documentaries

The Oldest Person in the World (2026)

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The festival-circuit documentary The Oldest Person in the World is an intentionally incomplete project, in that it could theoretically be expanded upon into infinity . . . or at least for as long as humanity is still viable and still making movies. As such, it’s a project without a clear goal beyond marking the passage of time, one that director Sam Green has taken on as a personal mission within the scope of his own family life but could, theoretically, stray into any direction the next filmmaker in his lineage wants to take it. The logline premise is simple. Green has spent the past decade interviewing the world’s currently oldest living person, as determined by Guinness World Records, one reigning champion at a time. He hopes to continue this project for as long as he continues working & living as a filmmaker, with an open-ended invitation for it to carry on beyond him in another documentarian’s hands — preferably his young son’s. The idea is that, every ten years, a new edition of The Oldest Person in the World would be issued with a new batch of interviews as the title changes hands, inviting the audience to reflect on the passage of time at the furthest edges of a human lifespan. That project only takes up so much of the movie’s runtime, however, as Green allows himself space for his own self-reflections on the passage of time within his immediate family, getting sentimental about his growing son, his aging mother, his deceased brother, and his own prematurely failing health. The world’s oldest living people only have the strength and the self-awareness to say so much about what it means to live an extraordinarily long life, so Green fills the void with his own ups, downs, and neuroses. It’s unclear what place, exactly, that perspective would have in a future edition of this project once Green passes the baton, which is probably why the Guinness Book of World Records isn’t typically written in first-person.

It likely goes without saying that Green’s interview subjects are of far greater interest than his personal video diary entries that fill the gaps between them. It also likely goes without saying that the oldest person in the world is almost always asleep or grumpy, which makes them terrible interviewees — delightfully so. The MVP subject of this initial batch is the 118-year-old French nun Lucile Randon, who attributes her longevity to the mystery of God’s will, which she treats as a kind of supernatural hostage situation she wishes to be over as soon as He’s ready to relent. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the kindly 117-year-old Jamaican woman Violet Brown sees her continued life as more of a gift than an extended prison sentence, stressing to Green how important it is to hold onto the memories that matter most for as long as you can, lest they slip away to time. Green also does some extracurricular research between interviews into the history of the Oldest Living Person title, uncovering bar-trivia tidbits like how all-time champion Jeanne Calment was not only the world’s oldest living person ever at 122 years of age, but also became the world’s oldest rapper on a novelty record to promote her achievement in delaying the inevitable. These women (and they’re seemingly always women) are endlessly fascinating subjects in their own right, so it can’t help but feel a little disappointing that Green relies so heavily on his own cutesy narration to sell their shared story’s poignancy. The resulting film is frequently poignant, though, and funny too, so the indulgence is forgivable. It’s just always a relief when he finds himself at a loss for words (if not only because he doesn’t always speak his interviewee’s language) and sits with his subjects in a shared silence, allowing the passage of time to naturally imbue the moment with meaning.

Conceptually, the idea of The Oldest Person in the World continuing on as a collaborative project is a little flawed, given how much of himself Green has inserted into the initial work. The way he proposes it, the movie would not be followed up by sequels every decade like the Seven Up! series, so much as it would be continually expanded upon in new, fluctuating edits. A new edit from a new contributor would have to transform the work radically to be at all worthwhile, though, as Bresson’s axiom goes that, “A film is born three times: first in the writing of the script, once again in the shooting, and finally in the editing.” What happens if Green’s son grows up to be an avant-garde experimental filmmaker in the Godardian tradition? Would he be allowed to remix footage from this first edition into a multimedia collage of abstract, incongruent imagery, or would Green’s more Varda-inspired approach to documentary filmmaking play out in full before abruptly switching modes as the next contributor takes over? Furthermore, who’s to say that anyone besides Green would be interested in continuing this project at all, including his own son, given how personal the initial outing is to his own familial sentimentality? The imperfection of the proposed project does not delegitimize its existence, though, no more than the imperfection of Guinness World Records’ tracking of the world’s oldest living person makes that pursuit meaningless. Guinness sometimes struggles to fully verify the birth records of the reigning champion, so that there are stretches of time where there technically is no official oldest living person until the next legitimate one can be crowned. Time marches on, though, and things are inevitably taken out of our hands as we’re decommissioned and replaced by the next batch of human beings behind us. All we can really do in the meantime is observe & document the process.

-Brandon Ledet

You Can See Everything (2026)

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There’s a woman with whom I attended school who had the misfortune of enduring multiple childhood brain tumors. She was still quite smart, and although she was severely awkward, this was a magnet school, so she wasn’t that much weirder than the institutional average. I did figure she’d grow out of that like most people do, but when we reconnected years later, she was still stuck in a state of emotional immaturity. Although the reasons for her inability to connect with others on the same level were recognizably clinical, it wasn’t difficult to see how those without knowledge of her past would sometimes find her company off-putting, and as fellow Louisiana expats in Texas, I unsuccessfully tried to integrate her into my friend group. She departed for parts unknown during the first year of COVID, and when I think about her now what I remember most was how uncanny she looked when she smiled. Her brain simply didn’t produce neurochemicals in a typical way, and as such she didn’t naturally smile or frown; these facial movements were clearly practiced in a mirror to better fit in, and witnessing a smile that never reaches the eyes can be unnerving. Elizabeth Holmes is the same, but my high school classmate didn’t commit mass fraud and negligence (that I know of).

You Can See Everything is directed by Lance Oppenheim (Some Kind of Heaven, Spermworld, Primetime) and Nathan Fielder, a graduate of one of Canada’s top business schools with really good grades. Following on the success of his Comedy Central TV series Nathan for You, which was at once both a Bar Rescue/Kitchen Nightmares style “save the floundering business” reality show and a satirization of the same featuring Nathan concocting outlandish schemes, Fielder went to Showtime and HBO, where he conceived The Curse and The Rehearsal, respectively. Both are two of the most fascinating and bizarre pieces of art of this century, blending surreality, human interest stories, and psychological manipulation. As time goes on, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell where the lines lie between Fielder the person, Fielder the documentarian, and Fielder the subject. If Fielder ever became as notorious as Holmes and a Dropout-style TV series were made about him, and (even less likely) he ever dropped his public persona (if that’s even what it is), I can conceive of how he might respond to the question of how he felt about it the way that Holmes allegedly did when asked about Amanda Seyfried: “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.”

