documentary

Stolen Kingdom (2026)

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As much as I enjoyed the disorienting dream-logic set designs of Kane Parson’s buzzy “liminal horror” debut Backrooms, I did struggle to find its corporate-void setting especially scary or unsettling, and I have to question how much of that disconnect is generational. On its opening day, I left my beige-cubicled office job to watch Backrooms in a downtown shopping mall with clearance signs hanging over the front entrance, so it felt a little like having my average workday regurgitated back at me through a digi camcorder filter. Even long before COVID lockdowns and the subsequent recession left behind that hollowed-out corporate world, I’ve always had daily interactions with those kinds of unused or depopulated “liminal spaces,” left to rot after they outlast their intended function. They’re familiar to the point of being oddly comforting, since as an adult they offer a quiet, momentary getaway from the social chaos of city life and as a suburban teen they offered a private place to sneak alcohol and other consumable vices outside the supervision of grownups. For a younger generation who spent formative teen years in the era of “social distancing,” however, I can see how Liminal Spaces might represent a much more horrific aspect of modern life, as remnants of a dead, emptied world with nothing left to offer the poor souls inheriting it. Compare the differing generational relationships with Liminal Spaces in the Gen Z horror of Backrooms against the hopeful Millennial art projects of last year’s Secret Mall Apartment, for instance, and you’ll find two starkly distinct worldviews (one which sees them as the physical manifestation of a culture-wide nightmare and one which sees them as an opportunity to have flagrantly illegal fun with your friends).

Actually, you can save some time by just watching Stolen Kingdom instead, which combines both of those generational relationships with Liminal Spaces in one concise 75min picture. Stolen Kingdom presents itself as a documentary about the high-risk theft of a specific animatronic prop from a retired Disney World attraction — namely, Buzzy, from the “Cranium Command” exhibit of Epcot’s “Wonders of Life Pavilion.” Buzzy’s mysterious kidnapping offers this unassuming documentary a great dramatic hook, allowing it to dress up its talking-head interviews with an endless parade of theme park dorks in the conspiracy-thriller costuming of a true crime doc. In practice, though, Buzzy’s theft is only a small part of the story told here, which proves to be a much broader portrait of an urban exploration subculture that spans multiple generations of interaction with Liminal Spaces. As described by various talking heads (who almost all have been banned from entering Disney theme parks at one point in their lives), the transgressive act of breaking into off-limits areas of theme park attractions has changed drastically in meaning over the years. In the earliest instances of urban exploration at Disney World, teenagers under anonymous pseudonyms like “Hoot” & “Chief” would trespass backstage on dark rides to take up-close pictures of attractions usually kept distant from the public, both as a juvenile act of thrill-seeking vandalism and as a genuine appreciation of theme park artistry. Later, the urban exploration itself became the main attraction to these stunts, with YouTubers like Matt Swonsa making a modest career out of bragging on camera about their petty crimes in action, shifting the cultural focus from art to narcissism. By that time, most of what was being produced was about how eerie & spooky Disney’s abandoned attractions had become in corporate rot, all shot in crime-scene flashlight like a real-life version of Five Nights at Freddy’s.

Regardless of whether they find the craftsmanship of vintage Disney attractions cool or creepy, the majority of Stolen Kingdom‘s interviewees at least agree that there’s a great moral chasm between exploring them and looting them. As a closed-off subculture with isolated online fiefdoms, urban exploration has developed its own heroes & villains and internal debates over ethics & integrity. That’s where the theft of Buzzy comes in. The indisputable villain of this piece is former urban explorer Patrick Spikes, who was arrested for conspicuously stealing & selling off props from retired Disney attractions instead of merely documenting them for his YouTube followers. No one has ever proven that Spikes stole the missing animatronic from Epcot, but filmmaker Joshua Bailey does sit him down for a lengthy, self-incriminating interview here, where he comes across about as innocent as Robert Durst in The Jinx. As a cultural artifact, Buzzy is effectively valueless; it’s not like someone stole the Ursula animatronic from the still-active Little Mermaid dark ride. As a symbol of moral crisis within the urban exploration community, however, the missing robot means a lot to the world profiled in Stolen Kingdom, equipping the movie with a narrative engine it would be totally inert without. Personally, I most appreciate this documentary as an illustrative timeline of how young people’s relationships with Liminal Spaces has evolved over the past few decades, as well as a dirtbag counterpoint to the more earnest hopecore sentiments of Secret Mall Apartment. Regardless of our varied generational allegiances in the cultural meaning of Liminal Spaces, I also find it comforting to know that most people are still in agreement that personal profit is a repugnant motive for doing pretty much anything, while sharing art is a morally righteous one. The kids are still alright.

-Brandon Ledet

Time and Water (2026)

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Sara Dosa’s latest nature doc Time and Water is the frosty yin to her previous doc’s fiery yang. All of the grand romance & scale of Dosa’s 2022 documentary Fire of Love is on full display in this year’s Sundance-premiered follow up, except the temperature has plummeted to new, icy depths. In Fire of Love, Dosa profiled the love life and scientific research of famed volcanologists Katia and Maurice Kraft, all the way up to their tragic end during an especially violent volcanic eruption. In Time and Water, she instead profiles the life and work of glacier observer Andri Snær Magnason, which allows her to capture the same scale of natural phenomenon while still exploring new territory. The iciness of the subject isn’t entirely literal, either. Magnason’s personal relationship with glaciers is much more mournful than the Krafts’ relationship with volcanoes, as he is most famous for having written the first ever obituary for a dying glacier, not for his passionate love for the living ones. As a result, Time and Water is a chilling ice bath intended to shock its audience into realizing how quickly & permanently we’re losing glaciers to climate change, as communicated through the personal archives & heartbreak of those natural wonders’ volunteer spokesman.

