!!!!!!!, idioSYNcratic CAPITALIZATION, and onomatopoeic spelling) not to mention possibly embarrassing. But it would have been gratifying to see Richard Dewey’s ‘Radical Wolfe’ documentary show a dash of its subject’s moxie, damn-the-torpedoes bravery, and cynicism-stung wit.

READ MORE: Fall Film Preview: 60+ Most Anticipated Movies To Watch

Solidly entertaining, if a bit thin, the film never gets more than a centimeter under Wolfe’s seemingly impervious skin.

Continue reading ‘Radical Wolfe’ Review: Richard Dewey’s Tom Wolfe Doc Celebrates His Journalistic Bravery But Doesn’t Emulate It at The Playlist.

The MAGA mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 shared many surface similarities with the ideologically opposed mobs that fought against police in American cities over the past few years: improvised weaponry; social media fixation; an emphasis on combat tactics over strategic objectives. But there’s also a crucial exception: the January 6 mob included many U.S. military veterans. Amid the whooping, Instagramming throng of red-hatted rioters in cobbled-together tactical gear, lines of individuals in full battle rattle could be seen moving in quietly disciplined “stack” formations towards their objective.

Continue reading ‘Against All Enemies’ Review: Shining A Light On The Terrifying Veteran-To-Domestic Terrorist Pipeline [Tribeca] at The Playlist.

The last few years have been great times for documentaries about cults. That does not mean it is a time of introspection about the questing impulses driving people into cults.  The appeal of content—generally of the limited streaming series variety—about cults has more to do with the queasy fright provided by seeing roomfuls of people prostrate themselves before a bored-looking bearded guy on a dais. The current vogue for such work may also be a condition of late-period “look at the freaks” reality TV programming.

Continue reading ‘Aum: The Cult At The End Of The World’ Review: A Frightening Doc About The 1990s Cult Waging War In Japan [Sundance] at The Playlist.

Almost everything viewers need to know about the mortal consequences of the fentanyl epidemic portrayed in Colin Askey’s new Vancouver-set documentary “Love in the Time of Fentanyl” is contained in one exchange between two users. One man talks about how coming off heroin was hard but manageable, essentially Netflix and chilling in his apartment for a week—but detoxing from fentanyl? That led to the emergency room. Given that and the spread of fentanyl throughout the city’s illicit drug supply, it is easier to understand the argument for the safe-injection site which the film documents.

Continue reading ‘Love In The Time Of Fentanyl’ Review: Colin Askey’s Addiction Doc Strains To Find Hope In The Darkness [Doc NYC] at The Playlist.

Jamie Roberts’ terse, painfully precise documentary “Escape from Kabul” zooms right in on one episode—the massive last-minute airlift of Afghans and remaining American personnel from Kabul in August 2021—and never looks away, even when you might wish that it did. It’s a close-quarters kind of war film that moves in tight and leaves little room to breathe. This seems an appropriate stylistic decision for a movie that is mainly about tens of thousands of people trying to escape a country as it is being reclaimed by medieval fanatics whose promises of equitable treatment were not widely believed.

Continue reading ‘Escape From Kabul’ Review: In Jamie Roberts’ Tightly Focused Doc, America’s Afghan War Ends As A Bloody Catastrophe at The Playlist.

If there hadn’t been a body count, Chris and Jeff George’s escapades might have made for a divinely trashy TLC reality show. The brothers had gargantuan appetites, a habit of breaking the law without consequences, a flair for exaggeration, and a knack for spending money as fast as it came in on all the things that would keep a certain kind of viewer coming back: strip club visits, firearms, McMansions, and jacked-up trucks.

Continue reading ‘American Pain’ Review: Extra Bro-Energy Twins Become Florida Pill Mill Kingpins in Darren Foster’s Propulsive, Queasy Documentary [Tribeca] at The Playlist.

Some jobs do not prepare you for much of anything else. Work as a barista and you will know how to make a great latte, perhaps with that cute little leaf in the foam, but that is it. Other jobs provide more marketable skills. The buzzy new three-episode HBO documentary series “The Invisible Pilot,” for example, reveals that being a crop duster was excellent training for anybody looking to set up shop as a drug smuggler.

Continue reading ‘The Invisible Pilot’ Review: The Whizbang Real-Life Story About a Crop Duster turned Drug Smuggler at The Playlist.

Nobody who knows anything about war would claim there are good or bad conflicts. Still, the warfare seen in Sergey Loznitsa’s savage Ukraine-set satire “Donbass” manages to seem even more harrowing than the fictional fighting we are used to seeing on screen. That is not because the film is gruesome in its visuals. Instead, Loznitsa shows us something potentially more frightening than a bloody drag-out battle between two armies: A war where one side is barely recognizable from the other, the stakes are hard to discern, and because it is not quite clear what the fighting is for, it is difficult to imagine it ending.

