Denny Tedesco regularly punctuates The Wrecking Crew with seemingly archival footage of a small handful of people sitting around a table and reminiscing about their days contributing to some of the mo…
2014 was a relatively quiet year for documentaries. There was no Searching for Sugarman or 20 Feet from Stardom, no sensational hit that bridged the considerable gap between nonfiction-film-lovers and…
Nonfics is now a newsletter! Please support documentary criticism by subscribing here: nonfics.substack.com. There’s a moment in Les Blank’s Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers in which a Spanish-…
British rock band Pulp’s best-known song, “Common People,” is a satire of cultural tourism, an indictment of the valorization of working class authenticity by those who do not belong to it. As working…
Following its independence from colonial Portugal in 1975, Angola erupted in a civil war that lasted decades, destroying the country’s infrastructure and defining a generation haunted by memories of v…
There’s an image that arrives about halfway through Chris Marker’s Level Five that still haunts me days after viewing it. Perhaps it’s been widely available elsewhere, but this was the first time I ha…
Alex Gibney opens his documentary on Fela Kuti — the Nigerian musician and activist whose global renown as an African political dissident was said to be second only to Nelson Mandela — by examining th…
The higher education crisis is not a singular, standalone entity. It affects faculty, who are seeing their departmental funding slashed and compete over adjunct jobs without benefits in the face of sk…
Andrew Rossi’s documentaries have displayed an interest in the inner workings, and limitations, of ambitious institutions. With his 2011 film Page One: Inside the New York Times, Rossi explored the cr…
The moving image has played an essential role in our public memory of WWII. From wartime newsreels to soldiers’ home movies to propaganda to visual records of concentration camps, WWII was saturated b…