Spaceship Earth Is a Documentary That Could Have Used More Humanity

The title of Spaceship Earth refers to Biosphere 2, an enclosed location in the Arizona desert that replicates Earth's ecosystem. This domain has been created in an attempt to create a sustainable environment that could be used on other planets. You could just build another biosphere on Mars and, presto! You've got a location where astronauts can live without any problem! A group of people are placed inside Biosphere 2 to see if it's possible for human beings to survive just in here, with no contact with the outside world, for two years. If they succeed, both the participants of this project and its backers believe they will have made a scientific breakthrough.

A Secret Love Provides Simple But Heartwarming Pleasures

A Secret Love will receive one of my shortest movie reviews in a while. However, that shouldn't be taken as a comment on it being lackluster in quality or not being substantive. It's just that the movie sets out to do something relatively simple and achieves it. Sometimes you can break films like this into complex explanations for how they secured their artistic success. Sometimes, though, a movie like A Secret Love reminds you of its success in more basic, but no less worthy, terms. A documentary that wants to be a heartfelt tearjerker succeeds in being a heartfelt tearjerker. You don't need 3000 words to explain why this one works.

Honeyland Is A Sweet Intimate Portrait of a Helpful Beekeeper

Given how often movies aim for endlessly gargantuan spectacle regardless of whether or not it works for their story or not, it's always refreshing to find an unabashedly simple motion picture like Honeyland. It crossed my mind more than once whether or not the basic premise of this project could sustain a feature-length story. Such thoughts quickly vanished as Honeyland constantly proved my doubtful thoughts misplaced. In fact, Honeyland is quite remarkable in how it gets such an engaging movie out of so little. Directors Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov demonstrate that it's not the number of tools you have, but how you use them.

It's Remarkable That For Sama Exists But Thank Goodness It Does

You know how sometimes you see movies execute some wondrous feat with practical visual effects and you ponder "Wow, how did they pull that off?" That same sense of awe in pondering how a cinematic feat was accomplished defines For Sama, a documentary hailing from directors Waad Al-Kateab and Edward Watts comprised of footage I honestly can't believe was captured on film. This feature is all about the experiences of living in the middle of a wartime scenario in real-time as captured by Waad Al-Kateab's camcorder. At times, bombs go off around Al-Kateab, yet the footage keeps rolling. She knows the urgency of what she's recording. She knows that to create art about oppressed people is to create permanent reminders that they existed.

American Factory is a Gripping Look at Workers Fighting to Reaffirm Their Humanity

In the wake of 2008 economic recession, it was the little people at the bottom of the economic totem pole that suffered the most compared to the wealthy Wall Street tycoons who actually played a part in causing this downturn in the first place. Part of this suffering came from the closure of countless manufacturing plants, leaving American workers who had previously relied on that source of income with nowhere else to go. Some hope was offered up come 2015 when Chinese manufacturing company Fuyao bought up an abandoned GM manufacturing plant in Dayton, Ohio and turned it into an American branch of Fuyao's manufacturing company. For the first time in years, manufacturing jobs were brought back to this small American town and things were looking up.

Man on Wire Brings To Life The People Behind A Wondrous Stunt

As Tangled once thoughtfully pointed out, everybody's got a dream. But few have a dream as audacious as Philippe Petit. This French tightrope walker used his skills to walk across all kinds of landmarks around the world to bring a sense of joy and wonder to the masses. Come the 1970s, he had his sights set on his next feat of tightrope-walking which would also bring his ultimate dream to life. Petit was determined to use a tightrope to walk across the two towers of the then-recently installed World Trade Center. It sounded like utter lunacy and it still does. But it happened. Petit pulled this stunt off. And the documentary Man on Wire, hailing from director James Marsh, is here to interview Petit and the other participants in this mad stunt on how exactly they pulled this off.

Filmmaking Gone Awry Proves To Be Captivating In Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau

It's a common occurrence in the modern blockbuster landscape to hear stories of a director originally set to helm a splashy high-budget project get taken off the project during pre-production, reshoots or even principal photography due to that age-old excuse of "creative differences". Josh Trank on Fant4stic, Phil Lord & Chris Miller on Solo: A Star Wars Story, Stephen Gaghan on that upcoming Dolittle movie, oh, the list goes on and on. But few of these departures were as chaotic as when Richard Stanley was fired a few days into filming on his passion project, a feature film adaptation of The Island of Dr. Moreau. What led to Stanley taking this gig in the first place, his firing and the fallout of this decision is chronicled in the documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau.

