7.5
Meet Big and Little Edie Beale: mother and daughter, high-society dropouts, and reclusive relatives of Jackie Onassis. The two manage to thrive together amid the decay and disorder of their East Hampton, New York, mansion, making for an eerily ramshackle echo of the American Camelot. An impossibly intimate portrait, this 1976 documentary by Albert and David Maysles, codirected by Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer, quickly became a cult classic and established Little Edie as a fashion icon and philosopher queen.
6.7
Visionary cinema historian Mark Cousins (THE STORY OF FILM: AN ODYSSEY) charts the unknown territory of the imagination of one of the twentieth century’s most revolutionary artists. Granted unprecedented access to hundreds of sketches, drawings, and paintings by Orson Welles—tantalizing, never-before-seen glimpses into the filmmaker’s rich inner life—Cousins sheds new light on the experiences, dreams, desires, and obsessions that fueled his creativity and inspired his masterpieces. Playful, profound, and as daringly iconoclastic as its subject, THE EYES OF ORSON WELLES is a one-of-a-kind work of visual archaeology, a fresh way of looking at a cinematic giant whose singular worldview—fiercely humanist, defiantly antiauthoritarian—resonates now more urgently than ever.
6.9
The life and work of celebrated American writer Patricia Highsmith are revealed through her diaries and notebooks and the intimate reflections of her lovers, friends, and family in this fascinating documentary. While many of her most famous novels—including “Strangers on a Train,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” and the partly autobiographical lesbian love story “The Price of Salt”—were adapted into acclaimed films, Highsmith herself was forced to lead a double life and had to hide her vibrant same-sex affairs from her family and the public. Only in her unpublished writings did she reflect on her rich private life. Excerpts from these notes voiced by Gwendoline Christie are beautifully interwoven with archival materials to create a vivid, touching portrait of a complex artist.
7.9
For nearly five years, acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog desperately tried to complete one of the most ambitious and difficult films of his career, FITZCARRALDO, the story of one man’s attempt to build an opera house deep in the Amazon jungle. Documentary filmmaker Les Blank captured the unfolding of this production, made more perilous by Herzog’s determination to shoot the most daunting scenes without models or special effects, including a sequence requiring hundreds of native Indians to pull a full-size, 320-ton steamship over a small mountain. The result is an extraordinary document of the filmmaking process and a unique look into the single-minded mission of one of cinema’s most fearless directors.
7.8
The final film from the late, beloved Agnès Varda is a characteristically playful, profound, and personal summation of the director’s own brilliant career. At once impish and wise, Varda acts as our spirit guide on a free-associative tour through her six-decade artistic journey, shedding new light on her films, photography, and recent installation works while offering her one-of-a-kind reflections on everything from filmmaking to feminism to aging. Suffused with the people, places, and things she loved—Jacques Demy, cats, colors, beaches, heart-shaped potatoes—the wonderfully idiosyncratic work of imaginative autobiography VARDA BY AGNÈS is a warmly human, touchingly bittersweet parting gift from one of cinema’s most luminous talents.
7.4
The 1992 presidential election was a triumph not only for Bill Clinton but also for the new breed of strategists who guided him to the White House—and changed the face of politics in the process. For this thrilling, behind-closed-doors account of that campaign, renowned cinema verité filmmakers Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker captured the brainstorming and bull sessions of Clinton’s crack team of consultants—especially James Carville and George Stephanopoulos, who became media stars in their own right as they injected a savvy, youthful spirit and spontaneity into the process of campaigning. Fleet-footed and entertaining, THE WAR ROOM is a vivid document of a political moment whose truths (“It’s the economy, stupid!”) still ring in our ears.
7.5
As the front man of the Clash from 1977 onwards, Joe Strummer changed people's lives forever. Four years after his death, his influence reaches out around the world, more strongly now than ever before. In "The Future Is Unwritten", from British film director Julien Temple, Joe Strummer is revealed not just as a legend or musician, but as a true communicator of our times. Drawing on both a shared punk history and the close personal friendship which developed over the last years of Joe's life, Julien Temple's film is a celebration of Joe Strummer - before, during and after the Clash.
7.7
Trickery. Deceit. Magic. In F FOR FAKE, a free-form sort-of documentary by Orson Welles, the legendary filmmaker (and self-described charlatan) gleefully reengages with the central preoccupation of his career: the tenuous lines between illusion and truth, art and lies. Beginning with portraits of the world-renowned art forger Elmyr de Hory and his equally devious biographer, Clifford Irving, Welles embarks on a dizzying journey that simultaneously exposes and revels in fakery and fakers of all stripes, not the least of whom is Welles himself. Charming and inventive, F FOR FAKE is an inspired prank and a clever examination of the essential duplicity of cinema.
