Tag Archives: documentary

Pop culture has long mimicked pageantry. It’s reflected in Taylor Swift’s sequined leotard, Beyoncé’s unmistakable strut, and even Margot Robbie’s twinkling grin in Barbie. The melangé of glam and controversy in pageantry encouraged The New York Times’ Lauren Herstik to co-produce the documentary How to Fix a Pageant. “You have …

Let’s say you’re a band — a famous and well-regarded one — and you are deep into a tour that’s ambitious, theatrical, and almost triples the number of musicians you normally have onstage. Once upon a time, you played stark post-punk songs and Al Green covers at CBGB. Now your …

Great documentaries tend to tell messy stories in a way that somehow makes them clear, honoring the messiness all the while. Such is the case with Savior Complex, HBO’s new three-part doc that digs into some contentious issues – including colonialism, medical ethics, religious fervor, and the limits of activism …

You know their names: Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, and Christy Turlington. The supermodel quartet reached instant fame and held the fashion industry in the palm of their hands in the Nineties. To filmmaker Roger Ross Williams, they were the first influencers with indelible power, photographed globally and enamored …

Sean Penn knows what you think of him. Several minutes into the two-time Oscar winner’s new film, Superpower, ostensibly a documentary about the battle-hardened president of Ukraine, Penn’s gravelly voice answers a question posed in interviews past: Who do you think you are, Walter Cronkite? You have a savior complex? …

The second season of the FX soccer docuseries Welcome to Wrexham poses an implicit question: Can a formerly floundering team recently purchased by two showbiz stars, a team that has made legions of new fans through a breakout TV hit, still be considered a group of scrappy, lovable underdogs? The …

The thing about “open secrets” is: Everyone knows what the secret is, but no one wants to acknowledge or talk about it. Not really, at least — if somebody’s peers and colleagues are all privy to some forbidden or socially unacceptable facts, and bringing it up forces them to reckon …

It is easy to shit on Nickelback. Too easy, some might say. The question is really: Why? What, exactly, is it about this Canadian group that inspires such ill will? Their overwhelming success? Lots of bands are successful, for all of the right and wrong reasons. Their hits? No one’s …

The first official trailer for the forthcoming HBO documentary, Savior Complex, cycles through multiple complicated and often conflicting perspectives. The first presented in the clip is that of the documentary’s primary subject: Renee Bach. “I think some of the most wild accusations that were made about me is that I …

This post contains spoilers for the series finale of How To With John Wilson, which is now streaming on Max. The HBO docu-comedy series How To With John Wilson show is so idiosyncratic and unpredictable that it could have concluded on almost any note, and the ending would have seemed …