An Icelandic literary luminary, Magnason’s advocacy for glacier preservation is more poetic than scientific. He descends from a lineage of natural explorers with a long history of first-hand scientific observation of Icelandic glaciers’ declining health, but his own professional work on the subject is much more abstract. In somber voiceover, he conveys local folktales about glaciers’ role in creating & shaping his homeland. He defines the mountainous ice blocks as “ice that has come alive,” which I doubt meets the criteria for a scientific designation. Glaciers are “alive” in the sense that they are cyclically melted & rebuilt by Arctic temperatures, though, which technically means that they can also “die.” Magnason first used his literary notoriety to draw attention to glaciers’ terminal health condition in the new climate change paradigm by writing an obituary for the first fallen glacier in 2019, immortalizing in bronze, “Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.” Following that logic, this cinematic adaptation of that obituary does not spend much time explaining the capitalistic profit motives that are accelerating climate change year by year, but instead quietly mourns what’s already been lost while hoping to preserve its loving memory for a distant future.

For all of his cultural concerns as an Icelandic literary voice, Magnason’s investment in the future is largely familial. He narrates this eulogy as if it were a family photo slideshow, which Dosa punctuates with the clicks & whirs of a photo slide carousel. Alternating between the 16mm footage of his ancestor’s glacial explorations and his own digicam records of modern Icelandic homelife, Magnason hopes to visually represent the dramatic before & after of how the local natural landscape has changed while vocally apologizing to his future-adult children about the half-dead world that has been left for them to inherit. The focus on his family’s archival photography is thematically linked to the glaciers’ own natural archive, in the way they can trap vocalic ash and other particulates in ice as a record of passing time. Magnason sees that ice melting away as a kind of environmental dementia, which he’s watched creep into his own aging parents & grandparents as the years pile up on tape. It’s unavoidable to point out how tonally glacial that familial history plays out onscreen — both cold in its mournfulness and slow-moving in its monotony. As a time-elapse portrait of Iceland’s recent decades in environmental crisis, however, it lands a dramatic gut punch that leaves the audience doubled over, breathless.

If Dosa wanted to repeat Fire of Love‘s critical & commercial success, she could have hired Björk to cryptically narrate Magnason’s story the same way Miranda July narrated the Krafts’. Dosa did hire Dan Deacon to echo her previous film’s synth-abstracted score (provided by Air), but Deacon is usually restrained & icy in his own way here — only flashy in momentary flourishes of tape-warp sound effects. The overall mood of the piece is substantially more subdued than Dosa’s previous outing, which is entirely appropriate for a profile of a writer who’s most famous for issuing death certificates to glaciers with the official cause of death listed as “extreme summer heat.” As hard as Magnason works to convey how much his homeland’s beauty is in peril, that subdued mood and the Planet Earth-style nature footage of Iceland’s surviving glaciers does ironically function as a kind of travel ad for the nation, which is likely counterproductive if the end goal is to slow the effects of climate change. It says a lot that National Geographic picked up its distribution out of Sundance; if you caught it on a muted television, you might mistake it for a standard doc about how cool & beautiful glaciers are and not a heartbroken eulogy predicting their certain, mass, impending deaths. Magnason’s voice might not be the most exciting element at play here, but it’s what gives the picture meaning beyond its surface-level beauty, and Dosa was right to cede him so much room to speak from the heart.

-Brandon Ledet

BloodSisters (1995)

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American sex education is in such shambles that queer filmmakers have found the need to make D.I.Y. classroom tools to teach each other how to have safe, healthy sex, despite the fact that no legitimized classrooms would ever actually show them. From the PBS-special textures of Marlon Riggs’s AIDS epidemic screed Tongues Untied to the green screen psychedelia of Annie Sprinkle’s how-to guides like the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop, there’s a 101 classroom lecture quality to a lot of queer video art, spreading the good news about good sex one VHS cassette at a time. Take, for instance, 1995’s BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes, and Sadomasochism, a D.I.Y. camcorder documentary about the San Francisco lesbian kink scene. Ostensibly, that doc is meant to serve as a collection of oral histories from local kinksters about their personal relationships with BDSM, but the longer the interviewees pontificate about the subject the more instructive and abstract their testimonials get. It plays less like a direct-to-camera confessional from heavy-leather subculturistas than it does the orientation video you’re forced to watch before you can be issued a membership card to your local sex club.

We get a glimpse of why this kind of educational video might be necessary in an early sequence of HBO Real Sex-style street interviews, asking anonymous passersby how they feel about sado-masochistic sex. Most recoil in embarrassment, expressing a knee-jerk disgust with the subject and visible regret for having agreed to appear on camera. Then, heavy leather lesbians with stage names like Skeeter, Rainbeau, Peggy Sue, and Queen Cougar sit down for lengthy confessionals about their personal experiences on the kink scene, intentionally working to legitimize & destigmatize the practice of inflicting & receiving pain during sexual roleplay, all in the name of “cumsent.” While they explain BDSM’s political & therapeutic applications in casual, laidback chatter, graphic documents of the sexual acts being described (mostly of the spanking, whipping, and nipple torture variety) intercut & overlay their interview footage. As serious as BloodSisters is about conveying the legitimacy & ethicality of kinky sex, it also openly acknowledges that the scene profiled is mostly populated by nerds having fun playing dress-up. Everyone interviewed dons intentionally intimidating leather costumes, but they’re also reasonable, approachable people. If anything, they’re directly encouraging you to approach them at the leather bar as soon as the tape runs out and you pass the prerequisite vocabulary quiz for glossary terms like “soft butch,” “pushy bottom”, and “topping from the bottom.”