7.1
When filmmaker Chris Wilcha revisits the record store he worked at as a teenager in New Jersey, he finds the once-thriving bastion of music and weirdness from his youth slowly falling apart and out of touch with the times. FLIPSIDE documents his tragicomic attempt to revive the store while revisiting other documentary projects he has abandoned over the years. In the process, Wilcha captures “This American Life” host Ira Glass in the midst of a creative rebirth, discovers the origin story of David Bowie’s ode to a local New Jersey cable-television hero, and uncovers the unlikely connection between jazz photographer Herman Leonard and TV writer David Milch. This disparate collection of stories coheres into something strange and expansive—a moving meditation on music, work, and the sacrifices and satisfaction of trying to live a creative life.
8.2
A true twentieth-century trailblazer, Harvey Milk was an outspoken human rights activist and one of the first openly gay U.S. politicians elected to public office; even after his assassination in 1978, he continues to inspire disenfranchised people around the world. The Oscar-winning The Times of Harvey Milk, directed by Robert Epstein and produced by Richard Schmiechen, was as groundbreaking as its subject. One of the first feature documentaries to address gay life in America, it's a work of advocacy itself, bringing Milk's message of hope and equality to a wider audience. This exhilarating trove of original documentary material and archival footage is as much a vivid portrait of a time and place (San Francisco's historic Castro District in the seventies) as a testament to the legacy of a political visionary.
7
Winner of the SXSW Audience Award for Documentary Feature, RESYNATOR marks filmmaker Alison Tavel’s directorial debut, chronicling her ten-year journey as she uncovers the revolutionary synthesizer her late father created in the 1970s. What begins as a resurrection of the instrument evolves into an intimate and deeply personal journey—one that unexpectedly forges a profound connection with the father she never knew. Featuring appearances from Peter Gabriel, Fred Armisen, Mark Ronson, Grace Potter, and more, this heartfelt documentary is both a touching family portrait and a captivating deep dive into a nearly forgotten chapter of synth history.
7.8
Timely, intimate, and deeply empathetic, OUR BODY observes the everyday operations of the gynecological ward in a public hospital in Paris. In the process, veteran documentarian Claire Simon questions what it means to live in a woman’s body, filming the diversity, singularity, and beauty of patients at all stages of life. We see cancer screenings and fertility appointments, a teenager dealing with an unwanted pregnancy, a trans woman considering the beginnings of menopause. The specific fears, desires, and struggles of these individuals illuminate the health challenges we all face—even, as it comes to pass, the filmmaker herself.
7.5
An intimate and haunting portrayal of a quest for love and acceptance at any cost, this powerfully personal, compassionate documentary depicts the insidious influence of a secretive matriarchal religious order on three generations of the filmmaker’s family. In her captivating feature debut, Lebanese-American director Jude Chehab—who also shot the film—gracefully documents the unspoken ties and consequences of loyalty that have bonded her mother, grandmother, and herself to the mysterious organization. A captivating portrait of the toll that decades of unrequited love, lost hope, abuse, and despair take on a person, Q weaves a stunning multigenerational tale of the eternal search for meaning.
7.6
The latest from acclaimed Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho (BACURAU, AQUARIUS) is a multidimensional journey across time, sound, architecture, and filmmaking that explores the rich, complicated history of the filmmaker’s home city of Recife—the coastal capital of the state of Pernambuco—through the great movie theaters that served as spaces of conviviality during the twentieth century. Paeans to dreams and progress, these temples of cinema have also come to reflect major shifts in Brazilian society and politics. Combining archival documentary, mystery, film clips, and personal memories, PICTURES OF GHOSTS is a map of a city through the lens of cinema, offering a delightful tour in the company of a master storyteller.
8.1
TURN EVERY PAGE explores the remarkable fifty-year relationship between two literary legends, writer Robert Caro and his longtime editor Robert Gottlieb, who passed away this June. Eighty-six at the time of filming, Caro is working to complete the final volume of his masterwork, “The Years of Lyndon Johnson;” Gottlieb, ninety-one, waits to edit it. The task of finishing their life’s work looms before them. With humor and insight, this unique double portrait reveals the work habits, peculiarities, and professional joys of these two ferocious intellects at the culmination of a journey that has consumed both their lives and impacted generations of politicians, activists, writers, and readers.
7.5
This immersive sensory odyssey from Academy Award–nominated documentarian Sam Green (THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND) explores the elemental phenomenon of sound by weaving together thirty-two specific auditory explorations into a meditation on the power of sound to bend time, cross borders, and profoundly shape our perception of the world around us. Featuring original music by JD Samson (Le Tigre, MEN), 32 SOUNDS takes the audience on a journey through time and space, exploring everything from forgotten childhood memories to the soundtrack of resistance to subaquatic symphonies, and inviting us to experience anew the astonishing sounds of everyday life.
