Hitchcock/Truffaut (HBOGo/HBONow)

Your level of patience with Hitchcock/Truffaut, Kent Jones’ documentary tribute/video essay on the classic film book, may stem from how highly you hold the book and its subject in esteem. I knew about the book for many years (Hitchcock was a teenage favorite of mine, and still is) before finally tracking down a copy on a trip to the Cinema Bookshop in London the summer before college, at a time when it was near impossible to find a copy in America. It became one of several film bibles to me, especially as it came to define two of my all-time favorite filmmakers.

There is a lot in Jones’ film to love. Watching the ideas of Hitchcock/Truffaut put together with moving scenes from Hitchcock’s films, much more fluid than the collection of grainy black-and-white stills that populate the book, is a marvel to witness for any fan of the book (or of Hitchcock in general). Hearing some of the great minds of modern cinema, including personal favorites David Fincher, Wes Anderson, and Olivier Assayas, talk about Hitchcock and the films that speak to them the most is just as marvelous. Taken in little pieces, this film is a gorgeous piece of video essay: dissecting the greatest work by arguably the greatest filmmaker of all-time, in both his own words and images and the words of those who most passionately followed in his footsteps. There isn’t a moment of Hitchcock/Truffaut that doesn’t sparkle in cinematic splendor. It made me want to rush out watch all of these films again, then take my battered copy of the book Hitchcock/Truffaut off my bookshelf and read all about them.

As a whole, though, the film is in bad need of a thesis besides “Hitchcock is a master.” Different filmmakers hijack different parts of the film, including long passages of Martin Scorsese apostatizing from his very comfortable-looking sofa. Some films get scrutinized in fine detail, both obvious fodder like Vertigo and Psycho as well as more under-the-radar choices like The Wrong Man, while other major films are glossed over quickly or barely even mentioned. The title itself is even deceiving because Truffaut disappears from the film for extended sequences. It seems like Kent Jones forgets about the book and then begrudgingly returns to it only when his footage of other filmmakers runs out. He is seemingly more interested in Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader than Francois Truffaut, which is fine if the film weren’t named after Truffaut’s book and didn’t posit him as shoulder-to-shoulder with Hitchcock himself

Near the end of the film Jones goes back to the Hitchcock/Truffaut friendship and quotes Hitchcock as wondering if he was the victim of his own style. Hitch wondered if he wasn’t too exacting in his plots and not giving enough to his characters. Perhaps he should have made films like Truffaut, that let the characters lead the story and don’t always have to add up perfectly. Kent Jones could have learned from this lesson, though, and perhaps his tribute to Hitchcock needed to be a little more exacting in its thesis and a little less time spent wandering through the minds of the talking heads it features.

Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru (Netflix)

Joe Berlinger has made a career (mostly with the late Bruce Sinofsky) of creating portraits of the unfairly maligned, particularly through his Paradise Lost trilogy of films, which, over more than a decade, got three young men released from prison for a crime they didn’t commit. Even when he has moved away from the crime genre, as in his Metallica documentary Some Kind of Monster, he has found human beings on the side of mainstream and has painted portraits in shades of grey. There are never easy answers in Berlinger’s films.

On paper, Tony Robbins seems like a fascinating subject for Berlinger to capture on film. The motivational speaker, who charges almost $5,000 for a week-long retreat and helps over 200,000 people a year, can be a polarizing figure. For every person who feels their life has been saved, you have to imagine there are people who don’t buy into what he is selling, or who feel let down by his product. Berlinger doesn’t talk to any of them, though. In fact, the film never addresses head on any sort of criticism or throw any hard questions Robbins’ way. Instead, it merely follows him through one of these retreats, lingering on his f-bomb laden interventions with audience members and filling in the time between them with portraits of Robbins exercising and planning for the next day’s seminar.

The tipping point for many with this film will probably be an intervention that falls in the middle of the film. A woman is having trouble with her boyfriend, and Robbins gets her to confess that he is not the right one for her and the relationship is making her unhappy. At the end, she takes out her cell phone, calls him up and breaks up with him on speakerphone in the middle of a deadly silent ballroom with 2,500 people watching and listening. Berlinger lets the intervention play out with no commentary at all (although you quickly realize how edited down all of these interventions are). Has Robbins just saved this woman’s life, or has he bullied her into doing something horrible to someone she loves in front of a room or strangers? That is up for each of us to decide on our own, but Berlinger thinks she has been saved. These interventions are filmed like rock concerts, with a sweaty Robbins roaring at the crowd in close-up and wide shots of the energetic crowd screaming his name, and Berlinger’s camera is eating it all up. It is a two-hour infomercial for Robbins, complete with a “where are they now” segment about how happy everyone is post-Robbins’ retreat, but from an accomplished filmmaker like Joe Berlinger I expected more nuance than what I could have gotten at two in the morning on a basic cable station.

CLASSIC: Brother’s Keeper (Netflix)

In contrast to his latest film, Joe Berlinger’s first film (with Bruce Sinofsky) Brother’s Keeper is a prime example of a shaded portrait. Brother’s Keeper follows the story of Delbart Ward, an elderly farmer in central New York who is arrested for the murder of his brother William. All four Ward brothers live together, sharing two beds between them, and all are at least partially illiterate. Sinofsky never tries to answer whether Ward murdered his brother or not — the question of whether William was murdered at all or if he merely died of natural causes is something no one can answer for certain. He sets the audience up to decide for themselves. He presses all of the Ward brothers with difficult questions, many of which they have difficulty understanding and difficulty answering, and he gives both sides of the case equal time. The townsfolk who love the Ward brothers, and see them as victims, state their case just as clearly as the media and lawyers who see them as dangerous. When the prosecution of the case brings up the theory that semen was found on the body and the murder was “sex gone bad,” Berlinger and Sinofsky lets Ward’s lawyer share the information with the audience. We laugh with him at the ridiculousness of the claim, but the film also lets that threat linger over the rest of the story. It doesn’t care about answers, but it cares about questions.

There are a lot of questions in Brother’s Keeper. Is Delbart Ward a murderer? Is he mentally challenged in some way? Did the police coerce a confession out of him? Was he treated fairly? Nothing in life is black and white, so they merely let us decide how we feel about these brothers and their choices, just as we do in life with every person we come in contact with. After all, every person we meet in the course of the film has made that decision about Delbart Ward for themselves and most of them aren’t afraid to share that with the camera. To this town, it is nonsense to think that Delbart Ward could be guilty of something as horrible as killing his brother. After a trial that is documented in detail in the film, Delbart Ward is found innocent. The jury seems unsure if he is guilty or not, but they are sure that his confession was coerced. Near the tail end of Brother’s Keeper is a shot of a local sign. On the sign are two pieces of information: Delbart is not guilty and there’s a ham dinner at the local church. That nicely sums up Brother’s Keeper. Big events happen, but life keeps chugging along.