Kink education isn’t as niche of a field as it used to be. The kind of work BloodSisters was attempting to accomplish in the 90s has long had a brick-and-mortar institutional hub in The Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago. Its 101 classroom lecturing has continued on in recent docs like A Body to Live In, which explains the spirituality of body modification, and Rebel Dykes, which offers a similar collection of oral histories detailing heavy-leather lesbianism in London. The film was massively important for arriving early and aggressively to that conversation, though, and thus its most vital details are in the datedness of its vintage stylistic touches: its animated punk zine credits, its cracked whip screen wipes, its rainbow colored tints, its Greek chorus of kink novelty songs from Bay Area punk band Frightwig, etc. The movie is unmistakably of the 1990s, which underlines just how important its political advocacy was both inside and outside the lesbian community. When subs & doms in an especially heavy scene start playing with bloodletting & needles, it means something different knowing what conversations about AIDS were happening offscreen in the background. Likewise, knowing what conversations about what kinds of lesbian sex do or do not reinforce the patriarchy in nearby feminist circles informs a lot of what’s said onscreen, even though that side of the “debate” is thankfully denied equal time. So, the concluding all-caps battle cry “FIST FUCK THE SYSTEM” wasn’t just included as a cheeky punchline; it was a timely, literal call to arms. Given how dated some of its defensiveness about kink feels today, it seems to have done some good.

-Brandon Ledet

Microcosmos (1996)

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Back in my college days, the go-to TV series to get stoned & zone out to was the BBC’s Planet Earth, a soothing nature doc series shot in then-astonishing HD clarity. I couldn’t afford cable back then, though, so I only caught snippets of it while drifting through friends’ & strangers’ living rooms, occasionally mesmerized by a glimpse of the Northern Lights or an insect-destroying fungus before moving on to the next mindless activity. My own personal Planet Earth back then was a much-rented DVD stocked at the off-campus Blockbuster, a 2005 French documentary titled Genesis. In it, an African mystic stirs a bucket of water to create a small whirlpool, which he then uses to explain the history of the planet and the evolution of all the life it hosts. Much like David Attenborough’s dry script-reads in Planet Earth, the narration never stops, with the mystic constantly explaining the subsequent nature footage that illustrates the evolution of Earth life in astonishingly gorgeous close-up photography. Genesis is a little hokey, but it’s less than 80 minutes long (as opposed to Planet Earth‘s 500+), and it gets the job done. As I’ve since come to learn, it’s also always functioned as a bargain-bin alternative to a superior work, even though it predates Planet Earth by a couple years. Long before they made Genesis, directors Claude Nuridsany & Marie Pérennou had scored major acclaim with their 1996 masterwork Microcosmos, which offers an up-close, Planet Earth-style profile of insect life never before seen in such beautiful cinematic detail. Genesis is the watered-down version of their earlier success, which makes it a pity that’s the one I had access to on the nearest video store shelf.

The key to Microcosmos‘s success as a monumental work of art rather than a standard-issue nature doc is its almost complete lack of narration. While Genesis overexplains in metaphor and Planet Earth instructs in classroom lecture, Microcosmos includes only a small touch of narration to get the audience thinking about how insects, snails, and other miniature creatures live small lives that we rarely take the time to observe. Even those couple paragraphs of narration feel a little redundant, given that its opening theme song already explains it perfectly in a child’s falsetto, instructing “Look at your feet/this funny world/full of insane small creatures/and listen to/this buzzing chord/who keenly spreads such strange murmurs/The sound’s buzzing, swarming, sliding beetles, snails, and ladybirds.” Besides functioning as a presciently pitch-perfect parody of Björk’s career to come, that tune encapsulates the entire project in just a few simple words. Gazing at Microcomsos means pausing your busy brain to observe a world smaller than yours, the one just below your feet — where the bugs live. Nuridsany & Pérennou worked with state-of-the-art microscopic cameras to immerse their audience in that world, shrinking our moment-to-moment concerns down to the insectoid impulses to feed, breed, and shelter. It’s not a mode of observation & wonderment that can be explained in narration; it’s a practice that the movie teaches you by forcibly diverting your attention to the smallest things in life. I also have to assume that its lessons’ most accomplished students are 20-year-old stoners who’d rather focus on just about anything other than their actual homework, the same as with Genesis & Planet Earth one decade later.

The cast of Microcosmos is large & varied. You’ve got all of your classic microspecies here: your ants, your spiders, your ladybugs, your tadpoles, your moths, your butterflies. And then you’ve got a never-ending supply of esoteric creepy crawlies I couldn’t even begin to identify, as if they were found under a rock on an alien planet instead of the one we occupy. Even more mysterious is the moment-to-moment actions of these micro creatures, which Nuridsany & Pérennou playfully assign meaning through cheeky music & editing choices. It’s easy to read into insects’ intention & emotions while they’re mating, hunting, and organizing in groups, but when those acts all inevitably lead to no specified goal or result, the audience snaps out of the trance and remembers, oh yeah, they’re bugs. We’ll often watch the up-close struggles of a frog being pummeled with rain drops, a dung beetle struggling to push its self-assigned Sisyphean bolder, or a group of caterpillars lining up in military formation. We get emotionally involved in their toils, only for the edit to then switch to a wide shot that contextualizes these epic battles as the meaningless busywork of insects who have no idea what they’re doing or what’s happening around them. It’s an effect that says just as much about the manipulative nature of filmic storytelling as it does about the minute-to-minute meaninglessness of our own upscaled human lives. Nothing you’re working on right now matters all that much in the bigger picture of things, so you might as well take some time out of your day to look at some cool bugs doing cool bug shit. There’s a whole world down there, and it can be just as breathtakingly beautiful (snails having sex) as it is hilariously pitiful (ladybugs having sex).

