I’ve been on holiday for the last few days, celebrating my 15th wedding anniversary. In fact, I’ll still be off when this newsletter goes out. The magic of scheduling tools! I mention this because I wasn’t able to watch all of this week’s new releases in time. Also, in case I’ve missed anything that popped up on the documentary release schedule late, you know the reason why.

Below are this week’s documentary highlights, followed by daily listings for all known releases and broadcasts, along with a brief look at what’s coming soon for doc fans (including the latest from Questlove!). Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to receive more in-depth highlights and reviews in the future, plus full access to special posts like our best-of lists, and to give me more time to watch more (if not everything) available. If you have a doc in need of coverage or a mention, you can reach me at christopherbartoncampbell (at) gmail.

Nonfics Pick Of The Week: Time And Water (2026)

With its title and elegiac tone, Sara Dosa’s latest, Time and Water, sounds like a great follow-up to her Oscar-nominated 2022 feature, Fire of Love (one of my favorites of that year). The new documentary might have even more in common with her 2019 film, The Seer and the Unseen. It’s a return to Iceland that again deals with environmental threats and even revisits the country’s myths of elves. Time and Water is a surprisingly personal film, however, not for Dosa but for her subject, the writer Andri Snær Magnason.

He narrates the documentary, in which he laments the loss of his grandparents and Iceland’s glaciers, the latter to global warming. As I wrote in my review of Time and Water, I unfortunately “don’t find Magnason, his family, or his concerns all that interesting, and I didn’t enjoy listening to him talk about any of it.” Yet, it’s not a bad film at all. I conclude that “if at another time I find him and his climate change woes more compelling, I am certain I’ll like Time and Water more.” Also, I love the film’s score by Dan Deacon.

Time and Water will be released in theaters on Friday, May 29, 2026.

Other Documentary Highlights

Bring Me The Beauties: A Model Cult (2026)

Chris Smith continues to prove himself as one of the busiest documentary filmmakers working today. His latest is a three-part docuseries about a cult-like spiritual group from the 1980s that primarily recruited good-looking people. I’ve only watched one episode of Bring Me the Beauties: A Model Cult, but so far, I don’t see how this group was any different than the general superficial culture of the U.S. in the 1980s, and the series hasn’t really set up what was so bad about it yet. I confess, it hasn’t drawn me in.

Bring Me the Beauties: A Model Cult premieres on HBO and HBO Max on Monday, June 1, 2026.

Gary Hustwit Documentaries

This week’s filmmaker in focus comes courtesy of a new Criterion Channel curation. The streamer is adding four Gary Hustwit documentaries to its library ahead of its mid-month premiere of the director’s latest, Eno. We’ll get to that one in a couple of weeks. For now, you can join Hustwit in his appreciation for design by watching Helvetica, Objectified, Urbanized, and Rams. The first three make up The Design Trilogy, focusing on typography, products, and urban spaces, respectively.

The fourth film is about industrial designer Dieter Rams, and since it’s probably the least seen, here’s an excerpt from our review:

“Elegantly made, and lovingly shot, this is the first documentary to focus on Rams, who has made a point of shunning his own celebrity. We trail Rams as he migrates from his Japanese-inspired garden to lectures, to exhibition openings, with interjections from the likes of designer Naoto Fukasawa and Rams’ collaborator Dietrich Lubs. Beautifully scored by Brian Eno, the film is primarily concerned with Rams’ iconic work at Braun and Vitsœ, where he revolutionized consumer product design by implementing an approach that placed functionality on a pedestal over the cheap and the chic. It’s gesamtkunstwerk for the modular minimalist’s soul; an attitude to art that is philosophy and vice versa.”

Helvetica, Objectified, Urbanized, and Rams all begin streaming on The Criterion Channel on Monday, June 1, 2026.

LGBTQ+ Documentaries

This week ushers in June, which is Pride Month. We always take this time (non-exclusively) to recommend the best documentaries about LGBTQ+ history and the best documentary portraits of LGBTQ+ culture. Certain streamers may also use the opportunity to highlight their LGBTQ+ offerings.

The Criterion Channel is one of them, as they’re reminding us that they carry such classic features as Portrait of Jason, Word is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives, The Times of Harvey Milk, Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, and Paris is Burning. But they’re also adding two essentials from Daniel Peddle focused on trans men of color: The Aggressives and its sequel, Beyond the Aggressives: 25 Years Later.

They also want subscribers to know that they have many LGBTQ+ shorts available to watch, including a handful of documentaries. These include Rob Epstein’s Greetings from Washington, D.C., Mirha-Soleil Ross’s Gender Troublemakers, Cheryl Dunye’s Greetings from Africa, Twiggy Pucci Garçon’s MnM, and Matt Wolf’s Bayard & Me, I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard, and Another Hayride.