Continue reading ‘Donbass’ Review: Sergei Loznitsa’s Bleak and Brutal Ukraine-Set War Comedy is Eerily Timed at The Playlist.

Defining cool is as hopeless as explaining what makes a joke funny. That doesn’t stop Tom Donohue from trying anyway in his (arguably deeply uncool TMC-bound) documentary “Dean Martin: King of Cool.” A cavalcade of colleagues and friends, along with a motley string of celebrity fans (Jon Hamm, RZA), do their best to figure out what about the awkward Italian kid from Steubenville, Ohio helped him embody (as one writer puts it) “all-American cool” during that postwar period when nightclub hip briefly went mainstream.

Continue reading ‘Dean Martin: King of Cool’ Review: Not Giving A Damn Has A Price [Doc NYC] at The Playlist.

Explorer, inventor, activist, and oceanographic popularizer, Jacques-Yves Cousteau introduced millions to the glories of the ocean through his popular movies. But he hated when people called them “documentaries.” Instead, he wanted his cinematic work—filled as it was with danger, awe, exotic mysteries, and a crew of wild-eyed nautical vagabonds wandering the oceans in an old minesweeper looking for excitement—known as “true adventure films.” The man we are treated to in Liz Garbus’ documentary “Becoming Cousteau” might have seen himself more as a filmmaker than naturalist, but he was first and foremost an adventurer.

Continue reading ‘Becoming Cousteau’ Beautifully Celebrates The Man But Gives Short Shrift To His Legacy [Telluride Review] at The Playlist.

The Dyatlov Pass Incident is the kind of story that will keep breathlessly speculative true-crime documentaries spinning for years to increasingly limited returns. It contains just about everything a televisual “what if?” show requires to keep viewers engaged for an hour or so: a multitude of tragic victims, an intensely cinematic natural backdrop, a baffling patchwork of clues and evidence, and several possible solutions ranging from likely to absurd which people can choose between. But all the right ingredients do not always produce the best outcome, as Liam Le Guillou’s not quite ready for prime-time documentary “An Unknown Compelling Force” shows.

Continue reading ‘An Unknown Compelling Force’ Follows A Director Down A Cold Case Rabbit Hole [Review] at The Playlist.

A dutiful crime documentary that raises few hackles, “Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal,” doesn’t waste breath on moralistic huffing and puffing about what a certain group of rich parents did to get their children into exclusive colleges. It also, delightfully, expends precious little screen time on the celebrities like Felicity Huffman and Lori Laughlin, whose faces and names featured in nearly all news stories about this story when it broke in early 2019.

Continue reading ‘Operation Varsity Blues’: The Elite College Corruption Scandal Hiding in Plain Sight [Review] at The Playlist.

Rodney Ascher’s computer-haunted documentary “A Glitch in the Matrix” is not the most insightful recent examination of boredom-born foggy Internet delusions. That honor likely goes to Arthur Jones’ antic “Feels Good Man.” Still, Ascher’s appropriately discombobulating stew of queasiness, comedy, and terror seems well-cued to the subject matter, even while missing a certain editorial sharpness that might have brought some of its notions into greater clarity.

Continue reading ‘Glitch In The Matrix’: Rodney Ascher Makes A Computer-Haunted Doc About Those That Believe ‘The Matrix’ Is Real [Sundance Review] at The Playlist.

Knowing that what we imagine is more terrifying than what we see, “The Midnight Sky” plays the end of the world pretty close to the vest, with nary a devastated cityscape to be seen. It is a canny move for a movie that pivots around an apocalyptic disaster, and one that pays off at times by refocusing the story from the spectacle of loss to its rending emotional reality. But while less-is-more tends to be a smart play when trying for awards season credibility, there are times when George Clooney’s latest directorial effort trips up on its own earnestness.

Continue reading George Clooney’s ‘The Midnight Sky’ Is An Elegiac Apocalypse Without A Story [Review] at The Playlist.

For politicians, a statement like, “Our goal is to provide municipal services first,” isn’t a call to action. Not much in David Osit’s documentary “Mayor” is. But when Musa Hadid, the mayor of the West Bank city of Ramallah, delivers those words during a meeting about Donald Trump’s decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem, he delivers those prosaic words with a surprisingly inspirational tone.

Continue reading ‘Mayor’: Managing Santas And Sewage In The West Bank [Review] at The Playlist.