Microcosmos recently screened at The Broad as part of their weekly Gap Tooth repertory series, with a fully engaged audience making their own audible insectoid rustlings in reaction to every microstruggle depicted onscreen. After a clueless dung beetle spent minutes freeing its little bolder from an errant stick in the mud, the room burst into spontaneous applause. Personally, I only spent half the screening marveling at the majesty of nature’s smallest wonders; I spent the other half thinking about how every species of insect deserves to be blown up to kaiju scale in its own standalone creature feature, an experience the packed house was already gifting to the latecomers in the front row. Access to such a beautiful communal event in my own neighborhood was also a blessing in its own way. It’s funny how access can affect your relationship with cinema. What we’re able to see can be severely limited by cable subscriptions, video store libraries, and geographic proximity, like how I spent repeated nights watching Genesis while most of my friends were watching Planet Earth and we all should have been watching Microcosmos.

-Brandon Ledet

Take One (1977)

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They say all pornography, no matter how scripted, is partially documentary. You’ll find the phoniest characters, dialogue, and scenarios cinema has to offer in porno, and yet the physical sexual contact between performers is more real than all other cinematic action — unstimulated, often documented by the camera in medical detail. It’s easy to look back to vintage titles of the Porno Chic era and retroactively impose anthropological meaning on them, citing them as a document of a bygone era, since their unpermitted street shoots and nonexistent costume budgets often captured the people of the time as they were in daily life. Pornography is also immediately documentary, though, caught between the extremes of both staged cinematic fantasy and the documented reality of the performers within that fantasy. This is not a new observation. One of Porno Chic’s earliest auteurs was playing around with the tension between those extremes a half-century ago, coining the term “docufantasy” to describe his chosen artform’s dual, self-conflicting nature. Wakefield Poole’s 1977 “docufantasy” Take One opens by warning the audience that trying to parse out what’s fiction and what’s reality is a fool’s errand, announcing, “For your enjoyment, do not try to understand this film: there is nothing to understand. It is only real people doing reel things and making them real together.” That distinction between the “real” and the “reel” sums it all up more concisely than I ever could.

Take One finds Wakefield Poole on the opposite coast than his crown jewel Bijou, now docu-fantasizing about the gay men in 1970s San Francisco. In an early precursor to Beth B’s reality-TV prototype Visiting Desire, Poole invites eight men from the local scene to confess their fantasies in videotaped interviews, then act them out in front of 16mm cameras. Unlike in Visiting Desire, this experiment reliably results in onscreen fucking, with each performer given a spotlight fantasy sequence before they all gather for a climactic orgy in the theater where the movie they’re participating in premieres mid-runtime. Some fantasies are more abstract than others, such as an early sequence where a young man gets so revved up thinking about his muscle car that he finds a way to passionately penetrate its hood ornament, à la Julia Ducournau’s Titane or Kenneth Anger’s Kustom Kar Kommandos. In another, a domestic couple has semi-public sex on the sunny roof of their isolated desert home, leaning heavily into the soft psychedelia of the film’s post-hippie era. The most shocking sequence is the one in which two real-life brothers have sex on camera, fulfilling an incest fantasy most pornos only playfully hint at to capitalize on a convenient taboo. Here, the siblings’ lovemaking is warmly tender to an almost disconcerting degree, as if the audience has been invited to witness an intimate moment that no one outside their unusual relationship was ever meant to see. That sequence is more “real” than it is “reel,” alarmingly so.

If Take One falls short on either side of the real/reel divide, it’s in the supposedly documentary interview sequences that justify their resulting fantasies. For the most part, the initial video interviews that inspired the film aren’t incorporated into the final cut and are instead restaged and scripted in a more traditional pornographic narrative style. So, like Bijou, the film is at its best when it goes full fantasy mode, staging the abstract sex acts inspired by those interviews in an endless black void. The best scenes in the film are pure jack-off material, with men narrating their fantasies to the audience while masturbating in a featureless room decorated only with slideshow projections of momentary illustrations, as described in their horned-up ramblings. It’s a surprisingly poetic approach to pornography that’s introduced as soon as the opening scene, wherein a nude ballet dancer performs a full routine for the audience after emerging from the silver screen like a cryptid hatching from an egg. That poetic approach to the genre is later echoed in Poole’s liberal use of color gels, as he bathes his performers in fantastic colored lights that untether them from this earthly realm. The film’s incidentally documentary glimpses of vintage gay San Francisco are cool & all, but we spend most of the runtime indoors, so Poole is smart to attempt to document their internal lives instead. We learn about them by finding out what gets them off.

Because this project is so dependent on Wakefield Poole’s distinctions between the “real” and the “reel,” the filmmaker himself inevitably becomes part of the story. Take One is a meta-porno, including footage of Poole & crew recruiting performers, conducting interviews, operating cameras, and exhibiting film prints between the purer sensory immersions of the full-on fantasy sequences. The reality of the movie being made & projected in-film fully breaks down by the mid-premiere orgy sequence, which gets so out of control that even the projectionist gets in on the action, receiving a surprise blowjob in his hermetic booth above the fray. Having already fulfilled all of his obligations as a documentarian and a pornographer, Poole fully lets loose in that sequence, playing around with as many color gels and camera angles he can afford to shoot while his performers shoot all over each other. He becomes especially enamored with repurposing a glory hole as a peephole in that sequence, viewing the action from a self-imposed distance on the other side of a faux patrician. For all of the semi-documentary elements that make Take One interesting as a consciously academic object from porno’s distant past, it’s still most useful and most remarkable when it drops the bullshit and gets down to the task at hand: filming unstimulated sex acts in the most aesthetically pleasing light possible. Poole didn’t need to go out of his way to stage a “docufantasy”; that’s already the business he was working in.

-Brandon Ledet

Boorman and the Devil (2026)

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As much as I love the movies, I hate moviegoing audiences – at least en masse. Chatting with individual festival attendees at this year’s Overlook Film Fest was as warm & friendly as always, like meeting up with old friends who I’ve technically never met before. Then, watching Boorman and the Devil at that same fest reminded me just how rare of an experience it is to celebrate the artform with a like-minded crowd. David Kittredge’s documentary about the production & public perception of John Boorman’s Exorcist sequel The Heretic is an intensely alienating experience for true cinephiles, a reminder that most people who go to the movies don’t care at all about art. They are not open to being challenged; they demand satisfaction. It’s repugnant. Even when Kittredge gets cutesy about the mass-audience rejection of The Heretic, I could feel my blood boiling in general misanthropy, loathing every person I see on the street like that one Robert Crumb comic panel.