That quotation bears significant relevance on You Can See Everything, as it seems to be the one issue that Holmes is hung up on, and it is admittedly a potential key to her entire puzzling deal. Holmes makes a great number of claims about herself, many of them spurious at best: that she was never in tech for the money and was always altruistic in her desire to make medical testing more widely available, that she doesn’t feel that she did anything wrong, that she has never lied in her adult life. They cannot possibly be objectively true, but could this possibly be her truth? Is she simply delusional? At a pivotal juncture in the film’s first half, Holmes’s partner Billy Evans tries to make the case that Holmes’s contemporaneous claims of what the Theranos machine “can” do during her girlboss heyday wasn’t an attempt at deception but part of a larger fundamental gap between how Holmes thinks/speaks and how everyone else interprets her. To that end, Fielder shows the couple the classic Abbot & Costello “Who’s On First?” routine, and observes Holmes, who seems to laugh not because she finds something funny, but because she’s conditioned herself to laugh when others are laughing. When questioned, she can’t identify what is funny about the routine, and Nathan has to spell out for her that the joke is that a player has the unlikely surname of “Who.” When is she pretending—when she says that to her there was no difference between verbalizing “Theranos can do X, Y, and Z” and “At some point in the future Theranos could theoretically do X, Y, and Z,” or when she misses the point of the most famous comic banter of all time? Is it all just playing a character she created? I can’t conceive of why Elizabeth Holmes and her husband would think that Fielder would be the ideal person to document her final weeks before going to federal prison; it makes no sense. But I can see why Fielder would take the job.

I was fortunate enough to go into this film without being spoiled by some of the more unusual metatextual jumps that it eventually makes. There are elemental, recurring ideas in Fielder’s work that, in retrospect, I should have expected, but even if you guess he’s going to do some Rehearsal-esque stuff, I would not have guessed who he was going to involve in his scheme. It leads to some of the film’s best material, especially as the surprise star of the second half manages to embody what you would expect from a more standard documentary treatment, balancing empathy for Holmes against recrimination for her, and when Nathan starts to become a little too charmed by Holmes, it’s this person who sees through it. One could criticize the film (or Fielder through it, as the man and the text are inextricably intertwined) for being too empathetic for Holmes at certain points, as You Can See Everything isn’t really about her; it’s about Evans, which we should have known from the beginning since it’s his image that we open on. Holmes departs the movie at the halfway point to begin her term in federal prison in Bryan, Texas, at which point we jump ahead two years to where we find Evans firmly ensconced in tech bro culture in Austin: operating out of a WeWork, shooting automatic rifles at the weapons range, and creating deepfakes of his incarcerated partner while various reptiles slither and slip about the room.

Holmes and Evans are a match made in hell. She trusts him fully and completely, and he is a control freak who can’t even let her scramble eggs without intervening. He makes deals on her behalf (maybe), has taken over Holmes’s online presence by providing proof of his power of attorney over her to Twitter, and accepts the nonconsensual generation of AI porn of Holmes as an inevitability that he chooses to profit off of. Despite all of this, he and Holmes seem to remain completely simpatico, up to and including describing their love for one another with the same faux-poetic narrative. It’s bizarre. Is everyone just playing characters that they’ve created? Is anyone real, ever?

I’m not sure what You Can See Everything is—documentary of a criminal, confession of a voyeur, character study of a master manipulator (or two?), or docufiction of a woman with no sense of reality. It’s both earnest and detached; it’s damning, and sometimes surprisingly sweet. For now, I’ll settle for “utterly engrossing.”

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Joybubbles (2026)

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I am writing this review in a modestly sized, concerningly musty hotel room in Hot Springs, Arkansas, which still feels like the height of modern luxury in the way that all hotel rooms do. We are staying at the century-old resort hotel The Arlington, which overlooks the main stretch of the city’s historic bathhouse spas, towering above the punier tourist traps below as a monument to the timeless joys of a hotel getaway. Unbeknownst to me when booking this vacation, The Arlington is also the central screening hub for the longest-running documentary film festival in the United States, which happened to overlap with our stay. The one film in this year’s program that I was able to squeeze into my busy schedule of resting & relaxing around town also happened to be about the one person who could credibly claim to love mediocre hotel rooms more than anyone else who ever lived: Joe Engressia, whose unmatched obsession with the Holiday Inn hotel chain somehow doesn’t rank among his top ten most eccentric character quirks. Engressia was a man of many quirks, just as he was a man of many names: High-Rise Joe, The Whistler, and—most notably—Joybubbles, the last of which provided the eponymous name of his documentary profile that just screened at the 35th annual Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival (after premiering at Sundance earlier this year).

Joybubbles first earned fame as The Whistler in his college years, when his uncannily perfect whistling pitch enabled him to bypass telephone system infrastructure to make expensive long-distance phone calls free of charge. He was a naturally gifted pioneer of the practice, which made him a legend among other Phone Phreakers of the 1960s & 70s, who later went on to become the earliest computer hacker subculture of note. His own whistling hack was an innovation inspired more by loneliness than by mischief, though. Joybubbles was born blind and spent long childhood hours isolated indoors, with only the telephone connecting him to the outside world. By listening to the equipment’s clicks & whirs and pestering the phone operators on the other end of the dial tone, he gradually figured out how to extend the reach of his phone line even further, which is how he earned the Batmanesque moniker The Whistler.  Even when arrested for these violations of phone-company policy, Joybubbles always used his national notoriety as a means of expanding his social network so he’d have more people to talk to on the phone. He played the media’s bottomless hunger for “human interest” stories by becoming a human of great, continual interest — not to hack the planet but to just feel less alone.

