Daniel Fienberg

The documentary is an ungainly blend of ultra-earnest hagiography and trashy true-crime sensationalism, without being completely satisfying as either.

The New Yorker at 100 is a commercial for The New Yorker and it isn’t masquerading as anything else. But at that point, it should at least be a commercial for the magazine that befits the voice, aesthetic and ethos of the magazine in a meaningful way.

Where Finding Susan Powter works best is as a near-vérité glimpse into the life of somebody who seemingly had everything, seemingly lost everything and is now living in a limbo that would be sad except that the doc treats it as matter-of-fact, rather than tragic — a distinction I certainly appreciated.

Zenovich does a better job of acknowledging contradictions in complicated human behavior than reckoning with what those contradictions mean. Her documentaries are particularly flimsy when it comes to linking difficult men with bigger institutional failures. Still, there are worthwhile conversations that I’m Chevy Chase might allow viewers to have.

Being Eddie isn’t a great piece of documentary filmmaking, nor does its DNA include an iota of journalism. What it is, though, is consummately polished and affectionate, taking an actor who rarely seemed vulnerable or especially comfortable in the spotlight at the peak of his stardom and making him seem, for 103 minutes, thoroughly at ease.

There’s a story worth telling here, a snapshot within a sprawling tragedy, but Avrich can’t make a bigger statement that doesn’t feel oversimplified.

It may not be as sensational and buzzy as bringing down a major university or a sitting congressman, but since Surviving Ohio State won’t do either thing, it’s worth praising the potency of what it does well.

The conceit of letting Walters’ own interview tactics steer the documentary isn’t a bad one, but as executed here, it isn’t interesting either, which is a pity since Walters was absolutely interesting.

My problem with The Age of Disclosure isn’t the lack of opposing voices. It’s that there couldn’t be experts debunking anything here. Nothing is proven, and thus nothing can be refuted.

It’s a complicated meta-commentary delivered loosely in the guise of a ghoulish conspiracy thriller, presented in rushed form to an audience that would happily devour many more hours of the actual ghoulish conspiracy thriller that this is not.

The documentary is generally engaging, and putting Spiegelman in a spotlight will always be worthwhile. But Disaster Is My Muse is in the shadow of Crumb, in the shadow of Maus and just a little bit behind the times, in various disappointing ways.

I got bogged down frequently in the familiarity and intentional messiness of the story that Veiel and producer Sandra Maischberger chose to tell, while at the same time wondering what sense a wholly unaware viewer would be able to make of this woman and the long shadow she still casts.

In lieu of revelations, though, what keeps Martha engaging is watching Cutler thrust and parry with his subject.

On an intellectual and reporting level, Separated is sturdy and persuasive. Morris is angry, and if you’re watching this movie, chances are good that after 90ish minutes, you’ll be angry, too. What Separated needs, though, is a little touch of the old Errol Morris.

It would be difficult to convince anybody without a pre-existing interest that this constitutes compelling storytelling on any level.

Jim Henson Idea Man is a very conventional movie that dedicates its time to proving how unconventional Jim Henson was.

It’s surely not without emotionally satisfying moments and it does a persuasive job of emphasizing the importance of Reading Rainbow and of star LeVar Burton, but the documentary is slight in its artistic and thematic ambition.

There’s just a lot of media landscape stuff that Rather either can’t or doesn’t want to do justice — which returns me to my initial point that if you come from a perspective of youth this will be illuminating, but if you lived through it you’ll hardly get anything fresh at all.

The Contestant is a missed opportunity. It’s a documentary about voyeurism that, in the absence of freshly delivered insight, just reintroduces and rehashes the voyeuristic impulse it’s largely condemning.

Unfortunately, the exhaustive repetition of the most familiar parts of her narrative — plus an over-reliance on poorly utilized footage from an ethically compromised earlier documentary project — left me more irritated than moved by Stormy, however persuasive I found its main character.

There’s a great deal of beauty in Porcelain War and there’s a potent artistry behind it, but I’ve never watched a documentary with so many running visual metaphors and so little faith that the audience will be able to grasp them. It’s a bit stunning and a bit insulting all at once.

The film is very invested in proving the validity of the social relationships created in virtual space. To me, that’s the easy part. Video games can absolutely be nourishing and substantive and healthy. And I’m not even sure Ibelin confirms that in a smart way.

Girls State, like its predecessor, benefits from strong casting and ample access to the pint-sized political proceedings.

Maybe Korem’s primary objective is simply to make you think more about Milli Vanilli than you ever have before. In that, it’s a total success. It’s more of a failure when it comes to trying to answer some of those big questions and engage in direct accountability, and I don’t know if I buy most of its cultural conclusions

That the documentary United States vs. Reality Winner achieves its primary goals makes it a fairly successful film. That it achieves those goals while relying tediously on almost all of the genre’s most overused formal devices, offering shockingly little variation from countless other docs you’ve seen on similar subjects, makes it a so-so film.