After the overwhelming financial success of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, Warner Bros threw an obscene amount of money at Linda Blair to return for a cash-in sequel, alongside new-to-the-franchise costars Richard Burton & Louise Fletcher. They also gave free rein to New Hollywood auteur John Boorman to take the Exorcist story in any direction he wanted, an opportunity Boorman leveraged to deliver a hypnotic arthouse nightmare that recalls The Exorcist in name only. His vision was met with wide public derision, derailing his career until he could redeem himself with another hit in Excalibur a few years later. So, who are we supposed to side with here? The incurious audience who laughed The Heretic off the screen for taking chances instead of delivering more of the same? The studio executives who lost money or an artistic gamble? Or the artist himself, who improbably staged a literal fever dream on someone else’s dime? There is only one morally acceptable answer.

Boorman developed a life-threatening fever while filming The Heretic, a direct result of his own overly demanding ambition. That wasn’t the only on-set disaster. Burton struggled to stay sober enough to deliver his lines while standing still. Fletcher barely made it through the shoot before needing to have her gall bladder removed in emergency surgery. Blair spent long hours dangling off the roof of a skyscraper, unharnessed. Meanwhile, Boorman’s sick-leave absence opened a power vacuum for his screenwriting partner Rospo Pallenberg to run wild & unchecked on set, an off-putting presence that almost inspired open mutiny. The production was so troubled that the crew joked it was cursed by the demon Pazuzu himself, but none of that would’ve mattered if Boorman ultimately delivered a hit.

Kittredge relays these production-delay anecdotes from people who were actually there via tried-and-true documentary clichés that barely liven up the still set-photo imagery: first-person narration in his own voice, talking-head interviews with film critics & historians, cut & paste animation, and periodic chime-ins from fellow filmmakers with no direct association to the subject at hand (namely, Karyn Kusama, Mike Flanagan, and genre-doc mainstay Joe Dante). However, while Kittredge doesn’t match Boorman’s sense of poetic imagination, he is sincerely in awe of it, which goes a long way. This is not a movie about how Exorcist II: The Heretic was a laughable disaster; it is a story about how ambitious, risk-taking art isn’t always appreciated by the public, who’d rather laugh in mockery then get lost in cinematic poetry. Fuck ’em. They don’t know what they’re missing.

-Brandon Ledet

Videoheaven (2026)

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The sprawling runtimes of amateur film-analysis videos on YouTube have seemingly inspired a new subgenre of documentary filmmaking among professional cinephilic directors: the durational essay doc. No longer restrained by what audiences would pay to sit through in a theater, essay films about niche cinematic topics are getting more unwieldy in length, aiming to be more exhaustive & definitive than they are concise. 2021’s Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched expanded what would normally be a 40min Blu-ray extra about the history of folk horror cinema to a three-hour flex, too gargantuan to be ignored. 2023’s We Kill for Love did the same for the history of the erotic thriller genre, exhaustively chronicling its straight-to-video period in a near-three-hour runtime (which I did thankfully get to experience in a theater, thanks to the fine freaks at Overlook Film Fest). That small canon has now expanded with Alex Ross Perry’s three-hour video essay Videoheaven, which has an official website advertising its availability for theatrical bookings but most audiences will watch streaming at home on The Criterion Channel. Videoheaven is arguably a more expansive project than We Kill for Love or Woodlands Dark, in that it doesn’t restrict itself to a single genre. It instead attempts to comprehensively catalog the onscreen depiction of video rental stores in all televised & cinematic genres, with all of its on-screen imagery pulled from vintage clips from movies, sitcoms, new broadcasts, commercials, and corporate training videos. It attempts to track the rise, reign, and decline of the American video store as a cultural institution by noting the ways it was characterized & documented over the past half-century of filmic media. It is, inarguably, more of an academic exercise than it is populist entertainment, but like other durational essay docs before it, its length & thoroughness transforms that exercise into an unignorable cinematic event.

Of course, these three-hour attention testers are only cinematic events for audiences who are already deeply nerdy about cinema as an artform. In the past, the durational documentary format was reserved for more socially or historically substantial subjects like Shoah‘s five-hour oral history of the Holocaust, Ken Burns’s eleven-hour recap of the American Civil War, or the unblinking institutional observations of any Frederick Wiseman film you can name. This new crop of post-YouTube essay movies about The Movies only offers a deviation from that tradition in the newfound frivolity of their subjects. It’s a newly achieved level of audience pandering, signaling to movie nerds that the micro-budget horror films and direct-to-video softcore schlock we waste our time with is Important, Actually. Within that new paradigm, Videoheaven already feels like the Final Boss of movie nerd pandering. It escalates the “Remember all these movies?” clip-show format from more routine pop docs to only include clips from movies that feature hundreds of posters for and references to even more movies. Not only are we revisiting televised & cinematic depictions of video rental stores, but we’re also leaning in to read the titles that populate the shelves of those stores. And since Perry is, himself, the same kind of movie nerd that he’s also pandering to, he shares his audience’s cinephilic interests to an almost uncanny degree. It’s not enough for him to include Matthew Lillard working a video store counter in John Waters’s Serial Mom; he makes sure to feature the scene where Lillard is watching William Castle’s Strait-Jacket on the store TV, doubling the reference. A wide shot of a video store exterior in Amazon Women of the Moon had me excitedly pointing to a poster for Russ Meyer’s Supervixens in the display window; Perry then immediately cuts to an image of Russ Meyer himself working that store counter, signaling that he shared in the same excitement. It was just as much of a pleasure to revisit longtime personal favorites like Muriel’s Wedding, Sugar & Spice, and The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert in clips as it was to spot VHS covers for more recent personal discoveries like 52 Pick-Up and I Heard the Mermaids Singing on the background shelves. One scene from an obscure McG-directed romcom called This Means War featured Reese Witherspoon & Chris Pine flirting in front of a video store display for DVD copies of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope in the exact edition I had just returned to my neighborhood public library mere hours before pressing play. I was indeed in video heaven: overly pandered, pampered, and validated.