Before he legally changed his name to Joybubbles, this first-wave phone phreaker was also known as High-Rise Joe, named after his lifelong goal of living independently in his own high-rise apartment. Being visually disabled a half-century ago made that goal a lot more daunting than it sounds now, as most people in Joe’s life attempted to limit his independence & mobility for their convenience, in the guise of ensuring his safety. He learned independence in his early 20s by booking extended stays at Holiday Inns, however, which he had to treat with the same problem-solving bravery of mankind traveling to the moon as he worked his way up to full-time high-rise living. As a result, Joybubbles ends up playing as a celebration of mundane hotel getaways just as much as it is a celebration of humanity’s intimate relationships with mundane technology. Joybubbles loved Holiday Inns and high-rise apartments with the same childlike wonder which he loved rotary-dial telephones. As interviewees put it, he made a lifelong mission out of maintaining that childlike wonder with the mundane in a commitment to “staying 5-years-old forever.” His resulting personality fell somewhere between Daniel Johnston & Mister Rogers — half age-regression as art-project coping mechanism and half age-regression as defiance against an increasingly crass & cruel modern world.

As a documentary, Joybubbles mostly functions as a feature-length human interest story akin to the news clippings that profiled its subject while he was alive. These news reports & televised interviews from Joe’s phone phreaker days are helpful in providing some visual archival material of interest, while the rest of the runtime is padded out with vintage industrial footage, modern animation, and still photographs. With a few changes to how its interviewees are introduced via chyron, the whole project could be easily reworked into a podcast instead of a feature film, which would be just as well for a documentary about a blind man. In an especially telling segment, one of Joybubbles’s friends relates his age-regressed personality to Tom Hanks’s character in Big, as he recalls describing the imagery of the film to Joybubbles in real time at the movies, since he otherwise only had the sounds of the dialogue to go by. Oddly enough, this segment includes footage of the “Zoltar” fortune teller machine that grants Hanks’s wish to become “big” in the first place, and there are multiple replicas of that machine decorating the tourist-packed sidewalks of downtown Hot Springs, just outside of the festival. Stepping outside of my own city to breathe some crisp mountain air, enjoy a couple late-night beers in my overly air-conditioned hotel bed, and meet some sweetheart strangers along the way has been a truly restorative experience for my soul. And I owe the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival for introducing me to the biggest, quirkiest sweetheart of them all.

-Brandon Ledet 

Welcome Space Brothers (2026)

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It’s been a good year for new documentaries about vintage public access television. The succinctly titled Public Access offered a broad retrospective of public access TV in NYC’s punk & hippie days, the Robin Byrd profile Bang My Box took a deep dive into the pornier waters of those NYC TV shows, and now the UFO cult profile Welcome Space Brothers has jumped coasts to cover the Californian public-access cinema of the Unarius Academy of Science. Well, calling Welcome Space Brothers “new” is somewhat of a stretch. It has spent several years in distribution limbo since its initial festival premieres (the same limbo where Public Access now lingers), but the warm-hearted UFO cult documentary is currently enjoying a city-by-city road tour and recently screened at The Broad. Like this year’s other public access TV docs, it introduces an alluring archive of outsider-art filmmaking from America’s recent weirdo past: a series of indoctrination videos from a Californian cult who believe space aliens are arriving soon to free mankind from the intergalactic trauma echoing from our past lives. It might be the most useful of the trio for audiences who like to do their own exploring, though, since some of the psychotronic “psychodrama” movies it covers are accessible on The Internet Archive instead of being trapped on a private collector’s moldy VHS tapes. You can easily go learn the “science fact” of Unarius’s science fiction UFO-landing movies anytime you’re bored enough to open your heart to another world.

From the outside, Welcome Space Brothers might appear to be a true crime exposé of a shadowy cult organization with a nefarious leader and brainwashed membership, but it’s immediately apparent that Unarius is largely harmless as a collective. It says a lot that the cult itself has been promoting this documentary’s various screening dates through their mailing lists, which I know first-hand as a subscriber who was auto-enrolled after buying a copy of their most notorious production, 1980’s The Arrival, from their archaic website. To the cult, Welcome Space Brothers is a potential recruitment tool, amplifying the reach of their cosmic message far beyond the puny broadcasting capabilities of San Diego-era public access channels, where they started. To most audiences, it reads as a true crime picture without the crime, exposing a secluded community of mysterious cultists as a kind of eccentric art collective. Instead of blowing the doors off Unarius headquarters to reveal abuses of power hidden inside, it mostly just finds a collection of lonely dorks making psychotronic video art together about their favorite subjects: the trauma of their own past lives and the space aliens who are soon to liberate us from those recursive shackles. They’re mostly playing arts & crafts, developing their own unique house style of gawdy drag revue sci-fi kitsch, as beautifully captured in their 70s & 80s heyday of backyard communal filmmaking. As the title suggests, they have nothing to hide. They’re welcoming you in.

Welcome Space Brothers is most useful as a guided tour of Unarius’s pre-existing cinematic output, which can be bewildering to outsiders. It’s not especially substantial as a standalone piece, but it does a great job chronicling the various inner-circle power struggles that shaped Unarius’s golden years, which is essential insight for fully comprehending the communal therapy aspects of the group’s psychotronic theatre. It’s an insular scene with its own designated faces & heels, as lorded over by the cosmic fairy godmother Ruth “Uriel” Norman, whose space-alien drag queen persona was in itself a communal art project. It’s clear when you spend some time with Unarius’s cinematic output that The Arrival is their most fully realized grand-scale art project, reaching delirious heights of video art sci-fi psychedelia the group never achieved before or since; it’s just not clear why until you better understand the behind-the-scenes dynamics of the various weirdos who made these pictures, since everyone but Uriel was stripped of personal attribution in the credits. Welcome Space Brothers explains the real human drama behind the major Unarius titles, which initially earned their ironic so-bad-it’s-good notoriety from local stoners who caught them out of context on late night public-access broadcasts. You could even feel that shift happening in real time at The Broad, where the crowd’s initial titters & jeers at the cult’s absurdity slowly quieted down as we got to know the eccentric characters as individuals, each worthy of intergalactic love & empathy. They’re the only cult I’ve ever trusted with my home address, and I’m excited to be further indoctrinated by their psychodrama videos now that I better understand them as communal diaries rather than as pure aesthetic objects.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Spermworld (2024)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Lance Oppenheim’s compulsive sperm donorship documentary Spermworld (2024).

