Daniel Fienberg

306 Hollywood is a personal essay! It's a tone poem! It's a biographical collage! It's an embrace of the banal kitschy! It's magic realism! It's such a little story you may wonder why it's being told at all, except that it's a story likely to touch anybody who has ever lost a loved one, which makes it a very big story.

It’s a documentary of sterling musical moments and clever connections between culture and the city that all the principals here so clearly adore.

Don’t sell Songs of Earth short, mind you, as an exclusively visual experience. Its sound design and score are every bit as immersive, and that may hold the actual key to best experiencing Olin’s film.

What Gideon's Army does is make a respectful case on the behalf of a profession that too often gets maligned.

Clement is the reason that Will is tolerable, because if you look at the character's on-the-page actions, he's not an especially well-developed man-child.

If Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song is nourishing only to a certain point, there’s plenty of Leonard Cohen scholarship out there.

Structurally, the documentary is a mess and I'm not convinced it quite lands on the story it wants to tell, but it's engaging and enraging nonetheless.

Cornwell died in 2020 and it’s a treasure to have this last opportunity to glimpse into the mind of a master raconteur, to hear his erudite explanations for his thematic fascinations and to watch him tiptoe around which personal tales he’s comfortable rehashing and which are better left in forms previously written.

Although it runs out of creativity well before the end of its 100-minute running time, it still coaxes ample good will out of the remarkable life and boundless energy of its 4-foot-7 heroine.

It’s frequently funny and occasionally savage in its commentary on the changed terrain. But in proving that Beavis and Butt-Head absolutely have a place in the contemporary world, it suggests that there’s a limit to how deeply we probably want to interrogate that place.

There's a richer documentary to be made, one you might crave even more after 90 minutes of being inspired and impressed by Lily Hevesh.

At only 67 minutes, Bradley&Pablo's doc is aspiring much more to the former. Less brevity and more depth could possibly have yielded a superior movie, but Alone Together may be an example of a documentary better served by leaving fans wanting more than making casually curious viewers want less.

It's an engaging, amusing and occasionally jaw-dropping portrait of a world that could hardly be more foreign to most documentary fans. But it's just those fans who are likely to wish it peeled back a few more layers.

The Great Hack uses a decent rehash of the Cambridge Analytica scandal as the starting point for an interesting two-pronged character study, an instigation for provocative ideas about data crime and what is ultimately a really, really, really conflicted look at when it's terrifying having corporations learning things about our online habits and when it's cool.

I have problems with some of the ways Price tells his story and some of the access he was able to get, but his documentary is more thoughtful than it necessarily needed to be.

An astonishing real-life geopolitical thriller with a very run-of-the-mill historical explainer grafted to it like a remora, Madeleine Gavin’s documentary Beyond Utopia is so packed with high-stakes tension and nail-biting set-pieces that it’s fairly easy, and probably even ideal, to ignore its clunky structuring and expositional choices.

Guggenheim’s particular approach here leaves lots of room for the next documentarian who wants to celebrate Fox’s life, but with its tight focus and distinctive style, it delivers an essence of Fox’s energy and generation-spanning appeal.

It’s a hoot with a bit of heart, and if you can accept that the main character’s actions ultimately hurt nobody — with the possible exception of a few Pez executives — its fizzy pleasures and compact running time are easy to enjoy.

Some of its mockery and many of its nerd-friendly celebrity talking heads — Seth Green! Kevin Smith! Paul Scheer! — are predictable, but when it isn’t poking fun at moments of iconic trash, it offers an insightful exploration of the production and context of the special.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The documentary isn’t as thorough or enlightening on border issues as something like Netflix’s Immigration Nation, but the young heroes make At the Ready a good vehicle through which many viewers will be able to process their own preconceptions and opinions.

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 had quibbles about the consistency of the documentary’s narrative approach — but not its bracing message about the challenges of political idealism and the wide-ranging consequences of democracy in peril.

El Camino is a high-quality piece of suspense and action filmmaking carried by Paul's still-tremendous performance as Jesse Pinkman. It looks great, sounds great and if you're a fan, it's full of cameos and references that are sure to amuse.