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.

Given the many personalities in all our families and the way we often all perceive past traumatic events differently, making a probing documentary about your own family sh*t could end up either highly damaging to those relationships, exploitative of genuine pain, self-serving, or in some cases, very navel-gazing. And yet filmmaker Ry Russo-Young’s terrific new HBO documentary series, “Nuclear Family,” avoids all those familiar trappings, instead crafting something just extraordinarily intimate, personal, and deeply captivating.

Continue reading ‘Nuclear Family’: Ry Russo-Young Revisits Painful Family Traumas To Reckon With Her Past [Review] at The Playlist.

How does someone document the onset of a raging pandemic? Director Nanfu Wang found herself tasked with that very question; her response is the Sundance 2021 selection “In The Same Breath.”  The documentary is an unflinching look at Wuhan during the COVID pandemic’s earliest days. It’s a  portrait of how one city confronted the unknown while also focusing on the human toll that is sometimes forgotten. It sounds like something you may want to avoid, we’ve all faced so much emotional trauma, but you watch five seconds of this trailer and you are gripped.

Continue reading ‘In The Same Breath’ Trailer: Nanfu Wang Chronicles The Pandemic’s Early Days In A Harrowing New Documentary at The Playlist.

It’s played all over the world in countless languages, but if you grew up in North America, chances are nothing is more beloved from your childhood than the children’s educational program “Sesame Street.” And it’s hard to understand and put in context just how groundbreaking “Sesame Street” was at the time, and how influential; a project that saw the power of television in the 1970s and aimed to create an entertaining tool that would also teach children. But that’s exactly what’s done in the critically-acclaimed documentary, “Street Gang: How We Got To Sesame Street.

Continue reading ‘Street Gang: How We Got To Sesame Street’ Trailer: The Children’s Television Workshop Gets The Spotlight at The Playlist.

Wow, if you thought Woody Allen had been canceled, Mia Farrow “won” and the allegations against Allen and the scandal between them was relatively over—Allen slinking back into the shadows to make films in Europe with whatever companies or actors would appear in them for the rest of his days— guess again. The scandal and drama are being unearthed again in an explosive new documentary called, “Allen V. Farrow.

Continue reading ‘Allen Vs. Farrow’: HBO Reveals Teaser Trailer For Explosive Secret Doc About The Woody Allen & Mia Farrow Scandal at The Playlist.