It comes as no surprise that Sydney Pollack’s Amazing Grace is 87 minutes of sheer excellence. The long-lost movie captured the recording of Aretha Franklin’s landmark 1972 live gospel album Amazing Grace and remained unreleased (due to sound issues and then litigation on the part of Franklin) until its Monday…

It is a pop culture rite of passage for entertainers of a certain age to become the subjects of documentaries that look straight ahead and back—films that serve as simultaneous retrospectives of their careers and candid accounts of their day-to-day living. Most of these authorized portraits are entertaining, many are…

It looks as though Amazing Grace, the Sydney Pollack-directed documentary chronicling the live recording of Aretha Franklin’s landmark 1972 gospel album of the same name, will finally hit theaters. The DOC NYC film festival announced today it will be screening the movie twice on Monday, November 12.

The Oscar-winning 2009 documentary The Cove shocked the world with its brutal examination of the dolphin drive hunting that takes place in Taiji, Japan. The film’s unforgettable climax featured minutes of hidden-camera footage containing enough dolphin slaughter to make the ocean run temporarily red, and left an…

“Joan didn’t want to be Joni Mitchell,” Iggy Pop says in the trailer for Bad Reputation. “Joan wanted to rock.”

Though Kevin Macdonald’s documentary Whitney was commissioned and technically authorized by Whitney Houston’s estate (whose executor is the late singer’s sister-in-law, Pat Houston), the film is nonetheless the subject of a thorough and at times scathing statement released by Whitney’s mother, Cissy Houston.

“You want our blood, but you don’t want our pain,” is how Whitney Houston assessed the public’s interest in superstars in a 1991 interview with Ebony. This was years before her problems with drugs were common knowledge, and decades before her 2012 death from drowning (in which cocaine, per the Los Angeles County…

For such an affectionate, authorized portrait, Morgan Neville’s Fred Rogers bio-doc Won’t You Be My Neighbor contains enough revelations to make you see Rogers in a new light. While multiple sources maintain that the soft-spoken, kind persona Rogers inhabited on his long-running children’s show Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood…

The 1975 documentary Grey Gardens turned eccentric mother-and-daughter recluses “Big” and “Little” Edie Beale into legends. But the story behind that story is a legend in its own right. It’s a tale of unseen film footage that was lost or buried for reasons that aren’t entirely clear and has, it seems, magically…

It’s easy to remember the late designer Alexander McQueen as a stunning visionary, a fashion designer who seemed to build entirely new worlds on his runway. They were collections inspired by violence and blood, surgery and mental hospitals, robots and aliens, and were an indelible influence on so many designers that…

It was the golden gown meme-d around the world: the gorgeously embroidered, yellow cape that Rihanna wore to the 2015 Met Ball, so heavy and delicate that it took several men to help her carry its train on the red carpet. The designer responsible for the look was Guo Pei, a Chinese fashion designer who specializes in…

“You don’t know her story until you hear the truth,” read title cards in the just-released trailer for the estate-approved Whitney Houston doc, Whitney, due out July 6. The warm and fuzzy preview touts “unprecedented access to her family and friends,” perhaps to contrast with last year’s Nick Broomfield/Rudi Dolezal…

Gloria Allred’s frequent use of her outside voice—in old footage, speeches, and at press conferences spanning decades—becomes a running theme in Seeing Allred, a documentary available on Netflix this Friday. Directed by Roberta Grossman and Sophia Sartain, the film charts Allred’s career as a civil rights attorney and…

PBS announced on Tuesday that it will air a five-part series about the #MeToo moment. The series, #MeToo, Now What?, is scheduled to debut on February 2.

Actress Rose McGowan has emerged as one of the fiercest fighters against sexual harassment and abuse in Hollywood in the #MeToo era, and in response E!’s commissioned a five-part docuseries chronicling her life as she navigates a post-Harvey Weinstein world. The first trailer for the series, dubbed Citizen Rose,…

The UK’s Channel 4 has announced its plans air a documentary about the final days of Prince. According to the press release, Prince’s Last Year “will examine the last 365 days of his life, following him from a secret gig at the White House to his first ever solo concerts, called the Piano & a Microphone tour.” Cee-Lo…

George Michael: Freedom calls on so many talking-head rock-doc tropes, it’s as though it’s following an instruction manual. Earnest interview footage of its subject that seeks to deepen and humanize the common public perception of him? Check. Fawning interviews from his famous friends, collaborators, and admirers?…

There has never been a film like Dina. The documentary, which won the U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize prize at Sundance earlier this year and was released in New York on Friday with more locations in coming weeks, plays like a quirky indie rom-com. It’s a slice of working-class life just outside of Philadelphia that…

A new documentary about Andrew Wakefield, the former gastroenterologist and floppy-haired mascot of vaccine skepticism, draws its title from a phrase Wakefield used to describe himself. The film does not get much more critical from here.

There are artists and there are pop stars and rarely the twain shall meet. In a review of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent Comme des Garçons exhibit, artist/writer David Salle wrote a sentence that succinctly exposed just how different these professional species are: “The modern artist says, Love me for hating…