Documentary Films and Programs

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Yellow Door: ’90s Lo-Fi Film Club’ Review: Cinema Education

      by

      This documentary is both a look at a small, obsessive film club that formed in the early ’90s in South Korea and an origin story of the director Bong Joon Ho, who was in the group.Every filmmaker, including the great ones, starts somewhere — even if that means making a low-rent stop-motion short called “Looking for Paradise” that’s about a stuffed gorilla searching for freedom while fighting a caterpillar that emerged from its fecal matter. That was how a young, student Bong Joon Ho made his debut, a saga detailed in “Yellow Door: ’90s Lo-Fi Film Club,” a charming documentary about a cohort of South Korean cinephiles formed in 1992.Before becoming one of the world’s most acclaimed contemporary auteurs (through movies including (“Parasite,” “Okja” and “Snowpiercer”), Bong found an education as part of this tiny, makeshift film academy made up of graduate students and other film lovers. The documentary, directed by Lee Hyuk-rae (who was part of the group), gathers the club members to reminisce about these early days, when they’d congregate in a yellow-painted office to watch and study bootleg VHS copies of art-house movies.Their interests were representative of what was then a larger, budding wave of South Korean cinephile culture that would produce major talent, including Bong and the filmmaker Park Chan-wook, though most of the other members of this particular group went on to have careers outside of film.The documentary carries a couple of interesting insights into Bong’s own origins: There’s a surprisingly profound kernel of emotional acuteness in his amateur debut, along with an early instance of the motif of basements that shows up in many of his later films. But the doc mostly amounts to a sweet nostalgia trip about a niche group of obsessive young people. It’s also an ode to young adulthood itself: For most of the group, latching on to cinema was simply a means of finding a community, and themselves.Yellow Door: ’90s Lo-Fi Film ClubNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Deep Rising’ Review: Who Gets to Mine the Ocean Floor?

      by

      Matthieu Rytz’s documentary about the bounty at the bottom of the sea examines the fight over whether to reap these riches or preserve them.Documentaries on ecological crises often begin by scaring the bejesus out of viewers before adding a note of tempered optimism. For “Deep Rising,” a film about the race to mine the deep seabed (in particular, the floor beneath the Pacific’s vast Clarion-Clipperton Zone), the director Matthieu Rytz eschews shock for awe, and inflammatory rhetoric for measured persuasion.The director’s choice of his two chief characters proves richly dialectical. Gerard Barron is the hipster CEO of The Metals Company, a Canadian mining concern focused on harvesting polymetallic nodules containing nickel, manganese, cobalt and copper among other minerals that the so-called green economy craves. (“Please get nickel!,” Elon Musk can be heard saying in an audio clip.) Sandor Mulsow is a warm, serious-minded marine geologist and the former head of the Office of Environmental Management and Mineral Resources at the International Seabed Authority, the organization the U.N. has tasked with protecting the ocean floor.Rytz takes care not to lionize or demonize either man. Even so, the pitch Barron gives a roomful of high-net investors sounds too good — and low-impact — to be true.The composer Olafur Arnalds’s string-led score and the actor Jason Momoa’s sonorous narration add to the film’s argument that where the world’s biodiversity and the seafloor’s still mysterious environs are concerned, caution and care are paramount.The footage of iridescent creatures with billowing tentacles or translucent bodies mesmerizes but it also creates contemplative pauses amid the documentary’s facts, interviews and the damning history of the mining industry. The optimism here resides in the filmmaker’s trusting his audience to grapple with the entwined fates of the seafloor, its inhabitants and humankind.Deep RisingNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Four Daughters’ Review: The Role Family Plays