Too Often, Echo In The Canyon Reduces Complex Rock Stars to Caricatures

Back in the 1960s, the introduction of The Beatles into the music scene basically turned all the rules of mainstream pop music on their head. Suddenly, a new age had dawned with artists like The Byrds, The Beach Boys and The Mommas and Poppas upending conventions with their blend of folk & rock music, extended runtimes for songs and more introspective lyrics. Many of these artists lived in a portion of Los Angeles called Laurel Canyon where, in their interactions together they each, managed to strengthen one another's music. Influence in the form of the presence The Beatles kicked off this era of music so it shouldn't be a surprise that influence would crop up again in the form of artists in this pocket of L.A. impacting one another's music.

Paris Is Burning Intertwines Movement With Intimate Interviews To An Astonishingly Powerful Effect

You ever watch a movie and know in your heart of hearts that you're watching something special? That's how I felt while experiencing Paris Is Burning for the first time. I was well aware of this 1991 documentary from director Jennie Livingston being a highly acclaimed motion picture and also being considered one of the all-time great pieces of queer cinema, but prior to watching it for the first time, I was otherwise totally in the dark on what exactly kind of plot or subject matter it covered. That turned out to be an ideal way to enter Paris Is Burning, whose many virtues unfolded before with a glorious sense of newness, it was like managing to open a wonderful gift on Christmas morning without managing to be spoiled on what it is.

Knock Down the House Is An Inspirational And Humanizing Exploration of American Politics

Let's not sugar-coat it, the last week of American politics has been a particularly vicious form of disheartening, which is saying something given how the last two-and-a-half years have been the physical manifestation of a nightmare. We need an ounce of hope wherever we can get it and goodness knows movies have always functioned as a go-to format for providing stories that offer up some hope to the world in times of crisis. For the Rachel Lears feature film Knock Down the House (which is now streaming on Netflix), hope is offered through a documentary that follows a quarter of female politicians looking to shake the status quo in American politics.

Beyonce: Homecoming Is Both An Exhilarating And Insightful Documentary

If somebody's still puzzled as to why Beyonce Knowles-Carter has become such a phenomenon in the modern-day pop culture scene, Beyonce: Homecoming, a feature that captures Beyonce's 2018 Coachella performance, should provide a handy-dandy summation for why exactly she's risen to such a legendary status in the modern era. Just the crowd's reaction to watching her perform live alone should say why Beyonce has become a pop culture force to be reckoned with. Many of these audience members don't get their experiences properly represented frequently in music nor does music often tell them explicitly that they are amazing because of the traits that society ostracizes them for. Self-empowerment anthems are common in American pop music but Beyonce takes that format and skews it through the lens of black culture and especially through the lens of black women empowerment to create self-empowerment anthems that don't just resonate with people but are quite unlike anything else we've ever seen in music.

Free Solo's Outstanding Camerawork Is Nightmare Fuel For People With a Fear of Heights

If there's one job I'm just not cut out for, it's mountain climber. My vertigo kicks in if I go up a particularly high escalator, I can only imagine how distraught I'd be trying to ascend the side of a mountain. But there's plenty of people who don't just manage to actually climb up mountains, they excel at it and some even manage to do with without any ropes to provide protection for them. These climbers are known as free solo climbers and one of the most famous people in this field is Alex Honnold, the star of Free Solo, a documentary about his exploits trying to ascend the El Capitan rock formation over the course of two years. It's a monumental task with an equally massive level of risk attached to it but Honnold is not the kind of guy who just sticks to the safe and sound.

Apollo 11 Shows That Flying To The Moon Isn't As Easy As Frank Sinatra Made It Sound

"How did they do that?" is one of the best thoughts one can have while watching a movie. When a film so dumbfounds the senses that you're left agape at how they could have possibly achieved a certain image or explored a certain theme to such a thoughtful level, it's just a rush of an experience as a viewer. Apollo 11, a new documentary about the very first manned mission to the Moon, is one such film that got me repeatedly thinking "How did they do that?", particularly in terms of me being befuddled on how people were able to capture certain moments in this historic voyage on camera. I'm still in the dark on how certain shots were achieved but I am far more certain that such shots help make Apollo 11 a worthy cinematic ode to a great achievement in the history of mankind.

