Anton and Anders discuss this documentary featured at Hot Docs 2024 on how the search for dinosaur bones links colonialism, the global bone trade, and scientific discovery.
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Fire Tower is a pleasant, instructive film that showcases a unique occupation and the eccentric individuals that pursue it.
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Jon Else’s documentary The Day After Trinity is a useful nonfiction companion to Christopher Nolan’s epic biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
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Benoît Bringer’s The Rise of Wagner investigates the history of the Wagner Group and its war crimes committed in Syria, Ukraine, and African Central Republic.
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Laura Gabbert’s documentary with food writer Ruth Reichl exposes the precarious state of North America’s food supply.
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The Longest Goodbye examines the psychological toll of space travel through the work of NASA’s Dr. Al Holland.
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Kay Lena Ndiaye’s documentary on the CFA franc is handsomely mounted, but lacks specificity and a clear thesis.
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Ananta Thitanat’s slow cinema documentary on the dismantling of the Scala theatre in Bangkok plays like a non-fiction version of Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn.
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Georges Hannan’s Undertaker for Life! attempts to lift the veil on the world of morticians, but refuses to engage with the visceral discomfort of death.
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Anders and Aren dig into Adam Curtis’ Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone, which charts the collapse of the Soviet Union and the stillbirth of Russian democracy.
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In his third deep sea documentary, Aliens of the Deep, James Cameron explores the amazing life forms that thrive in some of Earth’s most hostile environments and paves the way for the next phase of his career.
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In Expedition: Bismarck, James Cameron uses the conventions of television historical documentaries to present a portrait of himself as a storyteller and an amateur scientist.
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Using animation to recreate the subjects’ memories, Eternal Spring considers the hijacking in 2002 of broadcast TV by a group of Falun Gong practitioners in northeastern China.
This documentary on the phenomenon of chronic Lyme disease may not make a slam dunk case, but it offers plenty of musings on the nature of medical diagnosis and treatment for a society emerging from a global pandemic.
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Cody Sheehy’s documentary about Dr. He Jiankui is saved by the strength of its subject matter.
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The Way Brothers’ raucous film about the Danbury Trashers plays like a sequel to their previous sports documentary, The Battered Bastards of Baseball.
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This documentary by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei paints a portrait of contemporary China through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan.
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The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel shows how the rise of corporate responsibility and weakened political structures have deepened the entwining of our fates with those of the corporation, as both an economic and political agent in the last two decades.
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A fascinating, disorienting first-hand account of the Wuhan COVID-19 lockdown.
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Anders and Aren discuss the recent ESPN/Netflix doc on Michael Jordan and the 1997-98 Chicago Bulls, The Last Dance, touching on celebrity culture, documentary narratives, and shared pandemic viewing.
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