The other tact Perry takes besides pandering to already-in-the-know cinephiles is claiming space on future university syllabi, functioning as a teaching tool for Gen Z & Gen Alpha students who might not have any direct personal experience in video rental stores. Gen Z gets their own form of audience pandering in the employment of Maya Hawke as the narrator, who appears onscreen in several clips as a video store clerk in the TV show Stranger Things (after opening the movie narrating her dad’s performance of an existential crisis inside a Blockbuster Video in 2000’s Hamlet, further justifying her involvement). She plays mouthpiece for Perry’s observations about the video store’s evolution in culture and on the screen, landing some fairly convincing observations about how the video store setting is a uniquely American filmmaking phenomenon, providing a space for the film & television industry to talk about itself and its audience. Where the script might slightly overplay its hand is in the claim that all modern depictions of the video store experience (such as on Stranger Things) are now commentaries about the past, as if any remnants of the industry are a form of retro-media nostalgia. I don’t know if that’s entirely true; not yet, anyway. Sure, most newly launched video stores (like Los Angeles’s trendy Vidiots or our local indie spot Future Shock) lean into kitschy 80s & 90s aesthetics, but there are also several major hangers on from the old days that are still operating as normal. Just a couple months ago, I watched a new indie drama called Two Sleepy People that features characters hanging out in the continually operational We Luv Video, and it didn’t play as a nostalgia trip to the past at all; it’s just a hallmark of living in Austin. Ross’s point will inevitably be proven right, though, and future generations of young people will need to have The Video Store Experience explained to them in order to fully grasp what’s happening in, say, Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman, in which the main character spirals into her own academic video essay project while working as a video store clerk. In the meantime, it feels as if Perry forgot the axiom that “You can never quarantine the past” (as posited in his previous documentary, Pavements) while mourning the recent loss of his own go-to video store, Kim’s Video in New York City. The real deal is still out there, even if it won’t last forever.

Although its subject may initially sound shallow to non-cinephiles, Videoheaven continually proves to be a rich text throughout its deliberately excessive runtime. It addresses the video store clerk as both a villainous know-it-all movie nerd archetype and as an aspirational archetype for those know-it-alls, hoping to become the next Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino by applying their cinephillic knowledge to the perfect indie screenplay. It pauses at length on the looming presence of the beaded “back room,” exploring mainstream America’s attraction-repulsion relationship with commercially available pornography (something younger generations will likely only experience in increasingly private spheres). Personally, I was most thrilled whenever the movie touched on subjects I’ve recently covered on this website—the trashier, the better—like the self-hating video store owner of Video Violence or the hostile video store takeover of Toxic Avenger III: Citizen Toxie, both of which are discussed at length as helpfully illustrative texts. It was reassuring to know that someone else out there finds this societally meaningless topic just as personally meaningful as I do, and I found a kindred spirit in Perry’s clip-to-clip interests at every turn. Academic exercises or not, the curation & duration of these exhaustive cinephila essay docs always end up revealing something personal about their respective directors’ obsessions & motivations. They’re achieving every video store clerk & customer’s dream: conveying good taste & cinephilic knowledgeability through media selection & consumption, establishing themselves as the intellectual champions of Watching Movies.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Cinemania (2002)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the NYC repertory cinephilia documentary Cinemania (2002).

00:00 Welcome
01:27 Angel’s Egg (1985)
06:42 The Color of Pomegranates (1969)
14:44 Safety Last! (1923)
21:18 Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2026)
32:55 “Wuthering Heights” (2026)
48:48 Pillion (2026)
54:48 EPiC – Elvis Presley in Concert (2026)
59:06 Funny Pages (2022)
1:13:17 Dolly (2026)
1:17:28 RRR (2022)
1:29:42 Network (1976)
1:32:50 The Power of the Dog (2021)

1:38:45 Cinemania (2002)

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

Megadoc (2025)

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There’s a moment early in Megadoc in which Francis Ford Coppola is giving a speech to his assembled Megalopolis actors on the first day of rehearsals, and it feels very much like the first day of a high school theatre course. He quotes Dante’s Inferno, specifically the quote “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” which is posted at Hell’s gates, but then says that he has his own version, which is “Abandon worry, all ye who enter here,” which he notes should be on a sign in there in the large rehearsal space. “I have a sign and you’ll see it,” he says; “It’s supposed to be up,” revealing that, even in these early moments, things are already off schedule despite all the decades spent preparing for the film. “In this space,” he adds, “during this time, nobody can be bad, nobody can get in trouble.” Here, filmmaker Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas) zooms his camera in on Shia LaBeouf, and I don’t know if that was a live decision or one that came up in the edit, but it’s prescient nonetheless. 

