A frank, saucily absorbing documentary study of the American photographer, whose pristine images of swollen appendages and S&M activities, among other subjects, inspired heated political debates about public arts funding, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato's film examines his work with as sharp an eye as it does his rollicking personal life.
Absorbing documentary identifying an unsung hero of apartheid's peaceful demise: a French-Algerian businessman whose secret negotiations are the stuff of a future biopic.
(Dargis) 'REEL PARADISE' (R, 110 minutes) Steve James's untidy but absorbing documentary follows a family of New York cinéastes to Fiji, where they show free movies to the people, and experience mild culture clash and domestic disharmony.
Visually precise and politically amorphous, the absorbing documentary "Abendland" opens with a self-reflexive image of a surveillance camera perched over a green field.
Author and journalist Nelson George, who helped to fund Lee's debut She's Gotta Have It in 1986, has directed an absorbing, intimate documentary, A Ballerina's Tale, about Misty Copeland, who made history in 2015 when becoming the first African American principal dancer with the prestigious American Ballet Theatre ABTT).
Mallory looked on his quest as "the wildest dream," and an absorbing new documentary called "The Wildest Dream: Conquest of Everest" deals with the climber's fate and his legacy in an unexpected combination on ways.
Roger Ross Williams' incisive and absorbing documentary "God Loves Uganda" makes a compelling case for the link between the two situations without connecting all the dots for viewers, and without condemning the young missionaries who flock to "the pearl of Africa" believing they are saving souls.
Directed by Paul Devlin, this absorbing documentary flirts with metaphysics — one of the scientists, a Christian, muses on God's participation in both the Blast project and the nature of the universe — but mostly it keeps an amused eye on the effort of these driven brainiacs to set aloft an extremely sophisticated and fragile recording device.
Its assembly and eventual destruction -- the sand is poured into a bag, then scattered as a blessing -- is the cycle around which the German director Werner Herzog's absorbing documentary "Wheel of Time" is structured.
