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
Tag: Documentaries
8 Documentaries About True Love and Relationships
Romance and love are oddly tricky to capture authentically in a documentary. So much of what fosters real connection — as opposed to, say, “Bachelor”-style performative love — happens away from cameras. Plus, every love story is a bit of an experiment, and the observer effect applies: being filmed tends
3 Celebrity Documentaries Worth Your Time
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
Sundance Documentaries: ‘Eternal You,’ ‘Ibelin’ and More
Everyone from the academy to streaming services splits cinema into two buckets: movies (comedy, romance, horror, whatever) and documentaries, lumped into one unholy pile. Besides being obviously reductive, the division is false: Nonfiction movies can be comedies or romances or horror or any other genre, and they can create new
Why We Can’t Get Enough of Cult Documentaries
Nobody joins a cult. They just joined an exciting group of people trying to change the world. They just wanted to empower themselves, to feel better, to know Jesus, to do drugs with interesting people, to be different from their parents, to live off the grid. Then things got hairy
Two Documentaries on School Integration Offer New Views of an Old Problem
You most likely know that the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education ruled that racial segregation in U.S. public schools was unconstitutional. You may also know that the decision ordered states to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.” Less talked about is the 1969 decision in Alexander
Documentaries to Stream Now: ‘Primary,’ ‘4 Little Girls’ and More
The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we’ll choose three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time. ‘Primary’ (1960) Stream it on the Criterion Channel and Max. Rent it on Amazon, Apple
The Best True Crime Podcasts and Documentaries to Stream Now
In this podcast, one of Pakistan’s first in the true crime realm, we travel to Karachi in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when the city’s lust-fueled nightlife and high-society scandals would rival the most sensational eras of Hollywood or New York. This story has it all: the mysterious death
CrossFit Games Documentaries Have Become Surprise Hits
The morning after he uploaded his new movie “Froning: The Fittest Man in History” to the iTunes store, in early October 2015, the director Heber Cannon received a phone call from somebody at iTunes, who sounded bewildered. “Froning,” a documentary about the four-time CrossFit Games champion Rich Froning Jr. that
Filmmakers Sometimes Take a Years-Long Approach to Documentaries
One of the magic tricks of documentaries is the ability to film somebody changing over a period of time. When it’s a span of several years, audiences can get a unique psychological portrait. But these long-haul projects come with particular challenges and obstacles for the filmmakers who see them through.