Figgis was invited by Coppola to document the creation of Megalopolis, a movie that I ranted about at length starting about 29 minutes into our podcast episode about Destroy All Monsters. I won’t recount the whole thing, but I summed it up at the time thus: “Bloated, hollow, ugly, infantile, pompous, stupid, pretentious, hubristic, insipid, hideous, homophobic, talent-wasting, facile, nepotistic, provocative (derogatory), neoliberal, lifeless, inconsistently performed, self-fellating, tiresome, shallow garbage.” In its own way, Megadoc is a perfect metatext for the film around which it revolves, namely in that just as Coppola couldn’t help but write a flawless avatar for himself in the form of Cesar Catilinia, he of the riches of the Emersonian mind. Inserting himself into the narrative obtrusively, Figgis is also far too much a presence in this “documentary;” it is, at best, an elevated behind the scenes featurette, albeit quite a long one. Initially, all the subjects present seem put off by his camera’s presence, other than Aubrey Plaza, who was not only the only person in Megalopolis who knew what kind of movie she was in but also the only person in Megadoc who knew what kind of movie they were in. She moves in quickly and adopts Figgis’s viewpoint as if it were the omnipresent camera of her character Wow Platinum. She’s an early delight in the finished Megadoc as the first person to be willing to do candid interviews, although it’s unclear exactly where Plaza ends and Platinum begins here, all to the film’s enrichment. 

After that first day playing warm-up theatre games, things get more serious. Megalopolis takes on a conceptual art designer who is initially over the moon about getting to work with Coppola, and her office is adorned with concept images of the various applications of Megalon. By the midpoint of the film, Coppola gets into an argument with the on-set art director where it seems like the director just isn’t understanding that it would be a good idea to put a blue screen at the rear of a shot. He mocks the man, saying “This gets back into why I like live effects, because although, in your opinion, they’re not as extraordinary and wonderful as the other kinds, I don’t agree with you.” The way he puts a little edge in on the words “extraordinary” and “wonderful,” you can tell that he’s just trying to needle the guy to make a point, and after he’s fired the team and brought on the kind of lean art department to which he was more accustomed, he sneers while saying “The last film they did was Guardians of the Galaxy.” We cut back to that concept artist in her office, and all the images have been taken down from the wall behind her, and you can tell that she’s drawing on a lifetime of practicing speaking very deliberately and politically about the egos she’s encountered as she says, “I’ve wondered if we missed the signs earlier on that he wanted to approach the movie differently. I do wonder if he didn’t communicate it as clearly.” 

This firing of the art department and hiring of a new one is only one of many woes that contributes to Megalopolis’s budget problems. Although I didn’t care for Figgis’s insertion of some of his own on-set video diaries, one cannot say that he doesn’t have a good head for comedic timing, as he’ll often pair footage of Coppola making spur-of-the-moment creative changes and decisions that have major financial consequences with on-screen text revealing just how much money was spent on inconsequential fluff. There are several minutes of rehearsal and test footage from Coppola’s failed attempt at getting Megalopolis off the ground in 2001, and they’re some of the most interesting things on display here, as we get to see Virginia Madsen perform a scene as Wow Platinum and a sequence of Ryan Gosling as LaBeouf’s character Clodio, with (I think) Scott Bairstow as his flunkie Huey. There’s a table read attended by Uma Thurman at which Billy Crudup learns that he’s been cast as Cesar rather than as Clodio as he believed. This shows us that, at that point in his career, Coppola was actually doing screen tests and taking other necessary steps in the filmmaking process that seem to have been completely absent from the production of the Megalopolis that made it to screen. Coppola is old and grumpy by his own admission, sometimes directing from his trailer so as not to explode at cast and crew, but he’s also gathered a huge crew at his own great expense to stand about while he and his son Roman fart around with trying to make an in-camera effect happen, when that’s the kind of detail that should absolutely be figured out and locked down by the time you get actors into costumes and make-up. It’s the kind of colossal waste of capital that one would expect when spending a studio’s limitless funds, not one’s own money obtained by selling off vineyards. 

The film spends time on the conflict between Coppola and LaBeouf, and it is legitimately fascinating. Although I don’t think he’s a very good person and that his history doesn’t give him any excuses regarding his behavior, I also have sympathy for most former child stars who have a hard time maturing. It was once a VH1 reality show cottage industry to point and laugh at aged child actors of the seventies like Danny Bonduce and Peter Knight as they struggled with their demons (and frequently lost), which was gross then and remains so today. What we can learn from them is that although there are successes like the Fanning sisters and Scarlett Johansson, they are the exceptions to the rule that early life stardom is a machine that creates mental illnesses down the line. LaBeouf has a few moments of raw human vulnerability here about how this is his first chance to work with a director from the old guard rather than just taking a job because he was a “starving kid,” (I’m no Crystal Skull fan, but on behalf of Spielberg, ouch), but then he also spends a lot of his screen time arguing with Coppola, trying to perhaps stretch his acting muscles while the exasperated octogenarian is clearly just trying to get things done, either because he’s elderly and tired or because every second of this is hemorrhaging his wallet. Late in Megadoc, LaBeouf recounts the fact that Coppola told him he was the worst actor he had ever worked with; “He says, ‘You know, I have one regret on this show.’ I said, ‘Okay, what’s the one regret?’ He goes, ‘You. You have been the biggest pain in my fucking ass,’—the only time he cursed—‘You’ve been the biggest pain in my fucking ass of any actor I’ve ever worked with.’ I said, ‘Really? Really? Any actor? Did I show up fucking 700 pounds overweight in the jungle? Really, any actor? Did I quit ten days before we wrap? Really, any actor?” It’s relatively good stuff and the only thing that really elevates it above the kind of thing you would have seen in a DVD special features section fifteen years ago. 

In his review of Megalopolis, Brandon noted that one of the modern ills that Coppola attacked via his fictional proxy was “journalists framing great men for fabricated sex crimes,” which relates to why this film barely counts as a documentary, if at all. Figgis and Coppola are, if not friends, at least amicable colleagues, and Megadoc does not address the allegations against Coppola, which first came to public attention roughly around the time of the film’s release. Although there’s been no resolution to the legal ramifications at the time of this writing, it’s telling that Megadoc ends its insight into the film’s creation not with the wide release to the public in September 2024, but at the Cannes premiere in May of 2024, with no additional dialogue or insight over what amounts to little more than cable red carpet coverage. It’s perhaps because Megadoc revealed moments before that Coppola’s wife Eleanor died in April of that year, right after footage of their sixtieth anniversary party on the set of Megalopolis. It verges on the disrespectful in its pre-emptive use of Coppola’s grief to end on a poignant note instead of addressing what is ultimately the most controversial thing about Megalopolis’s production. Tsk. 