Rafa (2026)

It’s been 13 years since Zach Heinzerling released his Oscar-nominated debut, Cutie and the Boxer, and he hasn’t made anything so memorable since. Instead, he continues to helm projects with big topics and even bigger subjects, and he does so with such polish that there’s no denying he deserved the Academy’s recognition out of the gate. Rafa is his latest, a four-part series about tennis icon Rafael Nadal. It’s so conventional that I felt like I’d seen it before, as it follows Nadal’s career with intimate new footage concentrated on his return to the sport in 2024 after his hip injury, plus additional focus on his decision to retire. It’s another athlete profile that’s strictly for the fans, yet it’s also another that exhibits adept verite filmmaking.

Rafa premieres on Netflix on Friday, May 29, 2026.

Storm Front In Mayo: The Story Of The D-Day Forecast (2019)

This week’s Doc Option is inspired by the war movie Pressure, which opens on May 29, 2026. Based on a stage play, the drama depicts the planning of the Allied invasion of Normandy during World War II. I could recommend plenty of D-Day documentaries, from Stuart Legg’s Zero Hour and the Oscar-winning feature The True Glory to the more recent miniseries D-Day: The Unheard Tapes. But Pressure is specifically about the weather concerns for the operation, and so is the medium-length film Storm Front in Mayo: The Story of the D-Day Forecast.

As far as I can tell, this is the only historical documentary of its kind to feature archival footage of meteorologist James Stagg (portrayed by Andrew Scott in Pressure) and focus on how weather science played a part in the Normandy invasion. Storm Front in Mayo also devotes a lot of its runtime to the distinction of Dwight Eisenhower (portrayed by Brendan Fraser in Pressure). What the drama doesn’t seem to have that the documentary does is recognition of Maureen Sweeney, an Irish postmistress who made the first weather observation warning related to the D-Day plans. She also appears in the film at age 96 to share her side of the story. Give it a watch for her.

Storm Front in Mayo: The Story of the D-Day Forecast is available to stream for free on JustWatch via Plex.

Awards Highlights

News & Documentary Emmy Winners

Winners of this year’s News & Documentary Emmys were announced last week, with Prime Minister taking the awards for Best Documentary and Outstanding Politics and Government Documentary. Other big winners, some of them among our favorites of 2025, include Mstyslav Chernov’s 2000 Meters to Andriivka (available to stream via PBS), which was honored for Outstanding Direction, Cover-Up (available on Netflix), honored for Outstanding Editing, and National Geographic’s Underdogs (Disney+ and Hulu), honored for both Outstanding Writing and Outstanding Sound.

Another double winner was Secrets of the Penguins, which took the awards for Outstanding Nature Documentary and Outstanding Cinematography, the latter for its first episode, “Hearts of the Emperors.” National Geographic had a big presence at this year’s awards and also won with Lost in the Jungle, for Outstanding Current Affairs Documentary. Meanwhile, Netflix’s Turning Point: The Vietnam War won for Outstanding Research, HBO’s Critical Incident: A Death at the Border won for Outstanding Investigative Documentary, and the independent Can’t Look Away: The Case Against Social Media won for Outstanding Business and Economy Documentary.

Subscribe now

Documentary Release Calendar 5/29/26 – 6/4/26

Friday, May 29, 2026

Brazil ’70: The Third Star (2026) – A five-part docudrama series about the 1970 Brazilian football team and their performance in the World Cup. (Netflix)

Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy (2026) – An installment of Great Performances narrated by Joel Grey about Jewish composers and lyricists. (PBS)

Deadliest Catch Season 22, Episode 4: “Hunger Game” – The latest installment of a series that follows Alaskan crab fishermen. (Discovery Channel)

Rafa (2026) – A four-part docuseries about tennis star Rafael Nadal. See our highlights section for more info. (Netflix)

Time and Water – A documentary feature directed by Sara Dosa (Fire of Love) about Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason and his mission to preserve the memory of his nation’s glaciers. See our Pick of the Week section for more info and a link to our review. (In Theaters)

With Hasan in Gaza (2025) – A documentary feature directed by Kamal Aljafari that revisits footage he shot in 2001 about his search for a man he met in prison years earlier. (In Theaters)

Saturday, May 30, 2026

Craig Ferguson: American on Purpose Episode 1 – The first installment of a five-part docuseries on what it means to be American. (CNN)

MGM Parade Show #6 (1955) – The sixth installment of a documentary series devoted to promoting MGM’s films. This short spotlights the movies Anna Christie and Quentin Durward. (TCM)

Tucci in Italy Season 2, Episode 6: “Veneto” – The latest episode of a docuseries starring Stanley Tucci as he explores Italy through its cuisine. (National Geographic)

Sunday, May 31, 2026

The Food That Built America Season 7, Episode 7: “Chocolate in a Glass” – The latest installment of a docuseries about popular American foods. This episode looks at dangerous rides and activities. (History)

Hazardous History with Henry Winkler Season 2, Episode 7: “Thrills & Spills” – The latest installment of a docuseries about dangerous toys and household items that used to be common. This episode involves dangerous parts of homes. (History)

Jimi Hendrix (1973) – A documentary about the titular rock icon. (TCM)

The Killer Among Us Episode 3: “Death in the Dorms” – The latest installment of a docuseries hosted by Alan Cumming about murders in close-knit communities. This episode involves the murder of a student at a school for the deaf. (Oxygen True Crime)