      by

      This documentary from Kaouther Ben Hania restages pivotal moments from a family’s life.Re-enactment is not an unusual or particularly novel tool in documentary filmmaking yet recently it seems to have made a pointed resurgence — perhaps because the method has a distinct relationship to trauma and offers a compelling means of picking open old wounds for cathartic and/or healing purposes. Think “Framing Agnes,” “Procession,” and Nathan Fielder’s HBO series “The Rehearsal.”“Four Daughters” is another re-enactment film, distinct for the sense of intimacy and familiarity it brings to seemingly extraordinary circumstances. Olfa Hamrouni, a Tunisian woman, has four daughters, two of whom disappeared in 2015 to join ISIS in Libya. Directed by Kaouther Ben Hania, the documentary blends direct testimony by Olfa and her two youngest daughters, Eya and Tayssir, with stagings of pivotal scenes from the family’s life. The talking-heads style confessions, beautifully framed in velvety shadows, resemble stained-glass portraits.The docufictional interludes are performed by Eya and Tayssir, as well as two actresses who play the lost daughters Ghofrane (Ichraq Matar) and Rahma (Nour Karoui). A separate actress also plays Olfa (Hend Sabri), though Ben Hania shifts between the fictional drama and a behind-the-scenes perspective, meaning we occasionally see Olfa directing her double and tweaking the performances to conform to her version of events.We learn that Eya and Tayssir, only teenagers when they fled Olfa’s home, turned to Islamic extremism as a form of rebellion; Olfa, because of an upbringing punctuated by violence and misogyny, raised her daughters with an iron fist. Despite the documentary’s exciting hybridity, the conceit is more interesting in theory than it is in practice. The re-enactments map out the family’s tension and lay bare their wounds, but the lost daughters remain cyphers — the appeal of radicalization frustratingly murky through the end.Four DaughtersNot rated. In Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      The Best True Crime to Stream: Stories That Are Very Scary, and Real

      by

      Four terrifying, unnerving picks across television, film and podcast.It’s the time of year when I tend to push the boundaries of how many scary stories I can stomach. That includes horror movies, but also, true crime offerings that I may have skipped. Of course, with true crime, that self-soothing mantra of “at least it’s not real” doesn’t apply, which makes it all the more haunting. Here are four picks that shook me to my core.Documentary“Beware the Slenderman”On May 31, 2014, in Waukesha, Wis., Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser, then 12 years old, lured their friend and classmate Payton Leutner into a forest and stabbed her 19 times. Weier and Geyser were trying to appease the fictional character Slender Man, a tall, lanky, faceless ghoul and modern-day boogeyman whose image had been disseminated on the Creepypasta Wiki, a horror-centric online forum. The girls believed that if they killed their friend, they would save their families from Slender Man’s wrath and get to live forever in what they called Slender Mansion.This 2016 documentary, directed by Irene Taylor Brodsky, uses chilling footage of the girls recounting the precipitating events to police officers hours after the stabbing. And Brodsky spent 18 months with the parents of Weier and Geyser ahead of their trial on charges of attempted first-degree murder.Particularly hard to shake is how Slender Man captivated young people. The character originated from a Photoshop challenge to create convincing paranormal images, then spread to platforms across the web and became the basis of popular online games. In the documentary, mental health experts talk about the role of internet as companion; the abundance of grotesque imagery online; and what I found most disturbing: the concept that a meme with great spreadability is in fact a virus of the mind.Docuseries“John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise”The term “killer clown” would normally send me running for the hills. But I was curious about this 2021 six-episode Peacock docuseries, which is a comprehensive exploration of the crimes committed by the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who preyed on boys and men and was sentenced on 33 counts of homicide in 1980. Gacy, who had been a respected and well-connected figure in his Chicago community and who performed for children as Pogo the Clown, was executed at an Illinois prison in 1994.Along with interviews of investigators, a sister of Gacy’s and family members of victims — as well as film of the excavation of his home, under which dozens of bodies were buried — the series includes a great deal of previously unseen footage of a 1992 interview with Gacy by the F.B.I. profiler Robert Ressler, who is credited with creating the term “serial killer.” (For “Mindhunter” fans, Ressler inspired the character of Special Agent Bill Tench.) Most indelible to me is how utterly ordinary and unremarkable Gacy seemed.While serial killers like him have often been too heavily glorified, there is value in not forgetting the systemic failures that allowed such horrors to continue unchecked. Much as they did with the crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer, the police ignored warnings and pushed aside clues, including pleas from a victim who’d survived, because of entrenched homophobia.Podcast“Dr. Death”: Season 1I decided to binge this 10-episode series on a 12-hour road trip with my dogs. Not even one episode in, I had to pull over and get out of my car for some air. But I persevered, so don’t let that dissuade you.Season 1 of this Wondery podcast, reported and hosted by the science journalist Laura Beil, tells the story of Christopher Duntsch, a young neurosurgeon who arrived in Dallas in 2010 and charmed his patients with confidence and charisma. He claimed that he could cure back pain when nothing else worked. Under his care, which amounted to butchery, over 30 patients were severely injured; two died.As stomach-turning as these accounts are, revelations about how he slipped through the medical system are worse.“In the Dark”: Season 1In 1989, 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling was kidnapped on a dead-end country road in his small Minnesota town, a kidnapping that would fuel an already fast-growing national paranoia: that pedophiles were snatching up America’s children. The search that followed was one of the largest manhunts in U.S. history. Though the investigation was terribly mishandled — as the host Madeleine Baran, an investigative journalist, and a team of reporters make clear over nine episodes and two bonus episodes of this American Public Media podcast (it found a new home at The New Yorker earlier this year).For 27 years, there were no answers, but a couple of weeks before Season 1 was set to debut, in 2016, Wetterling’s remains were discovered, changing everything and taking a story from decades ago and placing it breathlessly in the present. More

