These are the documentary features currently making a splash on streaming and in theatres! Check them out and sound-off!
AVAILABLE ON STREAMING:
BARBARA WALTERS: TELL ME EVERYTHING (2025)
Director: Jackie Jesko
Currently streaming on Hulu
Rating: ***/***** (3 out of 5 stars)
The life and career of Barbara Walters probably deserved a docuseries. Jackie Jesko’s deep dive into the legacy of the first female news anchor, and arguably the most culture defining interviewer of all-time, is informative, but doesn’t dig deep where you want it to, particularly when it comes to Walters’ personal life. All of the touchpoints are there, and we get ample amounts of archival footage and interview selections, but the magic of a Walters’ interview was the totality of the interview, how she could pivot from something fluffy to something profound or uncomfortable in a microsecond. So, in that sense, we only get a sense of Walters as the provocateur, not the wily journalist she truly was. Did I learn new information? Absolutely. I had no idea Barbara Walters had a ‘relationship’ with Roy Cohn, and learning that it was likely just to use him for his power and connections made me smile. But I wanted more. More with her oftentimes estranged daughter, with whom she clearly had a turbulent relationship, something that is really only alluded to and never explored with much passion or grit. Even though Walters is a few years removed from this planet, you can’t help but feel her influence, or the influence of her estate, in keeping this picture from being more than it could have been.
BONO: STORIES OF SURRENDER (2025)
Director: Andrew Dominik
Currently streaming on Apple+
Rating: **1/2/***** (2.5 out of 5 stars)
When auteur filmmakers turn to documentaries, they either do so because they have a strong passion for the subject matter, or because their narrative career isn’t panning out. Both could apply to Andrew Dominik, a singular voice in the film world whose work never received the sort of attention or long-term respect it deserves. Until now, Dominik seemed most fascinated with artist, Nick Cave, but he has moved on to more mainstream affairs with Bono: Stories of Surrender, all about the U2 frontman’s life, philosophies, and learnings from decades of fronting one of the most popular rock bands of all-time. Similar to the types of documentaries Bruce Springsteen participates in, the film is a love letter to Bono more than anything else, and if I had any real issues with the film, it’s that Dominik doesn’t take enough risks with his subject, which I imagine was partly Bono’s doing. There is certainly a vulnerability on display here, but it’s a vulnerability we have seen many times from Bono, so it doesn’t surprise us. I had hoped to peel back even more layers of the frontman, but the film seems happy enough with just giving us the paint-by-numbers version. Personally, I feel the best documentary about Bono or U2 is their seminal concert film, Rattle and Hum. That film dives deeper into the emotionality of the band and the frontman than this or any other doc. Through his music, Bono comes alive in ways he just can’t speaking in poetic musings. Just pour yourself a glass of wine, throw on Joshua Tree or Achtung Baby, and experience the most authentic portrait of the man.
EVERY TIME YOU LOSE YOUR MIND (2025)
Director: Ken Andrews
Currently streaming on Hulu
Rating: **1/2/***** (2.5 out of 5 stars)
As a child of the 90s, a massive fan of shoegaze, and someone who sought out bands I’d never heard of on the regular, Failure was very much known to me. I was hardly an aficionado, but I could certainly name drop some singles and even sing some lines. But Failure disappeared. Or fizzled out, just as many bands of the 90s did. Thanks to fans like Maynard James Keenan of Tool and Hayley Williams of Paramore, their legacy has endured, and they’ve even enjoyed a bit of a resurgence. But, unlike Alex Ross Perry’s meta Pavements, against which all music docs will now be judged, Every Time You Lose Your Mind is more focused on the basics of the traditional music doc. We do learn a lot about the band we likely didn’t know, and get a crash course on the addiction and depression that both fueled and crippled them, but I never got the sense of a build-up to why this band deserves such praise and consideration. They were a good band, sure. But they were nowhere near the level of so many of their peers. Some 90s bands disappear for a reason and that’s because their music doesn’t move with the times. It becomes stuck in a certain area. Failure is stuck in that era. And, while I am glad this film exists to chronicle and celebrate them, I don’t know if it ultimately serves its purpose. Maybe it would have helped to have someone other than the driving force behind the band direct the thing. It’s difficult to be subjective when your entire life is built around what you’re presenting. Then again, they have a doc on Hulu right now, so maybe they’re a bigger deal than I realize.