Monterey Pop (1968) – A concert film by D.A. Pennebaker starring Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, The Who, Mamas and the Papas, Jefferson Airplane, and more as they perform at the titular music festival. *NONFICS PICK* (TCM)

Monday, June 1, 2026

The Aggressives (2005) – A documentary feature about trans men of color in New York City. (The Criterion Channel)

Beyond the Aggressives: 25 Years Later (2023) – Sequel to the 2005 documentary The Aggressives about trans men. (The Criterion Channel)

Bring Me the Beauties: A Model Cult (2026) – A three-part docuseries directed by Chris Smith (Tiger King) about the spiritual group Eternal Values. See our highlights section for more info and a brief review. (HBO and HBO Max)

Deadly Influence: The Social Media Murders Season 2, Episode 1: “Waiting for the Darkness” – The return of a true-crime docuseries involving social media and influencers. (Investigation Discovery)

Georgia O’Keeffe: The Brightness of Light (2024) – A documentary directed by Oscar winner Paul Wagner (The Stone Carvers) and narrated by Hugh Dancy about the titular painter. The film also stars Claire Danes as the voice of O’Keeffe. (VOD)

Helvetica (2007) – A documentary feature by Gary Hustwit about the titular typeface. *NONFICS PICK* (The Criterion Channel)

History’s Greatest Machines with Dolph Lundgren Episode 1 – The first part of a docuseries about the machines that shaped our world. (History)

If I Could Stay (2024) – A documentary about two mothers trying ot keep their families together and avoid deportation. (PBS)

In the Eye of the Storm: Chasers Episode 3 – The third installment of a six-part spinoff of the docuseries In the Eye of the Storm that follows weather spotters and storm chasers as they record tornadoes. (Discovery Channel)

Kedi (2016) – A documentary feature that follows stray cats around Istanbul. Read our review of Kedi. *NONFICS PICK* (The Criterion Channel)

Lethally Blonde Season 2, Episode 1 – The return of a true-crime docuseries involving people pursuing beauty and fame. (Investigation Discovery)

Objectified (2009) – A documentary feature by Gary Hustwit about product design. *NONFICS PICK* (The Criterion Channel)

Rams (2015) – A documentary feature by Gary Hustwit about industrial designer Dieter Rams. Read our review of Rams. *NONFICS PICK* (The Criterion Channel)

Urbanized (2009) – A documentary feature by Gary Hustwit about urban design. *NONFICS PICK* (The Criterion Channel)

Tuesday, June 2, 2026

The Proof Is Out There: Unexplained Edition Season 2, Episode 1: “Demons & Angels” – The return of a docuseries about strange phenomena captured on camera. (History)

Running for the Mountains (2024) – A documentary feature about politics in West Virginia. (OVID)

The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch Season 7, Episode 3: “Setting Boundaries” – The latest installment of a docuseries about UFO phenomena at the Skinwalker Ranch. (History)

Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror (2025) – A documentary feature about The Rocky Horror Picture Show. (VOD)

Wednesday, June 3, 2026

The Face Doctors Season 2, Episode 4: “I Just Want a New Nose” – The latest installment of a nonfiction series about facial reconstruction specialists and their patients. (TLC)

Michael Jackson: The Verdict (2026) – A three-part docuseries about the criminal trial of Michael Jackson. (Netflix)

Grey Gardens (1975) – A documentary feature by the Maysles brothers (and Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer) on a mother and daughter (Big Edie and Little Edie Beales) living in a decrepit Hamptons mansion. *NONFICS PICK* (TCM)

On the Case with Paula Zahn Season 29, Episode 7: “Two Fires, One Match” – The latest installment of a true-crime documentary series starring journalist Paula Zahn. (Investigation Discovery)

Thursday, June 4, 2026

Aida’s Secrets (2016) – A Holocaust documentary about reunited brothers who had been separated as babies during World War II. (OVID)

On the Roam Season 2, Episode 4 – The latest installment of a nonfiction series that follows actor Jason Momoa as he meets extraordinary people around the country. (HBO Max)

Welcome to Wrexham Season 5, Episode 5: “Holiday Spirit” – The latest installment of a docuseries about a Welsh soccer team co-owned by actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney. (FXX)

Share Nonfics

Sneak Peek At What’s Coming Soon

6/5 – Groundswell – A Cannes-winning documentary sequel narrated by Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson about humanity’s relationship to land. The film is the third part of a trilogy that also includes Kiss the Ground and Common Ground. (Prime Video)

6/5 – Louis Malle: Le Révolté (2025) – A medium-length documentary about the titular filmmaker. (In Theaters)

6/7 – Best of the World with Antoni Porowski – A travel docuseries starring Antoni Porowski. Watch the new trailer for the series below. (National Geographic)

6/7 – This Land – A six-part docuseries that explores the history of America through six defining frontiers. (CNN)

6/7 – Earth, Wind & Fire: To Be Celestial vs. That’s the Weight of the World – A documentary directed by Questlove about the titular band. Watch the new trailer for the film below. (HBO and HBO Max)