7.9
Sam Harkness was fourteen years old when his mother, Jois, abruptly disappeared. Tracking cryptic clues of her whereabouts years later, Sam and his half brother—director Reed Harkness, who has been making short films with Sam since childhood—head out on a West Coast road trip to try to find her. But solving the mystery of Jois’s disappearance is only the beginning. What unfolds is a remarkable emotional journey that gradually reveals the ripple effects of trauma across generations of the Harkness family. Stitching together twenty-five years of home movies and filling the gaps in the archive with play, SAM NOW is a vibrant mosaic of love, longing, and loss, as well as a deeply empathetic attempt at healing.
7
“Come, come! I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another.” Taking Virginia Woolf’s novel “Orlando: A Biography” as his starting point, academic virtuoso turned filmmaker Paul B. Preciado fashioned the documentary ORLANDO, MY POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY—a personal essay, historical analysis, and social manifesto. For almost a century, Woolf’s eponymous hero(ine) has inspired readers with their gender fluidity as well as their physical and spiritual metamorphoses across a three-hundred-year span. In making his film, Preciado invited a diverse group of more than twenty trans and nonbinary people to play the role of Orlando and to participate in this shared biography. Together, they perform interpretations of the novel, weaving into Woolf’s narrative their own stories of transition and identity formation. Not content to simply update a groundbreaking work, Preciado interrogates the relevance of “Orlando” in the ongoing struggle to secure dignity for trans people worldwide.
8
“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes. If we opened me up, we’d find beaches.” Originally intended to be Agnès Varda’s farewell to filmmaking, this enchanting auto-portrait, made in her eightieth year, is a freewheeling journey through her life, career, and artistic philosophy. Revisiting the places that shaped her—from the North Sea beaches of Belgium where she spent her childhood to the Mediterranean village where she shot her first film to the boardwalks of Los Angeles where she lived with her husband, Jacques Demy—Varda reflects on a lifetime of creation and inspiration, successes and setbacks, heartbreak and joy. Replete with images of wonder and whimsy—the ocean reflected in a kaleidoscope of mirrors, the streets of Paris transformed into a sandy beach, the filmmaker herself ensconced in the belly of a whale—The Beaches of Agnès is a playful and poignant record of a life lived fully and passionately in the name of cinema.
6.6
An electrifying portrait of Brazil’s fraught contemporary moment that blends documentary with narrative and genre elements, DRY GROUND BURNING reunites filmmakers Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós (ONCE THERE WAS BRASILIA) to offer a unique vision of the country’s possible future. Just out of prison, Léa (Léa Alves da Silva) returns home to the Brasilia favela of Sol Nascente and relives her past experiences with her half-sister Chitara (Joana Darc Furtado), the fearless leader of an all-female gang that once stole and refined oil from underground pipes and sold gasoline to a clandestine network of motorcyclists. Living in constant opposition to Jair Bolsonaro’s fiercely authoritarian and militarized government, Chitara’s women claim the streets for themselves as a declaration of radical political resistance on behalf of the incarcerated and the oppressed.
7.3
L writes letters to her estranged lover. Through these letters, we get a glimpse into the drastic changes taking place around her. Merging reality with fiction, dreams, memories, fantasies and anxieties, an amorphous narrative unfolds.
6.2
Forty years after Wim Wenders asked leading filmmakers at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival to offer their thoughts on the future of cinema in his documentary Room 666, Lubna Playoust poses the same question—“Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?”—to a new generation of directors. Utilizing the same minimalist, fixed camera format as Wenders, Playoust invites thirty directors who attended the 2022 festival—including Claire Denis, David Cronenberg, Lynne Ramsay, Asghar Farhadi, James Gray, and Wenders himself—to give their unfiltered perspectives on the state of the industry. Touching on upheavals in the technology, distribution, and economics of filmmaking as well as on larger questions of politics and culture, their answers provide a thought-provoking exploration of the meaning and relevance of cinema in the twenty-first century.
8
In 1937, tens of thousands of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent were exterminated by the Dominican army, the killings fueled by anti-Black hatred fomented by the Dominican government. Fast-forward to 2013, when the Dominican Republic’s Supreme Court stripped the citizenship of anyone with Haitian parents, retroactive to 1929. The ruling rendered more than 200,000 people stateless, without nationality, identity, or a homeland. In this dangerous climate, a young attorney named Rosa Iris mounts a grassroots campaign, challenging electoral corruption and advocating for social justice. In STATELESS, director Michèle Stephenson traces the complex tributaries of history and present-day politics, issuing an urgent warning about what can happen when racism runs rampant in the government.
7.5
A documentary telling the story of Joe Cocker's historic "Mad Dogs and Englishmen" tour through the lens of the Tedeschi Trucks Band's reunion of the Mad Dogs.