A common political cliché says that it’s not the scandal that gets you; it’s the cover-up. Alexander Nanau’s coruscating documentary “Collective” supersizes that formulation. Nanau begins with a terrible tragedy, which is likely enough of a subject on its own: the 2015 fire at Bucharest nightclub Colectiv, which killed 26 people. But in this movie, the fire—skin-crawling footage of which plays just before the credits—is just the beginning.

Continue reading Sickening Yet Riveting Documentary ‘Collective’ Shows A Cynical Nation In Collapse at The Playlist.

Prolific, lyrical, and possessed of that entrepreneurial optimism which afflicts some who have seen the worst of what the world has to offer, David Wojnarowicz was a multivalent artist who survived a tormented childhood and decanted that bone-deep fury into his work. Chris Kim’s skittering collage of a documentary “Wojnarowicz” doesn’t explore his career from the outside but rather works ground up through his art to present an experiential plunge into the raw tumult of the New York art scene just before and following the onset of AIDS.

Continue reading ‘Wojnarowicz’ Is A Fiery Testament To An Artist’s Enlightening Rage [DOC NYC Review] at The Playlist.

Near the start of Alex Gibney’s documentary “Crazy, Not Insane,” his subject asks the kind of essential question that feels so unanswerable that it is brought up not nearly as often as it should be. Thinking about the nature of evil and recalling her childhood interest in the Nuremberg Trials, she asks very plainly, “How come I don’t kill?” Everyone gets angry. But not everyone commits bloody murder.

Continue reading ‘Crazy, Not Insane’: Alex Gibney’s Latest Is An Unenlightening Look Into Serial Killers’ Psyches [DOC NYC Review] at The Playlist.

Steve James’ latest masterpiece—and despite his creative modesty, the man has many, from “Hoop Dreams” to “The Interrupters” and other interrogations of America and what we expect from her—takes a massive subject and breaks it down into fractal pieces. Those discrete bits, made up not so much from Subjects and Themes but from the people who his camera frames in a quiet kind of curiosity, are then assembled together into “City So Real,” an expansive five-part portrait of Chicago tussling with its purpose, identity, and future in the new millennium.

Continue reading ‘City So Real’ Is A Complicated, Loving Ode To Chicago [Review] at The Playlist.

A wickedly industrious joke-machine intellect attached
to a pneumatic pair of eyebrows, John Belushi was the king of American
comedy in the mid-to-late 1970s. At the peak of his career, he could boast a
sinecure at “Saturday Night Live,” blockbuster movies, a hit band, and the
best Toshiro Mifune imitation ever to hit American TV. Nevertheless, as
related in R.J. Cutler’s tragic documentary “Belushi,” he
destroyed everything he had with the same abandon that John Landis wrecked
police cruisers in their movie “The Blues Brothers.”

Using heretofore-unheard interviews from an oral history project by Tanner Colby, “Belushi” can be seen as something of a riposte to Bob Woodward’s 1984 biography “Wired.” The book is seen by people in Belushi’s circle as a cold, scathing, and exploitative take on their friend’s drug-related death in 1982 that ignores his talent and warmth.

Continue reading ‘Belushi’: A Loving Look At The Comedy Legend’s Rush Toward Oblivion [Review] at The Playlist.

Given that it lays out in unsparing terms the extent of a staggering American failure that ranks up there with 9/11 and Pearl Harbor, “Totally Under Control” is a surprisingly calm piece of work. A damning account of how the greatest technological, scientific, and military power on the planet laid down and allowed a pandemic to march right over it, the documentary is filled with eyewitnesses to the clown show who still don’t appear able to process what they saw.

Continue reading ‘Totally Under Control’: Alex Gibney’s Viciously On-Point Doc Shows How Trump’s Admin Utterly Blew The COVID Response [Review] at The Playlist.

A thumbnail history of the dysfunctional relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia, Rick Rowley’s documentary “Kingdom of Silence” deserves watching already for the briskly authoritative way with which it tells that story. But the two nations’ sordid decades-long exchange of oil, weaponry, and silent treatment of human rights abuses is only the backdrop for Rowley’s real story: the arc from idealist to nationalist to exiled crusader of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, murdered by his government in Istanbul for speaking his mind about the royal family.

Continue reading ‘Kingdom of Silence’: The Tragedy of Jamal Khashoggi Goes Beyond His Brutal Murder [Review] at The Playlist.

Jenny Popplewell’s true-crime documentary “American Murder: The Family Next Door” takes place in the kind of neighborhood where you can imagine somebody saying, “You don’t expect this sort of thing to happen here.” The corner of Frederick, Colorado we see in the movie is one of those sparkling new suburbs where the lawns and paint jobs are CGI bright and nothing much ever seems to happen, until it does.

Continue reading ‘American Murder: The Family Next Door’ Is Bare-Bones True Crime That Leaves Too Much Unsaid [Review] at The Playlist.