Author: Tripp Burton

Minding the Gap (Hulu) Minding the Gap started almost ten years ago, when a teenage Bing Liu would videotape his friends’ skateboarding exploits. As adults, he has revisited his hometown and those friends, and followed the beginnings of their adult lives. One friend is a young father, another is struggling to find a purpose and…

The Bleeding Edge (Netflix) Kirby Dick has made a career in recent years for tackling some difficult topics in a way that makes the audience angry (and has even gotten results). In his newest film, The Bleeding Edge, he tackles the medical device industry and the inherent risks in it that are being hidden. By…

The Final Year (HBO) The Final Year is a look at the final year of the Obama administration, focusing on three members of his foreign affairs team. It starts in an apartment early in the morning, as we watch UN Ambassador Samantha Power get ready for work and try to wrangle her children off to…

Faces Places (Netflix) Faces Places is co-directed by the legendary nonagenarian Agnes Varda and photographer JR, some six decades younger than her. The film is all the better because you feel both of their ages seeping through at every corner: it has the energy of a debut filmmaker and the grace of a great filmmaker’s…

Unrest (Netflix) Unrest, Jennifer Brea’s debut documentary about her own battle with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, is a powerfully uncomfortable viewing experience. Brea holds no punches in what she chooses to show us; she started videotaping herself early on in order to prove to her doctor’s that something was wrong, and she isn’t afraid to show…

Gilbert (Hulu) In an unexpected twist, one of the most touching love affairs in cinema last year may have been the notoriously vulgar comedian Gilbert Gottfried and his wife Dara. Director Neil Berkeley frames Gilbert sadly leaving their apartment for the road, her holding him dearly like a protective mother not wanting her kid to…

Abacus: Small Enough to Jail (Amazon Prime) The Abacus bank is not one of the mega-banks that was deemed Too Big to Fail in the mortgage crises of 2008; the family-run bank at the center of Steve James’ remarkable new documentary is instead Small Enough to Jail, in the words of one expert interviewed in…

One of Us (Netflix) A great documentary can open your eyes to a topic that is far more fascinating than you had ever really considered. Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s One of Us, now on Netflix, does just that for the Hasidic Jewish community in New York. It is a subset of society that I,…

Elian (Amazon Prime) Early in Elian, a new Amazon documentary about the Cuban refugee who took America by storm in the late 1990s, we meet a now grown, handsome and well-spoken Elian Gonzalez — a sharp contrast to the cute, almost mute boy we remember so vividly. He looks directly at us and tells us…

Obit. (Amazon Prime) Obit., the fantastic documentary about the men and women who put together the obituary section of the New York Times every day, paints one of the most painfully realistic portraits of the act of writing I have ever seen in a movie. The film journeys through the entire process of writing an…

My Scientology Movie (Netflix) British documentarian Louis Theroux has made a specialty of in-depth portraits of segments of the population, going into their often sheltered worlds and spending time with them to really try to understand who they are and what leads to beliefs and choices that are often at odds with the world around…

Check It (LouisCK.net) Louis CK has used his website in recent years as a way to get his own material directly out to his fans, but with Check It he is now using it to get work he needs to be seen out to a wider audience. The documentary, which he saw at the Tribeca…

Get Me Roger Stone (Netflix) Get Me Roger Stone, the new Netflix documentary about political operative Roger Stone, tells his story by mostly focusing on the man who most famously got Roger Stone: Donald J. Trump. Stone is the self-proclaimed architect of Trumpian America, and Get Me Roger Stone might do more than anything else…

Tower and Newtown (Netflix) I often find myself, when watching a documentary, asking if I would rather be watching the dramatized version of the film. Does the reflection of the participants help the story, or would I rather be put in the moment of the story and watch it unfold for myself? Tower manages to…

The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble (HBO Now) Morgan Neville has made a career of documentaries about rock and roll musicians, peaking with his Oscar-winning 20 Feet from Stardom, and while on the surface his new film might seem a little different, it covers a lot of the same territory.…