This Week In Documentary
Theatrical & Streaming Releases - New & Recommended - March 29-April 4, 2024
Welcome to the final March 2024 edition of This Week in Documentary, which is also the first installment for April 2024. You know what that means: we’re coming up on April Fools’ Day. This is a reminder that Jackass wasn’t the first prank-based reality TV series to spawn theatrical feature documentaries. In the 1970s, Candid Camera creator Allen Funt made the X-rated hidden-camera movie What Do You Say to a Naked Lady? and Money Talks (now streaming on Prime Video), which focused on what people will do for a buck. Actually, the TV show version of Candid Camera was itself adapted from a radio show plus a franchise of short films that Fund released on the big screen in the late 1940s.
While prank shows and films are perfectly fitting for viewing on April 1, I like it as a day to take a break from the serious truthiness of documentaries altogether. April Fools’ Day is a good time for documentary fans to watch mockumentaries instead. These include not just the funny kind made by and/or featuring Christopher Guest, such as Best in Show and This is Spinal Tap! but also less-comedic faux docs like Series 7: The Contenders and The Blair Witch Project. If you do prefer for April 1 to be a special day of laughter, though, it’s good to remember that the funniest documentaries shouldn’t include anything that makes fun of some earnest participant. That’s mean.
On that note, I would recommend Why We Laugh: Black Comedians on Black Comedy if it wasn’t for some cringe-worthy subjects (and anyway it’s not available to stream anywhere), in honor of Louis Gossett Jr., who just passed away. Gossett appeared in a lot of documentaries, including that one, and he also narrated a few, including the historical films Let Freedom Sing: How Music Inspired the Civil Rights Movement (available to rent on Apple TV) and the Oscar-nominated Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II (streaming on Kanopy). More recently, he appeared as a talking head in the biographical docs Sidney (Apple TV+), Hal (Kanopy and Ovid), Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise (Kanopy), and Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes / Feeling Heart (Kanopy). Maybe it’s time for him to be the subject of a documentary himself.
For more to watch, we have our Pick of the Week followed by a handful of highlights below. Then, for paid subscribers only, is our day-by-day breakdown of everything we’re aware of coming to theaters and streaming through Thursday, April 4. Drop a comment and let us know what you’ve watched or plan to watch.
Nonfics Pick Of The Week: Spermworld (2024)
I don’t have a lot to say about this week’s Pick of the Week that I didn’t already just put into my review of Spermworld. Lance Oppenheim’s sophomore feature is a curious but respectful documentary about sperm donors who operate outside of the FDA-regulated system and often do so at no cost, finding clients in need on Facebook forums rather than sperm banks. I love everything about the film, from the humanistic way it presents its participants to the lush cinematography and synth-heavy score. Here’s part of the review that hopefully sells it best:
Curiosity can lead to intrusive prying or even offensive exoticization, but Oppenheim shows that it also begets understanding. Maybe not full comprehension of motives or total psychology but at least of fundamental desires and concerns, the kind that all of us share, just maybe not to the same degree or connected to the same interests or experiences. The fact that Spermworld is primarily centered around an otherwise universal theme of human reproduction — not unlike Some Kind of Heaven’s focus on aging — makes its characters and stories especially easy to appreciate and identify with despite their quirks or their peculiar activities.
Speaking of Some Kind of Heaven, that first feature of Oppenheim’s would make a great double feature with Spermworld. You can find it on Kanopy or Hulu, the latter of which will also be hosting his new film starting this weekend. Additionally, you can find many of his short docs, which he’s been making since his teens, on his Vimeo page. There are a few produced for the New York Times Op-Docs division, such as Long Term Parking, which is about airline workers living in a parking lot near LAX, and The Happiest Guy in the World, about a man who lives on cruise ships. Not surprisingly, those and others had the honor of being Vimeo Staff Picks.
As for Spermworld, it premieres Friday, March 29, on FXX and then arrives on Hulu the following day. I recommend also reading The Reveal’s interview with Oppenheim.
Other Documentary Highlights
The Brink (2019) & The Unknown Known (2013)
Another double feature idea this week involves two controversial figures who served in the most recent GOP White House administrations. Alison Klayman’s The Brink (now streaming free on Tubi and Vudu) profiles Trump strategist Steve Bannon, while Errol Morris’s The Unknown Known (currently on VOD) centers on an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, who was the Secretary of Defense under Ford and George W. Bush (interestingly enough, Morris also made his own Bannon doc, American Dharma). The two documentaries celebrate anniversaries this week, as The Brink hit theaters on March 29, 2019, and The Unknown Known hit the big screen on April 4, 2014.
