I'm Chevy Chase And You're Not (2025)

You can imagine, after years of being told, "You're funny," a comedian might eventually start believing it and forget about the importance of material and timing, energy, audience, and cultural context, and so end up acting zany - look at me, blowing raspberries! - rather than delivering hard-earned jokes, and Cornelius Crane "Chevy" Chase - a man as funny as he is obnoxious, as loved here as he is hated there, happy-go-lucky yet deeply ashamed - might come close to that line today; you certainly can't watch the octogenarian presented here, and can't hear about his long catalogue of laugh-free comedy film bombs, and can't hear about his childhood trials and tribulations and come away saying, simply, he's funny.

★★★☆☆

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Not Without My Daughter (1991)

Sally Field is Betty Mahmoody, the real woman who turned her experience being abducted with her daughter by her husband into a best-selling novel adapted here into a gripping movie with Alfred Mollina playing the Iranian doctor who tricks his American family into a one-way trip to Iran.

★★★☆☆

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What Happened, Miss Simone? (2015)

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Three Identical Strangers (2018)

The rise to fame of celebrity triplets, Eddie Gallard, David Kellman and Robert Shafran, a trio who in the 80s appeared on the Phil Donahue show, did cameos in a Madonna movie and opened a SOHO restaurant, is a remarkable story in and of itself, worthy of a documentary, but this documentary weaves a sinister story behind the story of their trajectory to fame: a fascinating but not very substantial conspiracy theory centred around a hearsay account of a champagne toast and a box of research papers that remains unsighted and uncited.

★★★☆☆

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The Australian Dream (2019)

I grew up feeling like my disinterest in AFL was a personality defect, but watching this documentary about two-time Brownlow Medal winner and 2014 Australian of the Year Adam Goodes, I had the epiphany that what I hated about football as a kid was the vitriol and terrible behaviour on show at matches, both on the field and off, and the power of this documentary is that it shows what AFL could be and in turn what the country could be, and hopefully the Australians who most need to see this see it when they are ready to listen because it is a message powerfully presented and in a format that isn't able to be interrupted and obfuscated by the obnoxious input of the likes of Sam Newman, Andrew Bolt, and similar turds.

★★★★★

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The Wolfpack (2015)

Six boys and a girl raised in the confines of a NYC apartment - the eldest for fourteen of his eighteen years, apparently - are the subjects of this documentary that, at the cost of exploring myriad other fascinating lines of inquiry (criminal neglect, criminal neglect-by-proxy, urban fear, cultural isolation, personality disorder, spectrum disorder, controlling relationships, movie morality, dvd-shopping) instead focuses on the fact the boys played movie dress-ups to fill their time.

★☆☆☆☆

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Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011)

As I struggle with furniture companies that outsource (and so disown) unreliable delivery services, and as it feels increasingly like, in Australia, you have to fight to get anyone to do what they are in fact paid and are supposed to do, it is refreshing to watch this Japanese documentary about a man and his sons and their kitchen crews who wholeheartedly devote themselves to their jobs, turning into an art even the most menial aspects of sushi-making, like massaging the octopus (not a euphemism) - this family of sushi chefs are committed to their art, even at the cost of family- and leisure-time and even though it might all go (tuna-) belly-up after the patriarch scales down his involvement.

★★★★☆

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Room 237 (2012)

Reviewers can be prone to overthought or unchecked enthusiasm about their favourite films but the fanatics narrating this frustrating documentary, who share but barely elucidate their thoughts on Stanley Kubrick's The Shining including that it contains embedded messages in details such as the patterns of the Overlook Hotel corridor carpets or secret images photoshopped into the clouds in the sky, are on a level that in other circumstances might be able to be diagnosed and treated with neuroleptics.

★★☆☆☆

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Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (2015)

I'm not alarmed by stories of intergalactic wars, nor do I 100% accept that this is in fact the genesis story of the Scientology faith - could it possibly be? - and the abuses of power alleged here and in every other Scientology documentary ever made are concerning and warrant investigation but until proven do not induce in me the level of outrage and dismay that, say, the abuses of another secretive, closed church regularly in the media have caused me - no, the thing that most shocks me about this documentary, one a lot more illuminating, a lot more interesting than many especially given the gormless Louis Theroux hasn't thrust himself smack in the middle of it, is so many people's readiness to believe and their willingness to commit wholeheartedly and whole-financially to the thinnest, flimsiest of premises or promises - I must be too stingy with my time and money.

★★★☆☆

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The Trip to Spain (2017)

The Trip, this third time, is a trip to Spain, but otherwise everything else is the same including Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan's impersonations.