00:00 Welcome
01:31 Elevator to the Gallows (1958)
10:29 Double Indemnity (1944)
18:10 Black God, White Devil (1964)
27:15 Lifeboat (1944)
37:00 Spellbound (1945)
47:00 The Paradine Case (1947)
1:02:13 Rope (1948)
1:08:39 It Ends (2026)
1:13:10 Coyote vs Acme (2026)
1:21:33 Jason and the Argonauts (1963)
1:24:32 Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)

1:41:17 Spermworld (2024)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Sherman’s March (1985)

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If there’s any one Ross McElwee documentary that’s essential viewing for all cinephiles, it’s his 1985 breakout Sherman’s March, which is returning to streaming platforms in a spiffy new 4k restoration early September. Its re-release is timed to coincide with the streaming premiere of McElwee’s latest doc, titled Remake, which revisits scenes from Sherman’s March four decades later, reflecting on how it established and defined his directorial career. Except, not exactly. McElwee’s approach to documentary filmmaking is a gentle bait-and-switch game, with logline premises that promise an easily marketable, digestible picture that then gets slowly eroded & replaced with what’s actually on his mind — something more personal than sellable. Sherman’s March is the foremost example of this bait-and-switch technique, pitched as a dry educational film on the history of “Sherman’s March to the Sea”, a famous Civil War military campaign that financially devastated the American South. That Ken Burnsian academia only lasts for a few wry minutes before McElwee reveals his true mission, though, as indicated in the film’s verbose subtitle “A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Proliferation”. After securing funding to revisit famous sites from General Sherman’s warpath in what’s meant to be a much more traditional doc, McElwee quickly makes the project all about himself and his romantic struggles in a time of global political doom. He still makes a point to stop by some key historical sites from Sherman’s March to the Sea, but only when they’re conveniently close to his social calls or when they’re convenient for giving his film a vague sense of narrative structure. Likewise, his latest work is not exactly a “remake” of Sherman’s March in particular, as its title suggests, so much as it is a broad overview of McElwee’s filmography to date, using the act of reviewing old footage as an access point to grieve the loss of his son, who had appeared in many of McElwee’s films over the decades since Sherman’s March. What Remake makes clear about McElwee’s career is that he is first & foremost a diarist, one whose body of work only becomes more meaningful as you spend more time with him and his loved ones, as captured on film. His first and his most recent pictures are only bookends on a much larger library of communal self-portraits.

Considered in isolation, Sherman’s March is an Odyssean epic for people with “Wait, was she flirting with me or not?” social anxiety. McElwee spends the film’s sprawling three-hour runtime hopping from one situationship to another, filming his awkward flirtations and semi-romantic entanglements with a casual parade of Southern women his parents would love to see him settle down with. The movie’s framing within the historical echoes of a Civil War military campaign, the ongoing threat of nuclear holocaust, and a cheekily imagined romantic rivalry with Hollywood sex symbol Burt Reynolds is all just novel set dressing for the real business at hand: observing Southern womanhood in the 1980s. McElwee’s softspoken narration is a constant aural presence in the film, but he rarely appears onscreen himself. Most of the runtime is populated by the women he’s lazily pursuing, allowing the audience just enough time to fall in love with each of them before some universal obstacle gets in the way of a genuine romantic connection. The camera itself is one of those obstacles, since it would’ve been much less common for everyday social interactions to be documented in the 1980s than it would be now, in the smartphone era. McElwee had to sell Sherman’s March as a historical revisit to key Civil War sites at the time, since this kind of diaristic record of personal canon events and romantic self-lore was on the more experimental end of pre-camcorder 1980s filmmaking, long before the influencer vlog was invented as a medium. On revisit, its 16mm filmstock greatly helps the picture feel more artistically substantial than it would as a modern digital object. Firstly, the depth of color in the new 4k scan of that celluloid is gorgeous, emphasizing both the geographic beauty of the South and the film’s value as a document of a recently bygone era. Not for nothing, the limitations of 16mm film reels also helps maintain a steady rhythm so that no individual moment lingers past its welcome. The overall runtime may be nearly three hours in length, but the shortened film reels keep the pace moving along at such a brisk clip that the audience hardly has time to notice. It’s like tubing down a lazy river with a gaggle of chatty strangers, each just as alluring as they are peculiar and each sending mixed signals about their romantic intentions.

Remake‘s title suggests that it might find McElwee physically retracing his steps at old Sherman’s March shooting locations by catching up with the surviving subjects of that film whom he’s still friendly with. However, that’s only a small part of an infinitely more absurd attempt to remake his name-making doc. The larger project of remaking Sherman’s March was in the hands of mainstream comedy filmmaker Steve Carr, most famous for directing Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Once Carr approached McElwee with the outlandish idea of adapting Sherman’s March into a narrative comedy feature for the wider moviegoing public, McElwee instinctively started documenting the process via digi camcorder, tracking the Quixotic project as it mutated from theatrically-released comedy to prestige TV streaming series to goofball network sitcom to nothing at all. Like the initial pitch of Sherman’s March, that Hollywood project-development campaign only serves as a convenient entryway for allowing McElwee to continue documenting his familial life through cinema; the framing, however amusing, is incidental. The real project here is in revisiting footage McElwee recorded of his son, who died tragically young of a drug overdose after years of struggling with addiction. The prospect of developing Sherman’s March into a mainstream crowdpleaser was an obvious fool’s mission from the start, but McElwee used it as a chance to get his son acclimated to the mechanics of professional filmmaking after he showed interest in it as a potential career. They spend a significant amount of time together during the development process collaborating as documentarians of each other’s professional lives, unsure of what the near future holds. As news about the Sherman’s March adaptation fizzles out and fades away, so does the professional ambitions of McElwee’s son, who appears to be more interested in the hedonism of an artist’s lifestyle than in the tedious act of making art. The tragedy of his death takes Remake into much darker, more painful territory than where Sherman’s March goes, despite the relative lightness & frivolity of its framing. It also opens McElwee up to a larger exploration of how his documentary career has both preserved and distorted his familial life. McElwee’s time in Hollywood humorously draws a distinction between documentaries and “real movies,” but things get much more serious when he then has to ponder the distinctions between documentaries and “real life”.

