Lucy Walker’s disappoints with her follow-up to the Wim Wenders classic.Lucky Walker’s Buena Vista Social Club: Adios opens with a moment of recent history: audio of news reports announcing the death …
The classic 1999 music doc by Wim Wenders gets a retrospective review from Landon Palmer.
We list the best concert films and musician profiles of the year.One evening shortly after the election, I climbed into bed and searched in vain for something to watch and end the evening with. The he…
As Eric Hynes recently observed in his cautionary overview of a considerably lucrative nonfiction subgenre, music documentaries are a high-profile and rewarding business whose obvious bottom-line ince…
Nonfics is now a newsletter! Please support documentary criticism by subscribing here: nonfics.substack.com. In November 1976, in Dallas, Texas, officer Robert W. Wood pulled over a car that ha…
Station to Station opens with a clear explanation of exactly what we’ll be watching. A train has traveled across the country, from New York to San Francisco, over 24 days, stopping at 10 stations, whi…
There exists a perpetually revisited question in film criticism as to the role of context in reviewing. Should critics make the best effort to evaluate movies regardless or independent of any knowledg…
The conventional story of the relationship between rock ’n’ roll and the Vietnam War is told through American and British protest music, songs of defiance that condemned a violent, seemingly endless c…
The subjects of Les Blank’s interest were as consistent as they were surprisingly diverse and specific: food, music, community and the rituals and revelries that not only make life enjoyable, but at t…
The Decline of Western Civilization, Penelope Spheeris’s notorious portrait of the Los Angeles punk scene during the late ’70s and early ’80s, has had a history as storied as the legendary subject…