I’M YOUR VENUS (2024)
Director: Kimberly Reed
Currently streaming on Netflix
Rating: **1/2/***** (2.5 out of 5 stars)
A picture like I’m Your Venus is tough to reckon with, and even tougher to examine in a vacuum. It works as a companion piece to Jennie Livingston’s groundbreaking and seminal queer doc, Paris is Burning, but also as something entirely separate. The film focuses on the larger than life legacy of Venus Extravaganza, one of the breakout stars of Paris is Burning. Tragically, Venus was murdered in 1988, two years before the film found its audience. The case went cold quickly, and Venus’s story became a footnote on the legacy of the film. I’m Your Venus is a joint effort, between Venus’s biological family (her brothers) and her chosen family, to celebrate Venus’s life and dive back into the mystery of her death (an investigation that ultimately led to the NYPD reopening the murder case). While the film is a flattered meditation of Venus’s life, you can’t help but feel a bit conflicted. We spend most of this film with Venus’s blood family, a family she never even mentions in Paris is Burning. We are told by her brothers that they always supported her, but we sort of have to take their word for that, and I am not always sure we should. For fans of the OG doc, I’m Your Venus might offer some solace and sense of completion. It’s certainly well-intentioned, it seems. I just wish I felt cleaner after watching it. NOTE: Paris is Burning is currently streaming on HBO Max and Criterion Channel.
JAWS @ 50 (2025)
Director: Laurent Bouzereau
Streaming in Disney+ July 10th
Rating: ***/***** (3 out of 5 stars)
I know what you’re thinking – “Do we really need another documentary about Jaws?” The answer is a resounding ‘no’, but it’s the 50th anniversary of Steven Spielberg’s industry shifting masterpiece, so it was bound to happen. Jaws @ 50 is a love letter to the film and features every anecdote you’ve heard 100 times before. It offers zero new insight into the creation or evolution of the idea, the production itself, or the legacy. We do, however, get a lot of contemporary filmmakers speaking to the film’s impact, folks like Emily Blunt, J.J. Abrams, Steven Soderbergh, James Cameron, and more. Otherwise, it’s business as usual for this picture, which owes much of its success to the enduring fascination people seem to have with the film. Director Laurent Bouzereau has made a name for himself tackling biographies of people and films, as he has with Five Came Back, Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind, Mama’s Boy, Faye, and Music By John Williams. He seems to always fare better with extended series to tell his story. For Jaws @ 50, he’s tasked with cramming 50-years worth of stories and lore into a 90-minute film, and even though he exhausts everything we already know, you leave feeling like it was all surface (pun intended). This film feels like West Memphis Three, the Peter Jackson documentary that attempted to cram into one documentary what Joe Berlinger had needed three to do. That doesn’t mean it’s dull, and it certainly doesn’t mean Jaws fan shouldn’t check it out. It just means to go into it with a lot of love, and a healthy dose of understanding. And be prepared for deja vu.
NOW IN THEATRES/COMING SOON:
MARLEE MATLIN: NOT ALONE ANYMORE (2025)
Director: Shoshannah Stern
Now playing in limited release via Kino Lorber
Rating: ****/***** (4 out of 5 stars)
Few actors occupy as singular a space as Marlee Matlin. She was the first deaf actor to win an Academy Award, and really the first deaf actor to achieve mainstream success in Hollywood. She enjoyed a meteoric rise and then Hollywood did its normal thing, undervaluing her, othering her, and treating her win as just another check in the checkbox for diversity. But Matlin didn’t go anywhere. She has found ways to permeate the culture ever since, from her sporadic film and television work, to her stint on The Celebrity Apprentice, to her return to mainstream cinematic success with 2021’s Coda, which took home the Best Picture Academy Award, and a trophy for her deaf costar, Troy Kotsur, who became the second deaf actor to win an Oscar. She was a trailblazer and an icon, and Shoshannah Stern’s raw and intimate documentary takes us into all of her insecurities and travails as not only a woman in the industry, but a deaf woman. We come away with a fuller understanding of someone the industry has tried to marginalize, and gain a deeper appreciation for what her incredible talent did for cinema, and the deaf community. While the craft on display might be routine, the subject is anything but, and it’s that vulnerability and honesty and embracing of the darkness within that set this film apart from others of its ilk. Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore is a powerful piece of biographical storytelling.