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Milli Vanilli’ Review: Blame It on the Fame

      by

      Luke Korem’s documentary retraces the manufactured pop duo’s rise and fall, while asking pertinent questions about the price of stardom.The performers Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus earn your empathy in the documentary “Milli Vanilli,” a jolting, eye-opening investigation on how fame destroyed them. The war-of-words film, directed by Luke Korem, unfolds like a whodunit.The film retraces the bonkers events of Morvan and Pilatus’s naïve rise to the top in the late 1980s as Milli Vanilli, the image-forward pop duo who secretly lip-synced prerecorded songs to live audiences. Their hits included “Girl You Know It’s True” and “Baby Don’t Forget My Number.”At first, the duo needed money to escape poverty, but their celebrity status kept them hooked, and their German producer, Frank Farian, held the bait.And then, the documentary revisits their fall: During a live performance on MTV in 1989, the song started to skip, exposing them as frauds. In 1998, Pilatus died of an overdose. “I lost my sobriety and every sense of reality,” we hear him say in the film.Impressively, Korem gets those who ran the business side of Milli Vanilli, including officials at Arista Records, to spill the juicy details on what actually happened to the duo: Morvan and Pilatus became Farian and the label’s scapegoats. As presented here, it’s easy to see how this could be the basis for a horror film by Jordan Peele.Morvan is the heart of the documentary; he reflects on the group’s past treatment (he thinks they deserved that revoked Grammy) and raises still-relevant questions about the way the music industry exploits vulnerable performers. Charles Shaw, one of the real singers behind Milli Vanilli, says that Farian, who also worked with the group Boney M., “made most of his money on Black artists, and it worked.”Milli VanilliNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      ‘To Kill a Tiger’ Review: The Survivor Who Refused to Be Shamed

      by

      In this unflinching documentary, a young girl in rural India and her father fight an entrenched village culture to seek justice for her brutal rape.Nisha Pahuja’s documentary “To Kill a Tiger” opens with a startling image: a 13-year-old girl braids her hair in close-up as her father relates, in gutting voice-over, how she was raped by three men. Pahuja had planned to mask the girl’s face in post-production, but when Kiran (her pseudonym in the film) saw the footage at age 18, she chose to reveal herself in the film. It’s a defiant gesture on her part, to refuse the shroud of shame.“To Kill a Tiger” is a film bristling with such invigorating defiance. It follows Kiran and her parents, who live in a village in northeastern India, as they seek justice with the help of activists from Srijan Foundation, an advocacy organization. Interviews with other villagers reveal the tribalist, deeply patriarchal values that ensnare Kiran. Both men and women chastise her for her supposed irresponsibility and suggest brazenly that she marry one of her rapists to restore her “honor” and the village’s harmony.Kiran and her family are heroes, but this isn’t a simple tale of heroism. The film lays bare the uneasy and inadequate avenues available to survivors seeking justice. Is the long ordeal that pushes the family into debt and forces Kiran to repeatedly rehash her trauma making a difference? Is a fight that pits the family against their entire community worth it? Does the imprisonment of the perpetrators offer any real succor to the victim or upend the patriarchy?“To Kill a Tiger” doesn’t offer any easy answers. But in staying close to Kiran’s father, who refuses to let his daughter bow her head, and to the girl, who speaks with hope and flinty confidence, one thing is clear: The revolution begins at home.To Kill a TigerNot rated. In Hindi, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Another Body’ Review: A Cowardly New World