If there’s any major deviation in McElwee’s filmmaking methodology between Sherman’s March and its in-name-only remake, it’s that he started his career documenting life as it happened in real time but now views cinema as a record of the past. Remake finds the filmmaker reviewing footage from several major titles in his personal catalog, often in a pained attempt to spend more time with his son, whom he’s preserved a record of through decades of happenstantial film diaries. It’s just as personal and self-justifiable as any of McElwee’s other projects, but it also makes the case that his work is more effective in total than it is in individual titles. As indicated by its significance in Remake as the movie that defines McElwee’s professional career, Sherman’s March is likely the one title that could be wholly understood and appreciated as a standalone movie outside his larger body of work. Watching it alongside Remake only makes it a richer text, though, recontextualizing it as the first diary entry among many, all gently narrated by McElwee and all populated with recurring characters he deeply, truly loves: his takes-no-guff sister Dede, his boisterous poetry teacher Charleen, his son Adrian, and everyone else who’s politely suffered him pointing a camera in their direction for decades on end.

-Brandon Ledet

Deeper Inside Annie Sprinkle

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There’s a new HBO documentary out called Bang My Box that profiles the life and art of late-night TV host Robyn Byrd, who first became famous for hosting a pornographic call-in show on NYC public access channels in the mid 1970s. Byrd’s career spanned multiple decades of bright-eyed & bubbly political provocation, as she used her TV broadcast platform to advocate for free speech, safe sex, gay rights, trans visibility, and sex-positive feminism through the darkest days of Reagan’s regime and beyond. When the documentary crew catches up with her in the 2020s, she’s long outgrown & outlasted her signature crocheted bikini and mostly just lounges around her Fire Island home with her longtime partner, waxing nostalgic about the good old days. She’s a pure joy to be around in either timeline, but the audience is especially grateful for every frame of vintage footage from her heyday on The Robin Byrd Show in particular, which itself was a weekly document of the bigger personalities from the NYC Porno Chic scene of the 1970s & 80s, as filtered through Byrd’s personal brand of low-fi psychedelic video art. It’s no surprise at all, then, that the self-described “post-porn modernist” Annie Sprinkle eventually pops up in both of the timelines covered by the doc, appearing as a creative collaborator for Byrd in the 1980s and as a personal friend in the 2020s. Sprinkle’s own career saw her starting as a Porno Chic starlet on the NYC scene before she moved to San Francisco in the 1990s, where she made pornographic self-help tapes that doubled as psychotronic video art in the Robyn Byrd Show tradition (most notably among them, the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop). Given their parallel career paths, a Robin Byrd retrospective documentary is just about the most likely place imaginable to find Annie Sprinkle besides maybe her own home. To find a proper recap of Sprinkle’s career in politicized porn production, however, you have to dig a little deeper than what you’ll find on the HBO Max splash page.

Annie Sprinkle was eager to reveal herself to her audience as early as her first directorial effort, the early-80s Porno Chic confessional Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle. There, she breaks the rules of pre-video porno production by making direct eye contact with the camera and verbally addressing her audience, inviting them into her bedroom. Deep Inside is more a loose collection of Sprinkle’s sexual fantasies than a true self-portrait, though, acting as a catalog of her personal turn-ons rather than a true autobiography. It does open with Sprinkle flipping through a family photo album from her actual childhood, though, which is a lot more personal than most professional pornos tend to get. The closest thing Sprinkle has to a true Bang My Box-style career retrospective is the one-woman stage show Herstory of Porn: Reel to Real, which she filmed for the home video screen in 1999. Cinematically, Herstory of Porn borrows from the meta-critical Gen-X sarcasm of Talk Soup & MST3k, placing Sprinkle front row at her local porno theater so she can comment on a Greatest Hits clip show package of her own pornographic highlights in real time through the magic of greenscreen. As an autobiographical documentary, it’s occasionally informative, especially in the earliest stretch where Sprinkle reveals that she got into the porno business while working as a popcorn girl at a theater that was screening the Porno Chic landmark Deep Throat. When her theater’s print of Deep Throat was confiscated by the feds for an obscenity trial, Sprinkle was summoned to testify in court about its exhibition, which is where she met director Gerard Damiano, who dutifully helped initiate her into the biz. It’s difficult to take insightful anecdotes like that too seriously, though, since Sprinkle spends the majority of the runtime shoving toothbrushes & rolled-up American flags up her anus, narrating a “cumshot medley” from her classic works, and performing drag queen lip-syncs to footage of herself from various scenes of Deep Inside. Herstory of Porn is relatively informative about the general shape of Annie Sprinkle’s career, but it’s also an anarchic riot meant to shock & awe the jaded off-Broadway theatre types of 1990s NYC, which is a far cry from the softcore respectability of the Robin Byrd documentary.

