documentary film
GlobeDocs and a standout screening at the Somerville Theatre offer an inviting week of documentaries about mortality, justice, community, and a divided nation.
In Alex Gibney’s exhaustive documentary, Elon Musk emerges as a visionary, a menace, and a man determined to escape the world he has helped imperil.
Ed Perkins’s documentary finds a fascinating story in America’s 2016 creepy-clown craze, then buries it beneath sweeping analogies and frantic editing.
Nathan Fielder’s “You Can See Everything” turns the Theranos saga into a revelatory, Philip K. Dickian inquiry into artifice, identity, and truth.
Two compelling documentaries at the Boston Palestine Film Festival trace Edward Said’s intellectual awakening and the unfinished search for justice for Alex Odeh.
Asio Liu’s documentary uncovers the forgotten history of unlisted Vietnamese “boat people” refugee camps in the Penghu Islands in the Taiwan Strait following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.
Across two October weekends at the Brattle, the expanded 27-film series offers Boston audiences early looks at new work by Lee Chang-dong, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Martin McDonagh, Pedro Almodóvar, and more.
At TIFF, Barbara Kopple follows exploited delivery workers, William Greaves revives the Harlem Renaissance, and Iranian filmmakers find private lives shadowed by surveillance, war, and repression, yet also beautified in some cases.
Book Appreciation: “Gulliver’s Travels” at 300 — Small Men, Tech Bro Delusions