★★★☆☆

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Tea With The Dames (aka Nothing Like A Dame) (2018)

I couldn't really make my 78 year-old mother sit through Upgrade which the man on the counter described as featuring "high-octane violence" so I requested two tickets to "the one with the old ladies having tea," and then again upstairs, even though I knew the title very well, rolled my eyes and told the person checking tickets we were seeing "the four old ladies sitting around chatting," and then, in a theatre full of white fluffy clouds of hair and walking frame-littered aisles had a wonderful time with my mum laughing and marvelling at how easy it can be for movie-makers to entertain for a feature-length runtime without high-octane violence or special effects or decapitations (I've just watched Hereditary) and even without a sustained topic of conversation - some guy behind the camera makes up a lazy question whenever the conversation between the women dries up and with just their four bright personalities, a pot of tea and their ability to articulate their wealth of interesting experiences from their work in the theatre or movies, the Dames make Tea With The Dames wonderfully, effortlessly entertaining, abit like the The Trip To series.

★★★★☆

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Gurrumul (2018)

Firstly, this is a celebration of a remarkable life - interesting, funny, but also tinged with sadness given such a remarkable vocal talent was discovered so late and lost so soon - but it also serves as a reminder that "the tiles are falling off a national treasure," and it is well-constructed documentaries like this one that might help spread such an important message.

★★★★★

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Louis Theroux: My Scientology Movie (2015)

Thanks to the likes of Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine, Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me, and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, documentaries are now the stuff of major cinema releases and major release documentaries are made about anything these days (sushi master chefs (Jiro Dreams of Sushi); peculiar shared-interest groups ("Tickle"); daring feats ("Man On Wire"), personal stories from around the world ("The Eagle Huntress"), etc..), so surely The Church of Scientology wasn't surprised when yet another documentary maker, this time the irritating man-boy reporter, Louis Theroux, knocked on the door wanting to apply his dopey (and I've always found patronising and not very penetrating) drawl to the task of finding out about the famously secretive organisation, but the church does seem surprised and even enraged, defensive from the get-go, and the resulting documentary is equal parts disturbing (for showing there to exist yet more factions of people in the world that remain committed to never seeing eye-to-eye), bewildering (it presents a long string of disturbing but disputed facts via reenactment, much of it rehashed from other more forensic sources, with Theroux unable to uncover much exact, undisputed information except for, say, whether a particular stretch of road is public or private) and stupefying (it beggars belief how members of a driven, supposedly super-media-savvy church can't see beyond its outrage to at least check its behaviour in front of Theroux's cameras - its representatives on camera are childish, bullish, and outright peculiar to the point you wonder if they are just more of Theroux's actor stand-ins).

★★★☆☆

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Kumu Hina (2014)

About a teacher who encourages a female pupil to lead a local male hula performance, this short 77-minute documentary is a fascinating look at male, female and māhū gender roles in Hawaiian culture and makes you wonder why accommodating non-binary genders is made to seem so difficult in other places around the world.

★★★☆☆

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I Am Heath Ledger

Heath Ledger is a captivating presence on screen but this documentary is not so captivating for while it recalls the actor's charisma-in-spades and offers some hitherto lesser known details regarding his youth and his early and all-too-easy transition into Hollywood superstardom and his celebrity lifestyle, the movie is a eulogy, not a documentary, made for fans by Ledger's family and friends, with issues like drug addiction, the problems of fast and easy celebrity, young fatherhood, and possible mental illness, all mentioned but widely skirted around.

★★☆☆☆

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The Family (2016)

Thrown together, I'm sure, to cash-in on other recent cult-themed documentary releases, this one about Anne Hamilton-Byrne who in the 80s took advantage of Australia's lax adoption laws to steal, raise, and generally mess-up as many as 28 children, is a boring and unfocused mess of information that leaves viewers nonethewiser about how much of what happened was masterminded by Hamilton-Byrne and how much simply grew out of circumstance, and ultimately you are left with the impression the documentary makers themselves didn't know what story they were telling.

☆☆☆☆☆

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Gameloading: Rise of the Indies (2015)

This documents the rise of the independent game development scene and demonstrates that quite apart from the stereotype of gamers being pasty loner couch potatoes with a worrying love of violence, they are more often connected and savvy, entrepreneurial, doing what they love, producing experimental games, even art, and driving change in a mainstream gaming market obsessed with shootemups.

★★★☆☆

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Love Hotel (ラブホテル) (2014)

This not very illuminating 2014 documentary suggests a conservative Japanese society is moving to shut down the country's love hotels - might it more likely be not a conservative move but a practical one ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics? - and given no explanation is offered as to why so many patrons of these supposed dens of iniquity are at ease sharing their stories in front of the documentary camera, you are left with the impression this is a documentary made by a titillated outsider trying to make drama and stories where there really are none!

★☆☆☆☆

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Murdered By My Boyfriend (2014)

This 2014 drama based on a true four-year-long abusive and controlling relationship that resulted in a young British woman's death is chilling viewing but is important in the way it illuminates the ways abusive men manipulate and lock their victims into no-win situations.

★★★★☆

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This Is Spinal Tap (1984)

Behind the big stadium theatrics of all the world's mega rock'n'roll bands, you just know there are the inflated egos, the writhing masses of petty differences, the overblown personalities and idiocy and mismanagement of the sorts portrayed in this classic and hilarious rock mockumentary.

★★★★☆

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