I don’t think Meeropol’s formal choices always match the story she wants to capture, and After the Bite runs out of energy well before the end of its 90-minute running time. But I mostly enjoyed the idea of a more muted version of Jaws that suggests that if we have a contemporary shark attack problem, the solution is going to require more than a bigger boat.

The documentary that it chooses to be instead has appeal but, in the rush to get it onto screens before the next time somebody dares underestimate Curry, perhaps it lacks sufficient refinement.

The footage-forward/talking head-free approach is a tough one to get exactly right, and Adolphus doesn’t always nail it.

If Nuclear galvanizes a handful of people and even convinces a few more around nuclear power issues, good for Stone. But the movie itself is barely a filmed TED Talk.

Maybe it isn’t exactly that Pamela, a love story is unrevelatory. It’s just that what it reveals is that once you get past the tabloid-friendly headlines from the ’90s and ’00s, the actual Pamela Anderson is a fairly smart, fairly funny and fairly boring — not in a critical way at all, just in a way that runs counter to expectations — woman who just wants love. She also — and this actually is a problem — has always been a fairly candid interview subject.

It all results in a documentary I found consistently interesting and never revelatory. I learned things, but given the opportunity allegedly presented to the production, not close to as much as I might have wanted to learn.

A generally compelling story with obvious contemporary and global resonances gets an unfortunately dry and surface-level retelling in Ben Braun and Chiaki Yanagimoto’s Aum: The Cult at the End of the World.

The pieces don’t always fit together neatly and Alexandra Pelosi struggles with a subject whose façade is proudly impenetrable, but there are points at which Pelosi in the House is engaging and enlightening enough to make up for it being simultaneously choppy and rushed.

Though Downfall does some things extremely well, in the balance it’s not very good cinematic journalism and it’s only persuasive to a very limited extent — one that is almost impossible to dispute but doesn’t really take a vital conversation anywhere interesting.

Nothing in The Forever Prisoner feels all that revelatory, but the thing that’s essential in the doc is the reminder that for all of the story’s familiarity, it reflects a situation that has been barely ameliorated over more than a decade.

At only 80 minutes, Beanie Mania offers only limited depth and it’s hard to imagine any viewer not being left with serious questions throughout, but as a superficial, hastily glossed nostalgic oddity, it’s a tidy way to wrap your 2021 viewing.

The filmmaking choices all too frequently muddle any potential insight, yet the documentary contains so much good stuff that fans of the subject might be powerless to resist.

Leclerc’s lack of introspection — you never forget his youth — puts a lot of pressure on the other talking heads. Fortunately, The Alpinist can always count on Harrington for amusing or poignant beats.

It’s much closer to the work of its main subject: a bit hurried, inoffensive and ultimately unsubstantial. It’s loosely informative, rarely revelatory and, despite what the title might lead you to expect, never provocative.

Misha's actual story is fascinating in its own way, but within the relative levity of Hobkinson's framework, her truth and trauma get lost in a detective yarn. The film lacks the heft to adequately explain the nuance of Misha's truth

What Dower is interested in here isn't the hijacking itself or even how it has gone unresolved for decades, but rather the nature of the D.B. Cooper obsession.

I spent the first hour of Happy Happy Joy Joy guiltily feeling like I needed a rewatch of Ren & Stimpy — it's an important series and there's no pretending otherwise — and the next 35 minutes feeling dirty about the whole thing and the last 10 minutes getting actively angry about how the entire story had been framed and reduced to "difficult genius" cliches.

Buying Pepe as misunderstood and buying Pepe as a character destined for redemption are two different things, and it's the argument after the buildup where Feels Good Man stopped feeling persuasive for me. Your hopefulness may vary.

That nobody becomes a realized character with an emotional arc is just a place American Factory falls a little flat.

As a movie it's OK, with very little worth raving about. As a story and message, though, it feels important and worth getting out there in as swift and mainstream a way as possible. Better to inspire some institutional change and maybe save a few lives than to be hailed as art.

Utterly and passionately hagiographic, the documentary Seeing Allred presents 96 minutes of reasons to stand and cheer for celebrated feminist lawyer Gloria Allred. That means, of course, that for ultra-conservative lovers of Netflix documentaries, it's doubtful that Seeing Allred is going to dramatically change any opinions about her.

Easily the most ambitious film of the director's career, but also the most infuriating for all of the sociological and psychological points that it tries to make in ways that are too often unearned or poorly defended.

de Ayala is required to supply too much of the energy in a film that is, overall, far too staid for its subject matter.

Schaeffer fails to develop the relationship beyond clichéd signpost events.

While the film frequently concentrates on the wrong story, the humanity of the musicians comes through in their own words and actions.

The two encounters with the beast WXIII -- first in a darkened factory, and later in an empty stadium, to the strains of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in G Minor (Pathétique) -- elevate the disappointingly flat animation into a vivid fable of monster and morality.