The business of health is built on other people’s problems. This simple fact is reiterated in one form or another throughout Kirby Dick’s muckraking exposé of the medical devices industry, The Bleeding Edge; we see it in regulatory buck-passing, excruciating side effects, and a level of corporatization that, in Dick’s…

Asked recently to describe Alexander McQueen to a friend with little knowledge of fashion, the best I could think of was to say, “He basically gave Lady Gaga her entire aesthetic.” That’s, of course, an overly simplistic way of looking at it, not least because Gaga isn’t the only one whose approach to sartorial…

Twenty-two years into its run, the Fantasia International Film Festival is the grande dame of North American genre film festivals. And like any institution, it has its milestones—Fantasia was the first festival to screen Takashi Miike’s work in North America, and arguably launched the J-horror trend…

The photographer Lauren Greenfield, whose documentary The Queen Of Versailles profiled a mega-rich Florida family and their unfinished 85,000 square foot house, offers a career survey in Generation Wealth, revisiting her earlier books, photo assignments, and short docs in a purported overview of our global culture of…

The Houstons were as classic an American saga as the Ambersons or the Glass family, and the life and untimely death of their golden child, the global pop diva Whitney Houston, bore the weight of their ambitions and failures. John Houston, Whitney’s imperious father, worked in zoning for the corrupt mayor’s office of…

Werner Herzog is an endlessly fascinating filmmaker, having pivoted from helming some of film’s most daring productions to exploring our world with vital documentaries about cave paintings, grizzlies, and the internet. It’s not just Herzog’s boundless curiosity that enraptures audiences, but also the ways in which his…

Watching the disciples of Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh try to explain away the group’s involvement in everything from immigration fraud to attempted murder to intentionally contaminating salad bars with salmonella as a test run for a potential mass poisoning, you can’t help but wonder how these self-absorbed…

Ed Vaughn, a civil rights activist in his 80s, laughs as he remembers the first time he ate at a newly desegregated five-and-dime in Dothan, Alabama. He had fought for years for the right to be served at the whites-only lunch counter, but it turned out the food there was slop—nowhere as good as home cooking, anyway.…

There’s no real attempt at a thesis or story arc in Quest, Jonathan Olshefski’s long-in-the-making documentary about a decade in the life of a black family in an impoverished Philadelphia neighborhood. It’s bookended, with subtle political overtones, by the 2008 and 2016 presidential elections, but there’s nothing as…

Five years ago, Vertigo dethroned longtime champion Citizen Kane in the once-per-decade Sight And Sound poll, becoming film critics’ consensus choice for the greatest movie ever made. Survey those same critics about the single greatest scene in cinema history, however, and a different Hitchcock movie would almost…

Driving a box truck disguised as a giant camera, Agnès Varda and Jean “JR” René tour the French countryside in Faces Places, visiting farms, coal towns, factories, tiny cemeteries, and a toppled German bunker that sits like a Brutalist monument on a Norman beach. The odd couple pairing is almost too cute: the arthouse…

In the earliest days of the gay rights movement, the sight of a man wearing a dress was one of the most visible and shocking symbols of queerness. It’s what a lot of sheltered Americans thought of as “gay”—a man who wanted to live as a woman—and it’s what many of them mocked and feared. Political activism and popular…

Which sounds more painful to watch, for those sensitive to animal suffering: a deer being shot for sport, or a rhinoceros being forcibly held down and having its horn sawed off? Trophy, a documentary about the uneasy, seemingly oxymoronic junction of big-game hunting and conservation efforts, kicks off by showing both…

The documentary School Life originally had a much more provocative title, In Loco Parentis, which is a legal term that means “in the place of parents.” It implies, however vaguely, something lacking in a child’s mother and/or father—and School Life doesn’t spend much time on parents at all. Instead, the focus of this…

Every great comedian has a bit of darkness in them. Sometimes, it can even feel like the bigger their smile and the more positive their presence, the heavier that darkness truly is. Jim Carrey made a name for himself in both stand-up and film thanks to his silly physical comedy and highly expressive, seemingly rubber…

Bryan Fogel’s Netflix documentary Icarus tells such an eye-opening story that it almost doesn’t matter when the storytelling itself gets a little sloppy. An actor and playwright best known for the comedy Jewtopia, Fogel is trying his hand at feature-length non-fiction filmmaking for the first time with Icarus, and he…

The Keepers, Netflix’s newest documentary miniseries, ostensibly revolves around the 1969 murder of Sister Cathy Cesnik, a beloved teacher at a Baltimore Catholic high school whose case remains unsolved nearly 50 years later. But she’s only a small part of a bigger puzzle—which is how Sister Cathy, who’s painted with…

In The Overlook, A.V. Club film critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky examines the misfits, underappreciated gems, and underseen classics of film history.

The appeal of Planet Earth, which returned last year for its long-awaited second installment, is not merely its dazzlingly photographed images of nature; it’s the way the documentary series compiles that nature footage into coherent narratives. We remember it for individual images of sharks and wolves and birds doing…