6/11 – Surviving Earth – An eight-part docuseries about extinct creatures. (NBC)

6/16 – Becoming Katharine Graham – A documentary feature about the titular Washington Post publisher. (PBS)

6/16 – Eno – A feature documentary directed by Gary Hustwit (Helvetica) about the music artist Brian Eno. (The Criterion Channel)

6/17 – Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul – A documentary about the titular singer-songwriter and musician. Watch the new trailer for the film below. (In Theaters)

6/27 – Possibilities – A documentary about the legacy of Helen Keller. (VOD)

7/3 – Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World – A documentary feature about the titular poet and queer icon. (In Theaters)

8/21 – The Dynasty: UConn Huskies – A three-part docuseries directed by Matthew Hamachek (The Dynasty: New England Patriots) about the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team. (Apple TV)

For editors working at the highest levels of unscripted television, the job is as much about shaping a story as it is about cutting one. Few understand that better than the team at Outpost, the St. Louis-based post-production company behind HBO’s sprawling docuseries “U.S. Against the World.” Lucas Harger, a film and commercial editor and partner at Bruton Stroube Outpost, talks about the editorial process behind a large-scale docuseries, how the company balances work across TV, film and commercials, and why operating out of the Midwest has become less of an anomaly — and more of an advantage.

What is your process as an editor working across a large-scale docuseries for a platform like HBO? How did you work alongside the docuseries’ directors to craft episodes?

Yes, our team at Outpost was involved from the very beginning on “U.S. Against the World,” so before we ever dove into cutting episodes, we had many conversations with Park Stories (the show’s production team) to discuss the shape and structure, as well as the emotional and relationship arcs, and key story points.

Then, our internal team would huddle, get into the edit and establish a first cut as quickly as possible – something that we knew would at least give us the foundation we need to continue honing and sharpening the story. 

Once we have a first cut, we’re then collaborating again with the filmmakers on next steps and the direction we want to take the episod 

Outpost works across the TV, film and commercial spaces — what’s the internal process like for your team in terms of attacking that work? Does the entire team work across every medium, or are there different leads in different categories?

I’m proud to say that we have an amazing team with an incredibly diverse skillset at Outpost. So while everyone has capabilities working across different mediums, it’s also true that each editor has their own path, interests and areas of focus. Some cutters have a particular talent and creative eye for shortform content, while others really spread their wings in the music video world, and others in feature docs, scripted comedies, etc.

When I’m assigning projects to the team, I’m always considering their skillset first and foremost, but also their trajectory as creatives and the direction they want to go. 

What are the main differences between editing for scripted and unscripted projects?  

Documentaries are definitely more challenging and demanding. Not to say scripted projects are a cakewalk, but by default, you’re starting with more structure. You have a script, and you’re working based off what’s on the page. There are still challenges, decisions to be made and problems to solve, but the sandbox is a lot smaller.

For a documentary project – especially one like “U.S. Against the World,” which was years in the making – you have to be more comfortable swimming in an ocean of unknowns for a while. There is far more responsibility, and in turn creative space, for an editor to discover and shape the story being told.

Bruton Strobe and Outpost are based in St. Louis. What do you feel are the key differences and advantages of operating from the Midwest?

We love our homebase in St. Louis. It’s definitely intentional that we’re here and not in one of the major hubs, whether that’s LA, New York or even Atlanta. I think one of the key advantages is having the ability to operate from this 50,000 square foot studio, which just wouldn’t be possible in LA or New York – our entire creative team collaborates under the same roof. Another advantage is having this creative haven in the Midwest for really impressive and skilled post-production minds who, for whatever reason, aren’t interested in living on the coasts. It’s also become a great creative playground for our partners – filmmakers, producers – that are either east coast or west coast-based to escape to and work for extended periods of time, away from the usual noise and distractions.

Especially since 2020, we have clients and partners based all over the country, and any stigma around needing to be in LA or NYC to be successful just doesn’t exist anymore. 

The post The Art of the Edit appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Director Diane Ventura and frontman Ely Buendia discuss the new documentary Eraserheads: Combo on the Run, which traces the band’s formation — and reunion — amid political upheaval

Director Diane Ventura and frontman Ely Buendia discuss the new documentary Eraserheads: Combo on the Run, which traces the band’s formation — and reunion — amid political upheaval

Markus Persson, the billionaire creator of Minecraft, tells FORBES why he sold independent gaming company for $2.5 billion to Microsoft in an exclusive interview. (Source: Forbes)

The post Why Minecraft Went Corporate appeared first on Channel Nonfiction.

Markus Persson, the billionaire creator of Minecraft, tells FORBES why he sold independent gaming company for $2.5 billion to Microsoft in an exclusive interview. (Source: Forbes)

The post Why Minecraft Went Corporate appeared first on Channel Nonfiction.

Steven Soderbergh’s John Lennon: The Last Interview premiered at Cannes 2026 as an official Special Screening, with roughly ten percent of its visuals generated using Meta’s video tools and the rest of the completion financing supplied by the same company. The director called himself “my own whistle blower” and laid down an unusually specific ethical test for when generative AI belongs in a finished film.