Charles Guggenheim Documentaries
Speaking of anniversaries, this weekend marks the centenary of Charles Guggenheim’s birth. The 12-time Oscar nominee (and four-time winner) and father of fellow documentarian Davis Guggenheim was born on March 31, 1924. What better time than now for a retrospective of his work? Many of his films, a lot of them shorts, are available to stream for free through the Internet Archive or on YouTube via the Library of Congress or National Archives (despite none of his films, surprisingly, being in the National Film Registry). These include his first two Academy Award nominees, A City Decides and Nine from Little Rock (which won the Oscar), both of which are about racial integration in schools.
There’s also Children Without (which faced Nine from Little Rock at the 1965 Oscars), about siblings in a Detroit housing project, Monument to the Dream, about the construction of the Gateway Arch (he also made docs about other landmarks), Oscar-winner Robert Kennedy Remembered (he also did remembrance docs about LBJ and his wife as well), Oscar-winner The Johnstown Flood, Oscar-winner A Time for Justice, and Oscar nominees D-Day Remembered, The Shadow of Hate, A Place in the Land, and The Klan: A Legacy of Hate in America, the last of which he produced but did not direct. Not all are easily found online, but many of them can be. It’s a rich and historically significant filmography, so watch what you can.
The Paradise Lost Trilogy (1996/2000/2011) & The Qatsi Trilogy (1982/1998/2002)
As long as I’m highlighting films in celebration of birthdays, here are two triple features of note. Bruce Sinofsky, who was born on March 31, 1956, was the filmmaking partner of Joe Berlinger, and together they helmed the groundbreaking true-crime documentary Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills and its sequels Paradise Lost 2: Revelations and Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, all of which are streaming on Max (as a TV series with three episodes). Godfrey Reggio celebrates his birthday on March 29, and he also has an essential trilogy to check out. His most famous experimental feature (perhaps the most famous experimental film ever) is 1982’s Koyaanisqatsi (streaming on Amazon Freevee, Pluto TV, and Kanopy), which was followed by Powaqqatsi (on Prime Video) in 1988 and Naqoyqatsi (VOD) in 2002.
Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in 2 Pieces (2024)
Oscar-winner Morgan Neville, known for 20 Feet from Stardom and the biographical documentaries Won’t You Be My Neighbor? and Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, is back with a diptych about Steve Martin, and it’s sure to be a big hit on Apple TV+ for the star factor alone. Who doesn’t love Steve Martin? He has made so many kinds of movies that everyone alive in the last 40 years has a favorite or five (mine are: The Jerk, Roxanne, L.A. Story, My Blue Heaven, and The Spanish Prisoner). And outside of his work, he hasn’t been the most public personality, so his fans have never seen anything like this before.
On a creative level, though, Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in 2 Pieces is a fascinating project because it’s like two different films about two different halves of Martin’s life and career. The first installment, “Then,” is an all-archival work (with new narration and interviews in voiceover) about Martin’s childhood and rise as a successful stand-up comedian. The second piece, “Now,” follows Martin today and features on-screen talking head interviews with everyone from his friends and regular collaborators to his wife, Anne. While the two pieces go together, I like “Then” a whole lot more than “Now,” in part because I prefer that format but also because it’s a lesser-known, better-structured, and more interesting story. Still, given that it’s impossible not to love Steve Martin, the second part is certainly enjoyable.
Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in 2 Pieces begins streaming on Apple TV+ on Friday, March 29.
Town Bloody Hall (1979)
Another must-see classic documentary celebrating an anniversary this week, D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’s Town Bloody Hall turns 45 years old on April 3. Filmed by Pennebaker nearly a decade earlier than its release and only finished thanks to Hegedus, the film captures a debate about the women’s liberation movement held at The Town Hall in New York City. The panelists consisted of feminist advocates Jill Johnston, Diana Trilling, Jacqueline Ceballos, and Germaine Greer, plus … Norman Mailer. As noted in our list of great women’s history documentaries (we have three more days of Women’s History Month by the way), Town Bloody Hall is “more record than history, but what a fascinating document it is.” You can currently find the film streaming on The Criterion Channel.
Documentary Release Calendar 3/29/24 - 4/4/24
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