For more than four decades, Lagueria Davis’s aunt, Beulah Mae Mitchell, worked at Mattel. Davis, the director of the new Netflix documentary “Black Barbie,” was not a fan of dolls, but was drawn to the subject by her aunt, who is a devoted collector. On the surface, the documentary is about what led to the … Read more
Don’t you forget about them. “Brats,” the new documentary about the Brat Pack (now streaming on Hulu) covers the famous group of ‘80s stars, their memories about their heyday, and their gripes with that moniker. The circle of stars associated with the label are Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringwald, Demi Moore, Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Anthony … Read more
There is a platitude, beloved of the documentary community, that truth is stranger than fiction. It’s often correct. But lately I’ve been worried that the glut of documentary content required to fill the yawning maw of streamers is putting this axiom to the test more frequently. Not all stories are worthy of the documentary treatment. … Read more
New York Post may be compensated and/or receive an affiliate commission if you buy through our links. This June marks 30 years since Nicole Brown Simpson’s murder, and a new documentary is aiming to tell her story through the people who knew her best. The Lifetime doc, “The Life and Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson,” … Read more
It’s rare to see a film that feels not just poetic in nature, but like actual poetry. The rhythm and cadence, the imagery and metaphor, even the sense of movement and time that often accompany a great poem don’t translate easily to the screen. Filmmakers need a light touch and trust in the viewer to … Read more
Lourdes Portillo, the Oscar-nominated Mexican-born documentary filmmaker whose work explored Latin American social issues through spellbinding narratives, has died. She was 80. Ms. Portillo died Saturday at her home in San Francisco. Her death was confirmed by her friend Soco Aguilar. No cause was given. One of Ms. Portillo’s best-known works is her 1994 documentary … Read more
Have you ever stood in an art gallery, contemplating a vacuum, wondering if it’s art or if the maintenance staff just forgot to put it away? I love this feeling. To me, art is supposed to leave us re-evaluating everything we think we know about the world. But it does underline how knotty and capricious … Read more
It’s an accepted spring break axiom that you can retake a class but you can’t relive a party. Until now, that’s been true of Freaknik, the annual bass-rattling spring break street party that drew hundreds of thousands of Black college students to Atlanta throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Traffic crawled. Music blared. Booties were shaken. … Read more
Karen Boyer, Gene Wilder’s widow, remembered the last words her late husband said before his death in August 2016. A new “Remembering Gene Wilder” documentary focused on the actor’s diagnosis with Alzheimer’s disease and into his final days. In the film, Boyer recalled listening to Ella Fitzgerald’s legendary hit, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” with Gene before he … Read more
How can he miss them if they won’t go away? Judd Nelson says he “politely declined” to be in “Brats,” Andrew McCarthy’s upcoming Hulu documentary about the ’80s-era Brat Pack, of which both Nelson and McCarthy were charter members. “It seems strange to have that subject matter be something for edited entertainment,” Nelson, 64, told … Read more
The best documentary award became part of the Oscars in 1942, and the list of winners is genuinely fascinating. In the category’s early years, the State Department and various branches of the U.S. military were routinely nominated, and even won. As time wore on, films critical of the government and its policies — whether the … Read more
This week sees the release of “Dune: Part Two,” the second installment in Denis Villeneuve’s eye-popping adaptation of the 1965 Frank Herbert novel. “Dune” was also adapted in 1984, by David Lynch, who hated his version (or the cut that made it to theaters, anyhow) so much that he disavowed it. Perhaps you’ve seen the … Read more
It’s usually a delicious proposition: raw, unfettered access to a celebrity in the midst of a personal and professional metamorphosis. That’s how the controversial new Lifetime docu-series “Where is Wendy Williams?” began, say producers. Cameras started rolling in August 2022 amidst a cluster of scary medical diagnoses, troubling behavior (falsely claiming she had married a … Read more
Anybody who’s been to brunch at the beloved East Village institution Veselka knows how long the wait can be for an afternoon table to nosh on some of New York’s finest varenyky and borscht. But, in the days after Russia invaded Ukraine, the line on Ninth Street that curved onto Second Avenue felt different. It … Read more
The top prize at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival was given to “Dahomey,” a documentary by the French filmmaker Mati Diop about 26 looted artworks that were returned to Benin from France in 2021. The unconventional feature, narrated in part by the gravelly, imagined voice of one of the artworks, is a playful exploration … Read more
New York Post may be compensated and/or receive an affiliate commission if you buy through our links. In just a few hours, Lifetime is set to premiere the first two episodes of “Where is Wendy Williams?,” a new docuseries on life after the cancellation of the media personality’s eponymous talk show as she attempts a … Read more
Veselka, the Ukrainian diner on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, is one of the few restaurants in the city that truly deserves to be called venerable, even iconic. Mention it to most anyone — especially those of us who were here around the turn of the 21st century — and it provokes pierogi- and borscht-inflected rhapsodies, … Read more
About two-thirds of the way through, Navalny is relaxing between interviews with Roher when a woman asks if he’s getting annoyed by the questions about his past. No, Navalny tells her, in Russian: Roher can ask whatever he wants. She says that’s fine, but that he seems agitated. Navalny stops and explains: “It’s just that … Read more
At one point during “This is Me … Now: A Love Story,” a character observes that watching Jennifer Lopez’s love life is like bingeing “Vanderpump Rules” — eventually you stop judging the people you’re seeing and start judging yourself. But in the case of this self-financed multimedia project, you might also question what exactly it … Read more
Pop open the “documentaries” section of your friendly local streaming service, and a bevy of movies about celebrities will greet you. Rockers, politicians, artists, authors, athletes — increasingly everyone you’ve heard of has a documentary, and probably served as a producer on it, too. The appeal of such films is obvious: If you like someone … Read more