The 97-minute documentary is built around an unreleased radio interview running roughly two hours and 45 minutes, recorded by John Lennon and Yoko Ono at the Dakota Apartments for KFRC San Francisco hours before Lennon’s assassination. Soderbergh assembled more than 1,000 archival photographs and video clips to score the audio, then filled the remaining gaps with AI-generated material that he has repeatedly characterized as surreal rather than literal: circles of light, a black rose morphing into choreography, paint-mixing diptychs, lovers in split-screen. There are no AI deepfakes of Lennon or Ono in the film.

The Meta partnership and what it actually paid for

Meta supplied both the generative-video tools used for the AI segments and the financing that allowed Soderbergh to finish the film. The deal sits alongside Meta’s new multi-year Festival de Cannes partnership, which this year replaced TikTok as the festival’s headline tech sponsor. Sean Lennon’s blessing letter was read aloud by festival director Iris Knobloch before the screening. Soderbergh, in a small piece of theatre, chose to remain seated rather than stand and introduce the film himself.

In his Deadline Q&A with Matt Grobar, Soderbergh laid out the framework he applied to every AI shot: “It has to be necessary. Is it the only way to accomplish what I want to see? Is it truly the best way to do it?” He told The Associated Press he had no illusions about the reception: “I knew what was coming.” Then, on the question of why he was being so explicit: “Transparency is so important. In the world outside of the creative context, we’re not aware of the extent that this is being used and used to manipulate us. I’m like my own whistle blower.”

Where the AI sits in the cut

Soderbergh has been more specific than most filmmakers about where in his timeline AI actually sat. Speaking to Filmmaker magazine, he framed the segments as “thematically surreal images that occupy a dream space rather than a literal space,” noting that the AI material amounts to about ten minutes spread across the 90-minute body of the film, generally appearing whenever Lennon and Ono drift into philosophy. He has described the AI work as the last stage of finishing, prompted by “images that are impossible to shoot” combined with a project that had “run out of time and money” before Meta’s offer.

That framing is worth weighing carefully. Several outlets have framed the AI use as a quick-turnaround substitute for traditional VFX, but Soderbergh’s own quotes describe it as a budgetary and time impossibility rather than a swap for a year’s worth of compositing work. The distinction matters for any working DP, editor, or VFX supervisor trying to figure out where this tooling fits in a real schedule.

A festival that talked about AI in two voices

Cannes 2026 was always going to be a stress test for the festival’s posture on generative AI, and the Soderbergh screening sat awkwardly between two louder positions taken in the same week. At the Théâtre Debussy, Guillermo del Toro introduced a 20th-anniversary Cannes Classics screening of Pan’s Labyrinth with a blunt “Fuck AI!” Peter Jackson, accepting his Honorary Palme d’Or, took the other side, telling the audience he would be open to AI for performance work, including digitally resurrecting performers, as long as the guardians of their legacy signed off.

Inside the Marché du Film, the conversation was more procedural. At the AI for Talent Summit, Darren Aronofsky and Google’s James Manyika walked through what Aronofsky called the tool framing: “It’s not impersonating a person, it’s actually a tool, and it’s very much in the tradition of the evolution of filmmaking. From when sound was first introduced, there was incredible pushback from all the people playing usable instruments. When the portable camera came, we suddenly got films like Breathless and the French New Wave.”

The labor question, from the director who has used the tools

The Soderbergh comment most likely to resonate with working crews is the one he gave The Next Web on the labor question. He argued that “most jobs that matter when you’re making a movie cannot be performed by this tech and never will be performed by this tech,” then added a craft-level observation that cuts against the standard generative-AI marketing pitch: “As it becomes possible for anybody to create something that meets a certain standard of technical perfection, then imperfection becomes more valuable and more interesting.”

That position lines up uneasily with the festival’s own stance. Cannes director Thierry Frémaux and Iris Knobloch articulated, at a Pathé Palace press conference earlier in the year, a curatorial exclusion of films “primarily driven by generative AI” from competition. Reuters and others reported the policy, although it is not codified as a written rule in the published 2026 regulations. Frémaux also floated the idea of a visible “made without artificial intelligence” label on selected works.

John Lennon: The Last Interview screened as a Special Screening rather than in any competitive section, which neatly sidestepped that policy. It also gave Soderbergh, the most prominent American director to ship an AI-assisted feature this year, the platform to model what disclosure looks like in practice. For Cannes regulars trying to read the festival’s actual position on generative tools, the gap between del Toro’s expletive and Soderbergh’s Meta partnership is the gap to watch.

For more on Soderbergh’s history with low-budget, technology-forward production, see our earlier coverage of his iPhone-shot Netflix feature High Flying Bird and his blunt advice that there are no excuses for not making movies on a phone. For our broader take on integrating these tools without losing your day job, my Ready Creator One BILD Expo talk from last year is the natural follow-up.

A release plan for John Lennon: The Last Interview has not been announced. The film screened at Cannes as an official Special Screening and remains in the hands of its producers and Meta for the next phase of its rollout.

