The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we’ll select three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.
‘Crumb’ (1994)
Terry Zwigoff’s portrait of the underground-comics artist R. Crumb — Robert to his familiars — turns 30 this year, and it still presents one of the most improbable acts of self-baring ever seen in a documentary. At the start, Crumb says that he doesn’t “work in terms of conscious messages.” Much of his art is filled with grotesque and often misogynistic and racist images. His admirers defend him in intellectual terms: In an interview in the documentary, the critic Robert Hughes likens Crumb to Bruegel and Goya, and says that like all great satirists he is “something of an outsider in his own country.” (Crumb moves to France at the end of the film, in what by that point looks more like an act of preservation by him and his wife, Aline, than a flight from his detractors.) A gallery owner compares him to the 19th-century caricaturist and painter Honoré Daumier.
But Crumb’s status in the art world at times seems almost incidental to him; certainly, profit is. (He recalls turning down lucrative offers from the Rolling Stones and “Saturday Night Live.”) He takes his creative output seriously, but it is also depicted as a compulsion. His first wife, Dana, remembers how he would sketch on a place mat or a bus ticket. Aline says that Robert gets stilted in conversation around anyone he doesn’t know well. Zwigoff had reportedly known him for years, but even so, Aline’s assertion is tough to square with the candor we see onscreen. Dressed in his distinctive brimmed hats and wide glasses, Robert comes across as nearly extroverted onscreen. He holds forth on his sexual fantasies, his dabblings in psychedelia and his father, who he says “busted” the 5-year-old Robert’s collarbone on Christmas. He may exist on the fringes of propriety, yet he is the most functional among his brothers, with one of whom, Robert says, he shared a bed until their teenage years.
Although they likewise have a talent for art, those siblings, Charles and Maxon, are portrayed as having never escaped their troubled childhoods. They now live in squalor — Charles with their mother; Maxon, who meditates on a bed of nails, by himself — and somehow, with Robert as a mediator, Zwigoff is able to get them, too, to reveal their demons. If Robert’s art, in Aline’s words, “depicts his id in its pure form,” it’s a more controlled form of chaos than his brothers are capable of. Robert flips through Charles’s old “talent test” for an art course; both brothers took the assessment, but Robert suggests that Charles couldn’t help but scandalize the judge. In its way, “Crumb” is a heartbreaking portrait of a family that shared a talent that only one member could channel into catharsis.
‘Cropsey’ (2010)
Is there a good Halloween documentary? The directors of “Crospey,” Barbara Brancaccio and Joshua Zeman, grew up on Staten Island hearing about a figure called Cropsey, an all-purpose boogeyman who supposedly lived on the island. But even without a monster, Brancaccio and Zeman suggest, the borough is filled with vestiges of a dark past. One interviewee, the former editor of a local newspaper, suggests that Staten Island has always served as the city’s dumping ground — a convenient place to sequester trash, tuberculosis patients and intellectually disabled children. That last group was kept at an infamous institution called Willowbrook State School, where living conditions prompted outrage from Robert F. Kennedy and an early exposé from Geraldo Rivera. At one point, Brancaccio and Zeman wander the area of the abandoned grounds and find lunch trays strewed about the woods.
It is only natural that the stories surrounding Willowbrook and its network of underground tunnels would haunt the residents, but “Cropsey” concerns a moment when myths may have begun to intersect with reality. In the 1970s and ’80s, a series of children went missing on Staten Island. In separate trials in the late 1980s and early 2000s, a man named Andre Rand was convicted of kidnapping two of them. But Brancaccio and Zeman raise the prospect that Rand was a convenient scapegoat, a drifter who fit the profile of what residents were looking for even though there was, they suggest, a lack of scientific evidence connecting him to the case. The filmmakers repeatedly try to interview him, engaging in a bizarre mail correspondence, only to ultimately be rebuffed.
But it’s unfair to expect any true-crime documentary to find a smoking gun, and “Cropsey” is quite explicitly as much about the nature of people’s suspicions as it is about solving the case. Some of the residents have continued to hold themselves out as amateur sleuths. Bizarre theories from the era of satanic panic get re-aired. And Brancaccio and Zeman are left to wrestle with their own doubts. “It was becoming harder for us to tell the difference between the facts and the folklore,” Zeman says around midway through in voice-over. Visually, “Cropsey” is unfortunately reminiscent of a tabloid newscast from the era, and a cheesy, overused score by Alexander Lasarenko cheapens it further. But the tawdriness suits the subject matter, and it’s hard not to leave this eerie documentary without feeling at least slightly creeped-out.
‘Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus’ (2024)
In 2018, Stephen Nomura Schible’s documentary “Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda” offered an essential portrait of the working methods and philosophy of the titular Japanese pianist and composer, who died in 2023. By contrast, “Opus,” directed by Neo Sora, Sakamoto’s son, is a straight performance piece. But it’s a haunting one. The entire film consists of Sakamoto, shot in high-contrast black-and-white, performing 20 of his compositions, and the stark, minimalist style suits the piercing beauty of Sakamoto’s melodies. It’s the sort of movie during which your mind may drift, but that peacefulness seems consistent with its design.
Throughout, Sakamoto, with his wispy white hair and tortoiseshell glasses, appears completely immersed in his music. He plays some of his best-known work (like the theme from Nagisa Oshima’s “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence”) as if the notes were flowing through his body for the first time. The camera sometimes captures his face reflected in the piano; the microphone sometimes picks up his breathing. Around 40 minutes in, Sora catches his father in what appears to be a brief moment of hesitation — but Sakamoto quickly corrects course. “Let’s go again,” he says, before starting a gorgeous rendition of his late-1990s composition “Aqua.” Shortly after, Sakamoto acknowledges that he is pushing himself.
“Opus” provides an opportunity to watch the gracefulness of Sakamoto’s technique — the precision of how his fingers hit the keys, the care with which he tweaks the strings to create a more metallic sound for one song. Sora’s camera pulls back to Sakamoto in long shot as the grandness of his score for “The Last Emperor” echoes through the studio. The last image before the credits is of a piano somehow playing itself, without a musician in sight. Sakamoto’s ethereal notes — and then, apparently, the sound of his footsteps — are left to hang in the air.
The post Three Great Documentaries to Stream appeared first on New York Times.
