Daniel Fienberg

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

The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel is highly entertaining, full of ridiculously fun early footage of the band and its predecessors, and deeply emotional, with Flea succeeding in making me tear up on multiple occasions. As a film about Hillel Slovak, it’s a bit less successful.

So it’s a good opportunity to fall in love with Maria Bamford if you’re unfamiliar. And even if you know the story, the way Bamford tells it remains refreshing and fully involving.

I doubt any movie, especially any documentary, will make me laugh harder this year, and many of its emotional grace notes land fully. Even with my high expectations, The History of Concrete is a small triumph.

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.

It’s a trippy, meandering journey, but the moments of amusement and insight are ample.

Over 96 minutes, you’ll be horrified and saddened. You’ll probably also want more information on a lot of the broadly sketched details, because this project is an overview and not an in-depth thesis. It’s limited, but it’s convincing.

The Alabama Solution is difficult to watch, and impossible to watch without escalating anger. There isn’t easy catharsis or an easy non-Alabama solution, but it’s impossible to deny that something better must be done.

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.

In Nothing Is Lost, Stiller uses the public image and private artifacts of the parents he and the world knew quite well, pondering the gap between public and private, along with his own difficulties following in his parents’ footsteps as an artist, a spouse and a father.

At the end of the documentary, Richard O’Brien reflects on his realization over the years that Rocky Horror hasn’t truly belonged to him for years. It belongs, he says, to the fans, and Strange Journey is a record they’ll be pleased to have.

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.

Overall, though, Lost in the Jungle is a solid telling of a story that’s hard to make anything other than compelling.

Few documentary subgenres have been more burgeoning in the past couple of years than the sports doc, with Yogi Berra and Willie Mays getting very solid standalone films. If you’re a devotee, you can add Clemente to the ranks of the good ones.

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.

Although I think there are gaps that DiMarco and Guggenheim could have filled in, the documentary is elevated by its exceptional quartet of central heroes and by its effort to tailor the storytelling and aesthetic approach to the unique aspects of this movement.

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.

Funny, sad and uncomfortable in shifting proportions, the film is at once an urgent public service announcement and a documentary memento mori — not always pleasant to watch, but far more pleasant to watch than the subject matter would suggest.

Folktales is an easily embraceable coming-of-age documentary that makes up for what it lacks in depth with its surplus of wise, vaguely anthropomorphized canine companions.

Predators isn’t a documentary about closing the door on the To Catch a Predator legacy, but on seeing what shades of gray we can discover now that the door is ready to be reopened.

Half visceral, first-hand treatment of this particular war and half existential meditation on the ephemeral nature of modern warfare in general, 2000 Meters to Andriivka is perhaps less instantly harrowing than 20 Days in Mariupol. But its haunting impact may go further toward reshaping viewer perceptions of the ongoing conflict.

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.