Where do you draw the line between AI as a finishing tool and AI as a creative author? Don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments below!

Featured image: © Yoko Ono Lennon and Nishi Saimaru (via Cannes Film Festival)

I used to have a desk right next to an editor — they were on the other side of a thin wall, because this is New York City — who was editing a true crime series.

One day, the editor was working on a sequence where someone says the phrase, “murder, murder, murder.” The editor was — as editors do — playing that phrase over and over again. So for about two hours, I just heard the words “murder, murder, murder” on repeat through the wall. It felt as if the voracious public itself was intoning into my ear what it wants in a documentary: Murder! MURDER!! MURRRRRRRRRDER!!!

Given the incredible popularity of the true crime genre, I am apparently alone among all documentary viewers in that I do not gravitate toward anything with the word “murder” in it at all — much less in the title.

I am not sure why I don’t gravitate toward true crime. Given how much I love horror — even schlocky horror — and how, as I wrote here, true crime is arguably the horror of documentary, it seems like I should be interested. But I’m just not.

Murder, murder, murder — it’s just not for me.1

But this weekend, I made an exception to my “no murders” policy to watch the 5th and final episode of The Yogurt Shop Murders on HBO.

I watched this series because Margaret Brown directed it, and Margaret Brown is not only my friend, but a talented, smart, empathetic and fierce filmmaker. If you don’t know her work, I recommend a double feature ASAP of Descendant (2023) and The Order of Myths (2008), which demonstrate she is no stranger to excavating traumatic histories that haunt and divide communities, and asking what would it take to heal.

Indeed, that is the angle she brought to The Yogurt Shop Murders.

My favorite character in the series is Claire Huie, another filmmaker who tried to make a documentary film on this case back in 2009. She amassed a large collection of footage, but became overwhelmed by the scale of the undertaking: too many characters, too many theories, too much trauma, too much grief, too much responsibility. So she abandoned her box of miniDV tapes, and tried to move on.

There’s a scene with Claire, where she’s showing Margaret an interview she did with Barbara Ayres-Wilson. Her first interview question is, “Tell me about how your daughters were murdered.” She now sees that’s a pretty insensitive way to start an interview, and is absolutely mortified.2

Despite her missteps, Claire’s interview of Barbara yielded many incredible moments, including this:

“People always say ‘I just can’t imagine.’ You don’t need to. Don’t even. It’s too much to think about, too much to carry with you forever. You’ll have your own pain in your own way in your own time. You don’t need to visit this one.”

You don’t need to visit this one. I felt this like a warning shot.

But Margaret reveals her mission with the series, which is not to simply “visit” this horror, when she asks Sonora, another bereaved family member, “I’m wondering, is there a way that [telling] this story can help with healing?”

How to use documentary to help heal this community in the wake of unimaginable evil, especially an unsolved crime like this one, becomes the theme of the series. And by the end of Episode 4 — notably titled, “In Your Own Time” — Sonora finally answers Margaret’s framing question: “I think there’s a real benefit for both teller and audience to telling [this] story and to hearing [this] story. I think that can change how the memory lives inside you.” It’s a very good ending.

But, that wasn’t where the story ended. (Life! It just keeps life-ing, even after picture lock!!) The new episode details what happened after the original 4-part series dropped — again: about how to heal in the wake of an unsolved crime — and then, only weeks later, the police actually solved the crime. It’s an astonishing turn of events, and certainly adds even more weight to the idea that true crime can be about more than simply visiting horrors, and can help to serve the twin causes of healing and justice.

Another one of my friends, Geeta Gandbhir, had both healing and justice on her mind when she directed a film some people call a true crime masterpiece: The Perfect Neighbor (2025), an all-archival recounting of the slow build-up to a murder, which debuted to a rapturous response at Sundance, before dominating the Netflix Top 10 for many weeks, and finally being nominated for an Oscar. It was one of the biggest feature documentaries of the year by any measure.

For her part, Geeta doesn’t think of her film as true crime at all. “[W]hen people think true crime, they think maybe of something salacious or procedural,” she told Variety. This film is about a family friend that was murdered, and she made the film first to mitigate and process their own grief, and secondly to help ensure that justice would be served. For Geeta, the true crime label obscures more than it reveals about her film and her reasons for making it.

It is, nonetheless, tagged as “true crime” on Netflix, and that is how the 40+ million viewers who saw it there have encountered it.

I’ve written before about the importance of understanding what your audience is expecting from your film, and certainly genre conventions are a part of that. The Yogurt Shop Murders addresses the true crime genre label much more neatly than The Perfect Neighbor in the sense that most of its runtime is, indeed, “procedural”: we follow what happened in the crime, the investigation, the convictions and their reversals.

The Perfect Neighbor does none of that. It is about a murder, though, and that seems to be enough to get the true crime label. (Yes, there are many types of stories that fit within true crime, but murder is the most popular by far.)

It also meets the expectations of the genre by being incredibly suspenseful. It’s constructed as a riveting, present-tense unfolding of a tragedy told through body cam footage, Ring cam and cel phone footage, and other “found” sources. I was literally on the edge of my seat the whole time. It feels positively Shakespearean in how expertly it builds toward its conclusion.