SHARI AND LAMB CHOP (2024)
Director: Lisa Dapolito
Opening in limited release July 18th via Kino Lorber
Rating: ***1/2/***** (3.5 out of 5 stars)
Children’s educational programming just ain’t what it used to be. After all the Sesame Street documentaries and Won’t You Be My Neighbor, if we’ve learned nothing else, it’s that kids were way more ‘front and center’ with quality programming in the 60s and 70s. Shari and Lamb Chop explores another visionary entertainer, the late Shari Lewis, whose sock puppet, Lamb Chop, triggered the imaginations of countless children over the years. Following her rise as an expert puppeteer and educator, the film showcases the parts of Lewis we already knew, and then dives into the insecurities and complexities of being a woman in a business that didn’t seem to want her. Director Lisa Dapolita doesn’t reinvent the form here, as Shari and Lamb Chop is as straight forward a documentary as you get, but I learned a lot about the subject I didn’t know before, and it gave me a deeper appreciation for both what she faced and what she created. What Dapolito does do, which she also did with tenderness and care in her previous effort, Love, Gilda, is peel back the layers that made Lewis tick. It might look flashy, fluffy, and basic, but there’s a real depth to what Dapolito is saying about Lewis. Most times, it takes a woman to understand a woman’s heart, and this is a prime example.
VIDEOHEAVEN (2025)
Director: Alex Ross Perry
Now playing in NYC; expansion to follow via Cinema Conservancy
Rating: **/***** (2 out of 5 stars)
No one was happier with Alex Ross Perry’s shift to documentaries than me, particularly after I saw his meta masterpiece, Pavements, currently playing in theatres. That film has a passion and originality you seldom see in music docs, and it set the stage for a new trajectory for one of indie cinema’s long-time darlings. Videoheaven, however, which comes fresh on the heels of Pavements, is a pet project that should have stayed just that. No one loves the video store more than me, but three-hours was far too long to dedicate to them, particularly when it consists of nothing more than video store set scenes from films, video store commercials and news reports, and a tonally unbalanced voiceover from Maya Hawke. The script here is the real problem, ambling about and repeating itself over and over again. It felt as if Perry was working on this on the weekends just for fun and then had friends tell him – “You should do something with this!” And, so he did. And I am sure a whole host of cinephiles will eat it up. The same cinephiles who flock to see Los Angeles Plays Itself every time it screens. But the over-the-top seriousness with which Perry imbues his subject feels privileged and out of touch. We can love something and miss it and still understand it was just another fad in the grand march of capitalism. Video stores were influential. Video stores were culture-defining for many of us. But, for a film all about video stores, it felt far too informational with very little passion or vision.
FROM THE VAULT:
APOLLO 11 (2019)
Director: Todd Douglas Miller
Currently streaming on Kanopy
Rating: *****/***** (5 out of 5 stars)
With the release of the Disney+ documentary, Sally, now feels like a perfect time to dust off the 2019 masterpiece, Apollo 11, which I would argue is the greatest film, fiction or non, to ever deal with the U.S. Space Program and man’s determination to explore the stars. Comprised entirely of never-before-seen footage of the Apollo 11 mission and painstakingly brought to beautiful life and story by filmmaker, Todd Douglas Miller, Apollo 11 is one of the most immersive and patriotic films I’ve ever seen. You’re watching real flesh and blood human beings use both their brains and brawn to attempt something most deemed impossible. The intimacy of the footage and the successful examination of the ‘team’ aspect of the mission make it something truly original. And, it has one of the most joyful needle drops in cinema, when John Stewart’s “Mother Country” is used for a montage. If you ever have a chance to see this on the big screen (IMAX particularly) – take it. You can still take a lot from it on the small screen, but the big screen turns it into something transformative. After the one-two punch of Dinosaur 13 and Apollo 11, Miller has cornered the market on fascinating stories that deserve reappraisal. It’s been six-years since Apollo 11 landed (pun intended) and I’ve been waiting on pins and needles for his next documentary ever since.