Hale County: This Morning, This Evening Is A Transportive Avant-Garde Type of Documentary

If you're a pleb like me, you were likely puzzled by at least one documentary nominated for Best Documentary Feature in the 91st Academy Awards ceremony that went by the name of Hale County: This Morning, This Evening. It was a nomination thought of as surprising far and wide simply due to the low profile of the film (Hale County has never played in more than 8 movie theaters in its domestic box office run), though thankfully PBS put the documentary up on their website for a week so that individuals like myself who were unaware of the existence of this film could finally catch up and see what all the fuss was about.

Peter Jackson and Company Do A Remarkable Job Restoring World War I Footage In They Shall Not Grow Old

I've been saying for a while now that it would be a dream come true to have director Peter Jackson's first post-Hobbit directorial gig be a motion picture in the vein of his earliest grindhouse works, most notably Meet the Feebles, something demented, warped and low-budget. Wouldn't it be great to see that side of Jackson again after so many years of only seeing him use his filmmaking skills on big-budget productions? Well, it turns out his actual first directorial effort after those Hobbit movies is something far removed from the likes of Meet the Feebles but that's not at all a bad thing. On the contrary, They Shall Not Grow Old feels like a return to form for Jackson as he uses groundbreaking VFX in the service of human beings and not the other way around for the first time in ages.

We Didn't Start The Fyre, That's All Billy McFarland's Doing

The Fyre Festival is a constant creator of turmoil, even when the saga behind this music festival sham is chronicled in documentary form, there must be chaos in the form of competing documentaries and valid concerns about the creative integrity of Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened A.K.A. the one Fyre documentary that's on Netflix. Said creative integrity pertains to how crucial behind-the-scenes individuals involved with this documentary are also those who had a stake in the company involved in the Fyre Festival, which could make this documentary more of a PR move rather than a glimpse into what informed the madness of this music festival gone haywire.

An Inspirational Historical Figure Gets A Cookie-Cutter But Agreeable Documentary With RBG

RBG is a biographical documentary about Ruth Bader Ginsburg and that's pretty much the short and simple of what it is. The feature, directed by Betsy West and Julie Cohen, isn't something that has any shocking revelations about Ginsburg or what fueled her political career, it's all focused on the basic events of her life that one can find in any biographical book. Such life events are presented in a relatively standard way for a political documentary, there's not too much here in the editing or choices of visual accompaniments that stands out as particularly creative or innovative. That being said, the film's ace up its sleeve is that the life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a truly inspiring one that you can't help but be invested in. The documentary about her may be run-of-the-mill in some respects but Ginsburg's real-life accomplishments certainly aren't.

Shirkers Is A Fascinating Exploration of A Cinematic Passion Project That Never Was

I've mentioned before how Netflix really did just crush it in terms of the quality of their original movie output in the last three months of 2018 and easily rising towards the top of that stellar crop of movies (which really is quite the feat!) is the documentary Shirkers. Directed by Sandi Tan, the feature is named after a motion picture she made with her friends and a film teacher mentor, Georges Cardona, in Singapore in the early 1990s. She poured her heart and soul into this film, all of her passion for cinema drove her to complete something that hadn't really been seen before in the film industry of her home country of Singapore.

Minding the Gap Is Must-See Top-Notch Documentary Filmmaking

When director Bing Liu set out to make Minding the Gap, his primary goal seemed to be to look at the abusive childhoods that he and his two best friends had endured and how that abusive behavior had impacted their modern-day lives. It's hard to imagine that director Bing Liu ever thought, in the process of filming the everyday lives of his childhood pals, hed end up with something that has such precise build-up and tragic pay-off's that it feels like it could belong in a traditional narrative feature. In the confines of a film, these turn of events would be held back by the fact that they are, after all, fictional, just performers reading a script, whereas Minding the Gap is capturing reality itself, complete with raw revelations about the complicated lives of Bing's best friends.

Orson Welles And All His Complexities Make For A great Documentary In They'll Love Me When I'm Dead

The saga of filming The Other Side of the Wind for years on end is a fascinating story in and of itself, there's more than enough material in that saga to fill up a whole documentary or two. But though They'll Love Me When I'm Dead primarily concerns itself with the multi-year process of filming this motion picture, it uses that tale as a springboard for a larger exploration of the career of Orson Welles, which kicked off with a bang with Citizen Kane but spiraled into endless creative difficulties as he struggled to work with studio executives who hindered or outright ignored his work. Welles is a mythic figure of cinema in the modern age just as he was for many young directors at the start of the 1970s, but his career was rife with difficulty that gets explored throughout They'll Love Me When I'm Dead.