Whatever genre label you put on it: The Perfect Neighbor is a phenomenal example of archival storytelling, and I am thrilled such a large audience of people who, unlike me, gravitate toward “murder, murder, murder” content have seen it, because it’s simply an incredible documentary.

If you somehow managed to miss The Perfect Neighbor, now is a good time to watch, because:

I want to talk to Geeta about how she found the form for this film, and how she sees it in fitting into her larger body of work.

I also wanted to check in with Geeta after the massive success of The Perfect Neighbor and find out what it was like, on a personal level, to have one of the biggest docs of 2025 — and then, on top of all that, to be nominated for not one but two Oscars (click that link if you’re asking, wait, isn’t there only one Oscar category for documentary? How did she get two nominations???), even as she was still processing the death of her family friend in this horrific tragedy.

It seems — from my vantage point as a friend on the sidelines — it’s simply been a crazy time for Geeta, and I’m wondering if she’s even had a chance yet to catch her breath.

Do you all watch true crime documentaries, and if so, what draws you to this genre? Talk to me in the comments!

Comings, Goings, & News

Saturday, May 30 I am hosting the 7pm Q&A for We Are Pat at DCTV!
Sunday, May 31 I am hosting the 3:30pm Q&A for Time and Water at The Angelika!

I used to have a desk right next to an editor — they were on the other side of a thin wall, because this is New York City — who was editing a true crime series.

One day, the editor was working on a sequence where someone says the phrase, “murder, murder, murder.” The editor was — as editors do — playing that phrase over and over again. So for about two hours, I just heard the words “murder, murder, murder” on repeat through the wall. It felt as if the voracious public itself was intoning into my ear what it wants in a documentary: Murder! MURDER!! MURRRRRRRRRDER!!!

Given the incredible popularity of the true crime genre, I am apparently alone among all documentary viewers in that I do not gravitate toward anything with the word “murder” in it at all — much less in the title.

I am not sure why I don’t gravitate toward true crime. Given how much I love horror — even schlocky horror — and how, as I wrote here, true crime is arguably the horror of documentary, it seems like I should be interested. But I’m just not.

Murder, murder, murder — it’s just not for me.1

But this weekend, I made an exception to my “no murders” policy to watch the 5th and final episode of The Yogurt Shop Murders on HBO.

I watched this series because Margaret Brown directed it, and Margaret Brown is not only my friend, but a talented, smart, empathetic and fierce filmmaker. If you don’t know her work, I recommend a double feature ASAP of Descendant (2023) and The Order of Myths (2008), which demonstrate she is no stranger to excavating traumatic histories that haunt and divide communities, and asking what would it take to heal.

Indeed, that is the angle she brought to The Yogurt Shop Murders.

My favorite character in the series is Claire Huie, another filmmaker who tried to make a documentary film on this case back in 2009. She amassed a large collection of footage, but became overwhelmed by the scale of the undertaking: too many characters, too many theories, too much trauma, too much grief, too much responsibility. So she abandoned her box of miniDV tapes, and tried to move on.

There’s a scene with Claire, where she’s showing Margaret an interview she did with Barbara Ayres-Wilson. Her first interview question is, “Tell me about how your daughters were murdered.” She now sees that’s a pretty insensitive way to start an interview, and is absolutely mortified.2

Despite her missteps, Claire’s interview of Barbara yielded many incredible moments, including this:

“People always say ‘I just can’t imagine.’ You don’t need to. Don’t even. It’s too much to think about, too much to carry with you forever. You’ll have your own pain in your own way in your own time. You don’t need to visit this one.”

You don’t need to visit this one. I felt this like a warning shot.

But Margaret reveals her mission with the series, which is not to simply “visit” this horror, when she asks Sonora, another bereaved family member, “I’m wondering, is there a way that [telling] this story can help with healing?”

How to use documentary to help heal this community in the wake of unimaginable evil, especially an unsolved crime like this one, becomes the theme of the series. And by the end of Episode 4 — notably titled, “In Your Own Time” — Sonora finally answers Margaret’s framing question: “I think there’s a real benefit for both teller and audience to telling [this] story and to hearing [this] story. I think that can change how the memory lives inside you.” It’s a very good ending.

But, that wasn’t where the story ended. (Life! It just keeps life-ing, even after picture lock!!) The new episode details what happened after the original 4-part series dropped — again: about how to heal in the wake of an unsolved crime — and then, only weeks later, the police actually solved the crime. It’s an astonishing turn of events, and certainly adds even more weight to the idea that true crime can be about more than simply visiting horrors, and can help to serve the twin causes of healing and justice.

Another one of my friends, Geeta Gandbhir, had both healing and justice on her mind when she directed a film some people call a true crime masterpiece: The Perfect Neighbor (2025), an all-archival recounting of the slow build-up to a murder, which debuted to a rapturous response at Sundance, before dominating the Netflix Top 10 for many weeks, and finally being nominated for an Oscar. It was one of the biggest feature documentaries of the year by any measure.