Maybe the most revealing snippet of Herstory of Porn is Sprinkle’s assertion that sex is “simply the most interesting subject in the world,” musing to herself “why anyone would want to make a film or a video about anything else, I don’t understand it.” She really means it too. The deeper you dig into her 90s-era video productions the more you realize how all-important sex is to her, to the point where it’s just as much of a religious pursuit as a professional one. Her self-help video Annie Sprinkle’s Amazing World of Orgasm (filmed in the 1990s, completed in the 2000s) continues the greenscreen psychedelia of the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop and the Herstory of Porn videos, with Sprinkle appearing onscreen in the pose of a local weather report girl to inform her audience about the spiritually transcendent power of the orgasm in all its many forms. She’s joined in her spatial void by a variety of experts on the subject: sex researchers, sex educators, sex therapists, cultural sexologists, regular sexologists, prostitution activists, chiropractors, poets, dominatrices, yoga instructors, and erotic touch experts. Each takes a turn describing a different facet of the human sexual orgasm in a standalone vignette: how to have one, how to fake one, what they feel like mixed with laughter, what they feel like mixed with pain, how they can occur during birth, how they can occur during death, how they can connect us to the world beyond observable life altogether. The Amazing World of Orgasm video is presented as an all-encompassing documentary on the health & spiritual benefits of sexual pleasure, but it looks & feels like a Dianetics or Unarius video — more New Age religion than quantifiable science. When it ends on the proclamation, “Happy orgasms to all!” it reads like a call to wands, inspiring its audience to change the world for the better by rubbing one out as soon as the tape concludes. It also consciously functions as an outsider-art curio, though, which is immediately apparent when the very first sexpert’s testimonial is illustrated by overlayed video-warp projections from both Fritz Lang’s sci-fi masterpiece Metropolis and vintage porn from Sprinkle’s personal catalog. As sincere as Sprinkle is about the spiritual & political power about safe, pleasurable sex, she’s always careful to punctuate her rigorous research findings in that field with a sugary wink, signaling to her audience that it’s all in good fun.

As recounted in Herstory of Porn, Annie Sprinkle moved to San Francisco in the 1990s because she had earned a reputation for being too kinky for the professional pornographers of NYC. The cultish New Age hippie spirituality of California suits her well, and she’s since moved on from her “post-porn” self-help psychotronic phase to produce “eco-sexual” documentaries where she sensually fucks the planet Earth to promote Climate Change awareness (along with her wife and creative collaborator Beth Stephens). She’s also been incredibly smart about presenting & archiving her films in academic settings, where she can be primarily understood as an artist and a feminist instead of a pornographic actress, a designation that would undervalue her work in other contexts. I most frequently see her pop up as a talking head in documentaries on human sexuality these days, including the recent documentary on Fakir Musafar and the body modification movement, A Body to Live In. It may not surprise you to hear that Fakir also appears as a talking head in Sprinkle’s own Amazing World of Orgasm video, promoting body modification as a practical means for achieving religiously transcendent sexual climax. The only reason I know that is because Sprinkle maintains a subscription-based website where you can pay to access her archive of vintage “post-porn” self-help tapes online, including her must-see works: Amazing World of Orgasm, Herstory of Porn, and the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop. There’s a D.I.Y. ethos to her work in porn production & exhibition, refusing to wait around for institutions to fund, legitimize, or immortalize her art before it disappears forever. So, the most emotional I got while watching the new HBO doc Bang My Box was a scene where Robin Byrd reads a personal letter written by Sprinkle, urging her to have her personal VHS archive of The Robin Byrd Show scanned & preserved by an academic institution before that wealth of material is lost forever to time & decay. In that letter, Sprinkle stresses how important Byrd’s art is in both the realms of national politics and personal spirituality, and you can tell she means every word. Revisiting clips from that archive in Bang My Box, it became clear to me that The Robin Byrd Show was influential on Sprinkle’s signature “post-porn” video art style, and I was grateful that Sprinkle was retroactively influential on making sure that archive isn’t left to rot, unwatched.

-Brandon Ledet

Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks (2026)

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John Waters’s Desperate Living is, for all practical purposes, my favorite movie. I’ve seen it dozens of times — twice theatrically. This week, I learned something new about one of its most outrageous scenes: the babysitter on acid vignette. It’s a minutes-long gag wherein one of the citizens of Mortville explains that their expulsion from proper society resulted from brutally murdering their teenage babysitter, as retribution for cooking her baby in the oven while high on LSD (presumably mistaking it for a roast chicken or turkey). When I first saw this scene as a teen, I correctly assumed it was based on an urban legend, because its story was already familiar to me as a fan of the Lunachicks’ punk-rock novelty song “Babysitters on Acid,” which gives a full play-by-play of the same absurd scenario. While the “Baby-Roast” story did prove to be an urban legend after all, the recent documentary Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks added a new wrinkle to its pop-culture history by explaining that the band’s most recognizable song was directly inspired by that scene in Desperate Living, not by the legend itself. Curiously, Wikipedia cites the Lunachicks track as a retelling of the urban legend but omits any reference to John Waters’s film, instead referencing Rudy Ray Moore’s Disco Godfather (another personal high school favorite) as its most prominent cinematic depiction of note. This information is very important to me, specifically, but I doubt it means much to anyone else.

The question of “Does this mean anything to anyone?” constantly nags at the heart of Pretty Ugly. The original members of Lunachicks are all alive and eager to wax nostalgic about their punk-rock glory days, but they also seem a little baffled why anyone would want to listen. If anything, the project appears to be the result of peer pressure, collectively willed into existence by other recent documentaries of culturally dormant bands like DEVO, Pavement, Butthole Surfers, Fugazi, Sparks, and Judas Priest. Pretty Ugly lays out a clear path that these revivals are supposed to take: a written biography, then some reunion concert dates, and then a documentary promoting & encapsulating the entire project. This band seems especially reluctant to go through any of it—especially the concert reunions—but they eventually drag their feet across the finish line anyway. As an artistic project, Lunachicks represents a moment that has passed, with each member moving on to adult jobs & responsibilities after spending the entirety of the 1990s touring & recording without ever fully “making it” on the same level as their peers. There’s something personally embarrassing about picking their instruments back up to play decades-old novelty songs about the junk food, junk movies, and junk TV they consumed as young snotty punks, no matter how loudly or how often they’re encouraged by loyal fans. They still eventually go through with it, though, because that’s what 90s nostalgia acts are now required to do under the law of mob rule.

