The New York Times Presents: Malfunction: The Dressing Down of Janet Jackson

What’s more illuminating, however, is the way this documentary connects the dots from so-called Nipplegate all the way back to the beginning of Jackson’s career. ... Like everything in The New York Times Presents series, the evidence of the uproar is presented straightforwardly, letting its ridiculousness speak for itself.

Like Framing Britney Spears, it is most successful as a speed-read, an almost bullet-pointed rundown of the controversy at hand. ... Malfunction presents a timeline and an engaging reconsideration of a cultural discourse. But the most pressing voices—Jackson’s and Timberlake’s—are missing. That said, there’s an immense amount of gratification to be had from the rewriting of history to how it should have been.