For her part, Geeta doesn’t think of her film as true crime at all. “[W]hen people think true crime, they think maybe of something salacious or procedural,” she told Variety. This film is about a family friend that was murdered, and she made the film first to mitigate and process their own grief, and secondly to help ensure that justice would be served. For Geeta, the true crime label obscures more than it reveals about her film and her reasons for making it.

It is, nonetheless, tagged as “true crime” on Netflix, and that is how the 40+ million viewers who saw it there have encountered it.

I’ve written before about the importance of understanding what your audience is expecting from your film, and certainly genre conventions are a part of that. The Yogurt Shop Murders addresses the true crime genre label much more neatly than The Perfect Neighbor in the sense that most of its runtime is, indeed, “procedural”: we follow what happened in the crime, the investigation, the convictions and their reversals.

The Perfect Neighbor does none of that. It is about a murder, though, and that seems to be enough to get the true crime label. (Yes, there are many types of stories that fit within true crime, but murder is the most popular by far.)

It also meets the expectations of the genre by being incredibly suspenseful. It’s constructed as a riveting, present-tense unfolding of a tragedy told through body cam footage, Ring cam and cel phone footage, and other “found” sources. I was literally on the edge of my seat the whole time. It feels positively Shakespearean in how expertly it builds toward its conclusion.

Whatever genre label you put on it: The Perfect Neighbor is a phenomenal example of archival storytelling, and I am thrilled such a large audience of people who, unlike me, gravitate toward “murder, murder, murder” content have seen it, because it’s simply an incredible documentary.

If you somehow managed to miss The Perfect Neighbor, now is a good time to watch, because:

I want to talk to Geeta about how she found the form for this film, and how she sees it in fitting into her larger body of work.

I also wanted to check in with Geeta after the massive success of The Perfect Neighbor and find out what it was like, on a personal level, to have one of the biggest docs of 2025 — and then, on top of all that, to be nominated for not one but two Oscars (click that link if you’re asking, wait, isn’t there only one Oscar category for documentary? How did she get two nominations???), even as she was still processing the death of her family friend in this horrific tragedy.

It seems — from my vantage point as a friend on the sidelines — it’s simply been a crazy time for Geeta, and I’m wondering if she’s even had a chance yet to catch her breath.

Do you all watch true crime documentaries, and if so, what draws you to this genre? Talk to me in the comments!

Comings, Goings, & News

Saturday, May 30 I am hosting the 7pm Q&A for We Are Pat at DCTV!
Sunday, May 31 I am hosting the 3:30pm Q&A for Time and Water at The Angelika!

You can’t judge a documentary by its synopsis. Everybody to Kenmure Street sounds like a simple, conventional political film when all you have to go on is what it’s about (a day-long spontaneous protest in the titular location in Glasgow in 2021 after two locals are detained in an immigration raid). For this exceptional documentary, you need to know how it’s about it. That’s where we critics come in. Not just to tell you more, like how it’s a combination of archival footage, interviews, and dramatizations. That definitely doesn’t sell this brilliantly constructed film, which will be added to our ongoing list of the best documentaries of 2026.

Everybody to Kenmure Street begins with an archival montage traversing centuries of political protests in Glasgow before landing on the date in focus. To show what happened, director Felipe Bustos Sierra sourced video of the Kenmure Street protest from cellphones and media. To tell what happened, a variety of eyewitnesses, participants, activists, and local leaders are interviewed in some of the most uniformly well-designed talking-head shots I’ve seen in a long time. A few individuals are anonymously portrayed in dramatized scenes by actresses Emma Thompson (who is also an executive producer), Kate Dickie, and Keira Lucchesi, who speak their counterparts’ words while acting out moments from the protests. Thompson’s role has her lying under a police van the entire movie, in place of the unknown man she plays.

Those dramatization scenes reminded me of Clio Barnard’s The Arbor, while the rest of the film had me recalling Jose Padilla’s Bus 174. The latter is similarly about a crisis involving a vehicle surrounded by police, media, and many others, in a way that was heavily captured on camera and therefore beneficial to filmmakers looking to piece together images of the day. We get to feel like we’re watching events unfold in real time, albeit condensed. We may even feel like we’re there with the community coming together, and that’s perfect since the film isn’t just about that day; it’s also a reminder of the unity in community. It’s a reminder, emphasized by a centerpiece archival history montage, that the rich and powerful try to divide those they wish to exploit to keep them from rising against them.

There’s really only one element to Everybody to Kenmure Street, and that’s fantastic filmmaking. The various approaches on display are so cohesive that it’s like they’re one. From the outsourced footage to the interviews and the dramatizations, it’s incredibly fluid. I really can’t stop thinking about the beautifully composed interviews, especially one with a protester wearing the same outfit he wore on the day, adding to the consistency of all the material. If there’s any part that breaks that flow, it’s the middle montage, which plays like a parenthetical flashback. But it also provides deep historical context about the setting, elevating the film from an experience to a revelation. It’s a creative work in addition to being important and inspiring, and that makes the latter traits more effective.