      by

      This film, directed by Sophie Compton and Reuben Hamlyn, follows a woman as she attempts to find the person responsible for posting her face on a deepfake porn video.When Taylor Klein, an engineering student, receives a message from a friend advising her to open a link, she’s cautious. Eventually she clicks, and finds herself staring back at herself. Taylor’s face has been stolen to make a deepfake video, which was posted with her personal information on a pornography site.The documentary “Another Body” takes us into this cowardly new world, one in which the images of a person — most often a woman — can be lifted from social media and digitally repurposed.When Taylor contacted the police to report what she thought was a crime, she didn’t get far. Currently only five states have laws making nonconsensual deepfake pornography a criminal act.The film, directed by Sophie Compton and Reuben Hamlyn, follows Taylor as she attempts to track down the person responsible. Along the way, she discovers two others whose faces have also been used for deepfake porn: Julia, a woman she recognizes from college, and Gibi, an ASMR actor and streamer.The twist is that Taylor’s and Julia’s names are pseudonyms and that they are portrayed by “face veil” actors (that technology came to the fore in the documentary “Welcome to Chechnya”).“Another Body” is most persuasive when experts weigh in on the reality-upending aspects of deepfake technology and image-based sex abuse. That the documentary does this by utilizing some of that technology to protect Taylor and Julia’s identities raises its own ethical questions — ones that, even with the filmmakers’ compassion and transparency, “Another Body” doesn’t quite resolve.Another BodyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Silver Dollar Road’ Review: Black Land Loss Is Still Happening

      by

      The 20th century saw a mass dispossession of Black farmers. This intimate documentary focuses on one family’s recent battle to keep their home in North Carolina.Sixty five acres on the coast of North Carolina were purchased by Mamie Reels Ellison’s great-grandfather in the aftermath of slavery. That land on Silver Dollar Road became a home, a place to farm and fish, and a sanctuary, stretching from its pine and gum-tree woods to a sandy beach, where the Reels family relaxed for generations.By the 2000s, though, the Reels homestead was in jeopardy. Developers had claimed the waterfront property, and Mamie’s two brothers, Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels, lost eight years in jail for refusing to vacate their houses. Directed by Raoul Peck, “Silver Dollar Road” adapts a 2019 ProPublica feature by Lizzie Presser into an intimate portrait of the family’s forbearance in the face of dispossession.Mamie and her niece Kim Duhon lead the family’s effort to hold onto the land, but while dipping into the legal morass, Peck’s film is more about sitting with the two women and their relatives, hearing out their fears and hopes as their ancestors’ land sits in limbo. Peck, who directed the fierce and engrossing James Baldwin documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” refrains from systemic-style analysis to let the family speak for themselves about their experience.A birthday gathering for 95-year-old Gertrude Reels sets the tone early on for the family’s tight-knit circles and sense of continuity. Interviews with Mamie and Kim evoke fond memories of their childhood haven, illustrated with faded photographs; and Melvin, a fisherman with a winning flair, gives us an on-the-ground sense of the land, roaming through woods and waterways. (Peck draws on 90-odd hours of footage originally shot by Mayeta Clark for ProPublica.)Their legal trouble dates back to the 1970s when a Reels patriarch, suspicious of Southern courts, died without leaving a will. His land was passed to his children, but one of the co-owning relatives secretly sold the land to a developer through a legal loophole. It’s only one maneuver among many that have been exploited in a vicious history of Black land dispossession, as the film’s concise captions make clear: Over the course of the 20th century, Black Americans lost about 90 percent of their farmland.The film’s second half shifts to the battle to free Melvin and Licurtis from a sentence whose substantial length feels racially motivated. But Peck doesn’t give the film over to talking-head experts explaining how the Reels are symptomatic victims. Their weariness and sadness comes through in interviews with them, but they’re also palpably borne up by love and belief. (Animated intertwining branches in the film’s illustrations evoke their family tree.)While videotaping outsiders on the Reels property during the brothers’ time in jail, Mamie minces zero words about racism among whites. But no one here is defined by this struggle, and amid the looming threats to a cherished home, Peck’s accomplishment is to let the Reels family own their emotional space.Silver Dollar RoadRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More