Personally, I’m grateful for the result of that peer pressure campaign. Unlike the more famous bands referenced above, I never really knew much about Lunachicks despite owning every single album they released on CD. A lot of the revelations in this documentary are things I would’ve assumed just by looking at their still images in those CDs’ liner notes. Of course they were heavily inspired by John Waters movies; of course most of their interpersonal issues were the result of drug abuse; of course they never broke through to major-label success. However, a lot of my assumptions about their place in the punk-rock ecosystem were heavily distorted by the era when I caught up with them as a teen. By the time I first heard Lunachicks, they were making a modedty living on the Vans Warped Tour mall-punk circuit; what I didn’t know is that they had earned decades of NYC punk-scene bona fides long before that cultural moment, initially “discovered” & promoted by members of Sonic Youth before working as contemporaries of better-remembered acts like L7, Luscious Jackson, and The Go-Go’s. I had never seen footage of them playing to rowdy barroom crowds, provided in excess here via camcorder-quality VHS footage (but mercifully synced to the cleaner studio recordings of their most popular songs). They were, by every measure, a real band. They just never broke through to a wider audience the way their peers did, as most brutally illustrated here by having to trade opening-headliner slots with The Offspring on successive tours, after the lesser band won the war of the charts.

It’s difficult to not blame the entirety of the Lunachicks’ failure to break through to industry misogyny. As young, hip NYC brats with a professional fashion model for a lead singer (Theo Kogan), they were actively resistant to being sexualized in their art, choosing to purposefully ugly themselves up in Waters-inspired drag instead of playing pretty for the camera. I loved that about them as a teenager, but I can also see how that could limit their marketability — as opposed to, say, The Donnas, who eventually had to go full glam to earn a full paycheck. Even in the 2020s, the punk rock marketing machine is a little squeamish about fully promoting their act. The documentary opens with band members encountering a NYC subway ad featuring a vintage Lunachicks concert photo that has edited out the stage-makeup menstruate running down their legs in the original still, leaving only the image of hot girls playing guitar. That squeamishness says a lot in the context of the recent nontroversy over Olivia Rodrigo’s adoption of the 90s kinderwhore aesthetic, wherein she dresses in the babydoll gear once perverted by grunge-era acts like Hole & Babes in Toyland but doesn’t have the grit & grime to pull it off, so she just looks like an actual baby. Everyone wants to profit off the 90s rocker aesthetic but no one wants the 90s rocker attitude that comes with it, which apparently has been true since the Lunachicks were helping define that aesthetic in the 1990s, to little lasting acclaim.

At the same time, the Lunachicks’ missed opportunities as a great band that could’ve been are also somewhat a result of happenstance. They put in the work, producing five fun, rockin’ records packed with memorable hooks and genuinely funny lyrics. They toured relentlessly, living in vans & RVs for a decade solid while some of their peers were arbitrarily called up to millionaires’ lives touring in a megabus instead. In the long run, time has flattened out the difference; each of those 90s acts are assigned their own reunion tour and nostalgia doc regardless of their achieved level of fame, each cherished by loyal fans and forgotten to time by the rest of the masses. In a way, this band-validating documentary is the reward for all that work, something I’m sure every Lunachick would happily trade for a regular royalty check from an Offspring-level radio hit they never got to enjoy.

-Brandon Ledet

Ruthie the Duck Girl (1999)

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One of New Orleanians’ most treasured pastimes is to complain that the city ain’t what it used to be, waxing nostalgic about all the people & places that “ain’t dere no more” as time has marched on without them. I tend to roll my eyes at this hyper-local brand of cynicism, because it’s very obvious to me that the city’s greatest charm (and most glaring fault) is that it never really changes, so when people get romantic about “the New Orleans that used to be” I assume they’re mostly just personally nostalgic for being in their twenties. Every time I have an especially great day in the Quarter, at Jazz Fest, or watching a second line from my front porch, I find myself getting emotional about how the people & culture of New Orleans have remained the same for at least as long as I’ve been alive. The city is just as beautiful now as it’s always been. Sometimes, I can even get verklempt about that much-debated fact while watching locally produced documentaries, such as the gay Mardi Gras doc The Sons of Tennessee Williams, the year-in-the-life party doc Always for Pleasure and, most recently, the late-90s documentary profile Ruthie the Duck Girl, which the New Orleans Film Society recently screened at The Broad. Looking at the French Quarter through director Rick Dulaup’s camcorder lens, I was overwhelmed by the comforting feeling that it’s just the same now as I always remembered it, and seeing local legend Ruthie the Duck Lady on the screen felt like running into an old friend while day-drinking on Decatur Street — sublime.

I would have known & caught glimpses of Ruthie the Duck Lady exactly as she appears in this documentary, drinking & smoking away her 60s in the late 1990s & early 2000s. As this documentary’s title suggests, however, her history goes back much further back in New Orleans’s past, back to Ruthie’s girlhood. Ruthie started her lifelong performance-art project as a humble Duck Girl, purposefully attracting attention by wearing a garish Easter bonnet and shepherding ducks around the Quarter. She was an eccentric by nature, but she was also one by choice, making a modest living out of selling autographed postcards of her image. By the time I would’ve seen her, the ducks were long gone, and the bonnet had evolved into a much more elaborate fashionista ensemble, covered in promotional buttons and accessorized with a ratty fur coat, no matter how hot or humid. Ruthie no longer needed to sell postcards; she’d get by just fine on free Budweisers & Kools, generously provided by the fine folks of New Orleans who were just happy to see she’s still around. If you stepped into her orbit at that time, like I did, it might be unfathomable how she had developed her character over the decades, like jumping into the Dune series by reading God Emperor first. This documentary does its best to answer the basic questions you’d have about Ruthie’s life & art, which were one & the same, preserving it for posterity in the process. The city that made her story possible might’ve continued on unchanged, but she only held on for another decade. So, it’s a gift to see her frozen in time here, exactly the way the Ain’t Dere No More cynics wish everything could remain.