The most magnetic person on screen, however, remains Plaza. Even in her Zoom audition, she’s funny and fantastic, and it reminds you that she truly is one of the great comedic minds of her generation. There’s a quietly disturbing scene in which we get to see the result of her petitioning to improv a scene with Dustin Hoffman, which jumps immediately to the two of them arm wrestling and Hoffman is flirting with her, and although he might be doing it “in character,” it makes one’s skin crawl regardless. It’s the only thing that seems like it’s not completely tempered by a need to skirt around the edges of anyone’s ego, but it’s not enough to save it. As a documentary, it’s functionally informative but not very insightful, but that’s not to say that it doesn’t have decent entertainment value, which is more than I would say about Megalopolis. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Stigmata (1991)

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One of the easiest ways to evoke dread in a horror film is to fake a found-footage cassette tape, recoiling from the flat digital textures of modern cameras to instead seek shelter in the spooky analog media of old. Two of this year’s buzziest horror titles rely heavily on that aesthetic cheat-code to varying levels of success; both Together & Bring Her Back explain the practical step-by-step details of their respective supernatural rituals via vintage camcorder recordings made by the cults who practice them. It’s the kind of haunted-media aura that you’d assume was earned over time, the way that scratchy old records, faded celluloid, and dusty children’s toys become creepy as they degrade but were considered innocuous when fresh. Camcorder video is different, though. Like with Polaroids, homemade video tapes were immediately understood to have a creepy aura, since their production in private, unregulated spaces could document all kinds of unspeakable evils with relative impunity. You can especially feel it in the video-art experiments of No Wave filmmaker Beth B, whose early projects like “Belladonna,” “Hysteria,” and “Thanatopsis” layered eerie camcorder video footage over horrific text pulled from Sigmund Freud, Nazi scientists and, perhaps the most extreme of all, Lydia Lunch. The real shock among those video-art experiments is how much her mid-length 40min feature Stigmata uses the exact same editing tricks as recent horrors like Together & Bring Her Back, interrupting its central narrative with shocks of contextless camcorder footage, evoking evil without ever fully explaining it. That’s not a newly creepy aspect to camcorder footage that was earned over time, like the spooky toy telephone & Fleischer cartoon broadcasts of Skinamarink. It was integral to the medium from the very beginning.

The core of Stigmata is more PBS special than analog horror. Beth B interviews six recovering heroin addicts about their lifelong personal struggles in the same black-void studio space you’d expect to see on a talk show like Charlie Rose (or, more charitably, a Marlon Riggs video). “Brutal honesty” doesn’t begin to cover the candidness of these interviews, which detail the personal, familial, and medical circumstances that lure people into hard drug addiction. Subjects explain at length how shooting heroin can be an act of self-medication, an escape from the prison of everyday life, and a relatively healthy alternative to suicide. Their struggles with the drug are confrontationally foregrounded, so that the entire screen is filled with the pain on their faces as they each recall their respective rock bottoms. The only relief valve Beth B offers the audience is occasional cutaways to unexplained home video footage that I assume was shot on vacation in coastal Europe, most likely Italy. These interstitials’ relationship to the addict interviews might mean something personally significant to the director, but that connection is left open for the audience to ponder. The title “stigmata” evokes the near-religious ecstasy of heroin use, which Beth B emphasizes by superimposing the opening credits over what appears to be an Old-World basilican dome. The subsequent interviews drag that ecstasy down to the physical level of holes being punched into bodies, while other camcorder cutaways stir up more horror than transcendence or peace. Beth B is especially fixated on the image of a stone window leading out to a seaside village, accompanied by unexplained sirens in the distance. The more that image repeats, the more sinister it becomes, as if it were found footage recovered from a self-documented suicide. The camera and its unseen operator never leap from that window, but the tension of the image never relaxes, and its ambiguous juxtaposition with the interviews make the whole project feel like a cursed object.

Self-billed as “a film/tape by Beth B,” Stigmata is included on Kino Lorber’s collection of the director’s solo works, titled Sex, Power, and Money. Along with her early reality-TV experiment Visiting Desire and her sleazy dance-club music video for “The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight,” it registers as the one of the most substantial titles on the set. Other shorts included there play with the same juxtaposition of confessional dialogue and video-art menace in more naked terms. “Belladonna” mixes found texts from Sigmund Freud case histories and war crime reports from the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele with triple-exposed images of urban transportation in modern NYC. “Hysteria” similarly clashes outdated case reports from patriarchal gynecologists throughout history with confessional interviews in which modern women critique their own naked bodies, presented as headless reflections in an unseen mirror. “Thanatopsis” illustrates a Lydia Lunch spoken-word piece about macho violence with domestic images of the punk-scene performance artist lounging in her apartment. Those are exceedingly strict formal experiments compared to Stigmata, which is less academically declarative in its own methods. The relationship between the intimate confessions of addiction and the anonymous found-footage B-roll is much trickier to define, leaving it open to more poetic interpretation. There is a sinister energy that hums underneath all of Beth B’s solo video work (except in “The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight,” of course, which is purely a party), but Stigmata stands out as the one that fully understood the evil power of its medium. It interjects home-video camcorder footage into its main narrative in the exact way that modern horror films do, establishing the visual language of current mainstream genre cinema in art-gallery experimental spaces decades ago. Beth B may be better remembered for collaborations with fellow no-waver Scott B on narrative titles like Vortex, but her solo documentary work convincingly verges on something new & lasting in its own right.

-Brandon Ledet