Aesthetically, Ruthie the Duck Girl is the kind of New Orleans culture documentation you’d expect to see on local PBS affiliate WYES. Even so, it’s the WYES equivalent of Grey Gardens, spending time getting to know a larger-than-life character while she was still alive to contribute to her own legend. Ruthie even occasionally waves around a miniature American flag like Little Edie, modeling her “costume for the day” with the full intent of making herself a fabulous spectacle. The biggest revelation of this profile was just how aware Ruthie was of her public perception, using it as both a modest source of income and a shield for some of her riskier behaviors (such as kicking tourists she found annoying in the shins with her roller skates). You’d expect a documentary profile of a local eccentric to go out of its way to humanize its subject, but Ruthie’s humanity was apparent to anyone who spent time talking to her instead of gawking at her. What’s much more compelling is puzzling through how much of her persona was a deliberately constructed character, to the point where she tests out new catchphrases like “That did it!” and “Can I get a beer for later?” on-camera, as if Delaup were shooting a sitcom pilot in front of a live studio audience. Revisiting Ruthie did feel like stumbling across an episode of some long-forgotten sitcom I haven’t seen since I was a child, a feeling amplified by the movie’s spotty distribution as an occasional cultural event outside the streaming market. Much like Ruthie herself, you can only see it by leaving your house and spending time around the city’s cultural hubs, occasionally catching a glimpse of the artist at work.

-Brandon Ledet

A Body to Live In (2026)

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Practically every adult I know socially has either a tattoo or a body piercing, if not both. Even I, a total square, have a few small tattoos myself, which you’ve only ever seen if we’ve hung out in an environment where it was appropriate to not wear socks. It’s increasingly common to see visible tattoos, nose rings, and other low-level body modifications in professional settings, since they’re now so common that they’re no longer transgressive or taboo. It wasn’t too long ago that this wasn’t the case. I remember tattoos & body piercings signaling a much edgier, fringe personality type growing up in the 1990s, whereas they’re now just as casual of a fashion choice as a quirky hat or what color shirt to wear. You can track the timeline of that body-mod culture shift in the new documentary A Body to Live In, which profiles the life, art, and spiritual practice of “modern primitivist” Fakir Musafar. From his early experiments with corset-binding fetish photography in the 1940s through his educational body-piercing and body suspension workshops in the 2010s, Musafar’s entire artistic, spiritual, and professional life was dedicated to the practice of body modification, and he saw that practice evolve from private kink play to public fashion display first-hand, seemingly involved with every major milestone of the journey. So, the documentary doubles as both a portrait of Fakir Musafar and as a broader overview history of body modification in the American mainstream.

I had never heard of Fakir Musafar before seeing this documentary, but he lived such a Forrest Gumpish life across so many various subcultures that I am familiar with that he continually crossed paths with faces that were already familiar to me: fellow self-promoting ritualist Anton LaVey, feminist pornographer Annie Sprinkle, professional Bob Flanagan flogger Sheree Rose, etc. Musafar’s body-mod journey was inspired by pure impulse (charged, at least partially, by unresolved gender dysphoria), and his early photographs were all produced in private, mostly consisting of corseting his body to simulate a female figure and then piercing that figure with needles and heavy ornaments. Once he found likeminded spirits across underground queer subcultures in 1970s California, the practice became much more social & less insular, and he was involved with a seemingly impossible range of extreme subcultures: heavy leather kinksters, Radical Faerie hippies, gallery-scene performance artists, and whoever else would show a sexual or spiritual interest in the ritualistic piercing & contorting of the human body. A lot of ground is covered very quickly as he drifts from subculture to subculture, always positing himself as a kind of mystic elder for the young & uninitiated to up to for guidance. We get to witness the evolution of professional body modification from the very first body-piercing shop opening in 1970s San Francisco to their modern omnipresence in every small town’s strip malls, but it’s always filtered through Musafar’s very particular, singular worldview.

For how impressively influential is subject was in a wide range of hip vintage subcultures, A Body to Live In is surprisingly smart about not devolving into hagiography. Musafar’s most glaring faults & criticisms are out there in the open, including control issues in his private relationships and larger accusations of cultural appropriation. In describing his early, private body-mod practices, Musafar explains that he was often inspired by ethnographic photographs in National Geographic magazines but would not read the accompanying captions, because he did not want the imagery spoiled by journalistic “interpretation.” Later, while promoting his “modern primitivism” philosophy on daytime talk shows, he struggles to articulate the authenticity of his body-mod rituals when confronted by Indigenous audiences who find his pick-and-choose appropriation of their cultures politically offensive. Even the term “primitive” is directly challenged for its political implications in the opening minutes, which might not be expected of a documentary exalting the movement for its positive influence across American subcultures. It’s very thoughtful, measured, and yet sincerely participatory in the body-mod spirituality depicted, making sure to include voices of dissent & discomfort with the practices’ cultural insensitivity while also showing the therapeutic & political good it can do in the right contexts.

Director Angelo Madsen does his best not to personally intrude on the material, except in a brief expression of regret for not asking Musafar a couple clarifying questions while he was alive to answer them. The most stylistic imposition on the material is found in the colorful psychedelia of the photograph development process, which helps transition from still photo to still photo without the clinical rigidness of an art-gallery slideshow. Madsen also arranges individual photos and slides on the screen to deliberately create a frame-within-a-frame distance from the original images, drawing attention to how Musafar’s curation of his photographs pushed his practice further into a fine art sphere than mere personal documentation of religious ritual & sexual kink. Musafar publicized his work through a wide range of artistic mediums, from the still photography he experimented with in his parents’ basement to documentary hosting in 1985’s Dances Sacred and Profane to confrontational performance art in the post-AIDS 1990s. It’s clear that his own body was the medium he was most interested in expressing himself through, though, as evidenced by his decades-long development of his nipples into cylindrical ornaments of great public interest. There’s a range of debate offered by the documentary’s talking heads about whether his primary motivation for that art was sexual, political, intellectual, gendered, or purely spiritual, and it’s to the film’s benefit that no one could definitively answer the question. They’re all partially true.

-Brandon Ledet