On March 11, 1989, Cops premiered on American TV. The reality show—still going strong today after 33 seasons—pairs camera crews with American law enforcement, giving small-screen viewers a front row seat to the day-to-day protection provided by the men and women of countless local, state, and federal jurisdictions. Invoking memories of Cops comes Ukrainian Sheriffs, a ride-along documentary from director Roman Bondarchuk.

The doc follows the exploits of a pair of sheriffs—Victor and Volodya—in the remote Ukrainian village of Stara Zburjivka. The duo, appointed by village Mayor Viktor Marunyak, respond to any and all calls from the town’s 1,800 residents, be they issues as mundane as domestic complaints or as serious as the discovery of a dead body. With cameras ever at the ready, the film is reminiscent of that American reality crime show.

Truth be told, Ukrainian Sheriffs pales in comparison to Cops from the angle of pure onscreen gratification. Where the US television show has the luxury of cherry-picking from only the sauciest of crimes recorded, this film, despite covering a period of time that is at least a year long (based only on seasonal clues), has very little excitement in the area of criminal activity. Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe, in a town of 1,800 citizens, things like broken windows and domestic squabbles are good to be the worst things these men see. But that doesn’t make it a compelling documentary. And while it’s quaint that Victor and Volodya are less enforcers of law and more voices of reason (arbitrating conflict in most cases and deferring real crime to Ukrainian police officials), it all grows tiresome.

Bondarchuk also struggles to find anything interesting in the personal lives of his two protagonists. The film attempts to humanize these individuals, but instead only succeeds in giving the viewer a look behind a very dull curtain, revealing activity that isn’t interesting beyond the base curiosity of seeing how people live in a part of the world otherwise unknown.

Where the film excels, though, is its look at the bigger political picture. The film is slow to start, but as it gets going, it delves into political areas similar to those found in other Ukraine-centric docs like Maidan and Winter on Fire, by visiting and revisiting the escalating Crimean tensions. However, Ukrainian Sheriffs does so on a local scale—namely, how the national crisis and the battle with Russia could affect local men subject to being drafted. It’s thought-provoking stuff that offers insight into the conflicting approaches to responsibility, survival, and patriotism that these men wrestle with, and that other men judge them on.

As a whole, Ukrainian Sheriffs can’t meet the challenge to make its own subject matter interesting. It might have its moments, but those moments aren’t enough to compensate for the rest. This is a film best suited for Ukrainian doc completists or people with a vested interest in the regional ongoings.

The story behind Dean Fleischer-Camp’s documentary Fraud is an interesting one. The director is said to have stumbled upon footage on YouTube—over 100 hours worth—of a American middle-class family of four living out their lives in front of a video camera, but this isn’t just any wannabe reality story. Fleischer-Camp pared that footage down to a scant 52 minutes to paint a picture of a man and woman so materialistic, they would jeopardize their own freedom and their children’s future for the chance to spend, spend, spend.

The family of four—thirty-something parents and two young children both under the age of about seven—is introduced to the viewer on 5/26/12 (according to the camera’s date stamp). Little is known about the family other than what can put together through the footage: they live in a small, cluttered house, suggesting lower-middle-class, and they are obsessed with anything related to an affluent lifestyle. As their bills mount and their resources dwindle, the family takes desperate measures to improve their cash flow so they can live what they perceive to be the good life, consequences be damned. The film ends on 10/3/12.

Less than five minutes into Fraud, I had my hand raised, calling shenanigans (please forgive the granularity of the next paragraph; it’s in support of a greater point).

At the film’s start, The Man, who does 99% of what presents itself as around-the-clock filming, records The Woman reading a pair of bank notices. The first notice is a decline letter for a new credit card. The other is in reference to a bounced payment. I understand the narcissistic obsession that comes with self-recording, but that The Man would record something as humiliating to himself and his family as that, and The Woman wouldn’t object, felt like a stretch. Still, and despite any change in tenor to The Family’s mood, I allowed that maybe reaction shots and debates had been edited out. I allowed it, that is, until the next scene where, in the interest of raising money, The Family has a yard sale. By the time the dust settles, they take their loot and head off to several retailers, including an Apple store, where everyone in The Family scores a new iPhone.

I called shenanigans again. Their declined credit card application suggests they were maxed out on their existing plastic, and the bounced payment suggests they were cash-strapped too, leaving only their yard sale earnings to fuel their shopping spree. I’ve never known a yard to generate north of $1000 in a single afternoon, and while the quick cuts of the film don’t afford a good look at the wares on sale, The Family’s living conditions suggest they didn’t have anything of high value to begin with, nor did they have a high quantity of lower-value items to unload.

This sequence is a terrific example of the film’s strength—it moves fast—but it’s also emblematic of the film’s great, great problem: it strains credulity from start to finish. Even if the action in the first five minutes of the film is factual, it raises such an eyebrow that all subsequent moments become the subject of intense scrutiny. That scrutiny then helps expose other improbable actions and events, up to and including the crime the film is named after and the subsequent cover-up; blatant timeline discrepancies between when events actually happen and the time stamp of the video; more private, humiliating moments filmed without shame or objection; the complete absence of questions from people The Family interacts with; and, perhaps most unsettling, the lack of any sense of genuine emotion between The Man and The Woman (and by extension, The Kids). These two people are more like high school buddies than a committed couple, and not once did I believe they were emotionally involved with each other or their children.

By the end of the film, so many unbelievable events and moments and decisions had happened, I called shenanigans on all 52 minutes. In a world where anyone is capable of anything, and anyone is capable of filming anything they are capable of, the four months this family spends on a money-burning binge rang as improbable as anything can.

And yet I couldn’t stop thinking about the film after it was over…and the next day, too. Despite the superficiality of it, I couldn’t deny how mesmerizing it was. Part of this is because of the audacity of the director, but the other part of it, the larger part of it, is that while this so-called family might not have gone through those onscreen moments “in real life,” a lot of families in America have indeed suffered (or enjoyed, depending on how you look at it) some of those moments—living beyond their financial means, committing fraud, endangering children, you name it—all in the name of being able to spend money they otherwise wouldn’t normally have to spend. The nuclear (wasted) family Fleischer-Camp presents onscreen is like a composite of the unseemly denizens of an America obsessed with materialism and wealth, and it is chilling.

Therein lies the dilemma in terms of rating this film. As a documentary, it’s bad, and the title is apt. In fact, I wouldn’t even grant this specious work a “docudrama” moniker. But as a piece of visual art, effectively lean in runtime and edited with surgical precision, its statement on the skewed perceptions of the importance of money versus responsibility held by so many Americans, is like nothing I’ve seen before. That it achieves this without passing judgment makes it all the more impressive. Fraud is not a documentary about one family; it’s a reflection on a culture—a reflection that is as hard to look at as it is as hard to look away from.

When Sonita premiered last year at Amsterdam’s documentary film festival IDFA, it walked away with the audience award, a win that isn’t too surprising considering the film’s story. Director Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami follows Sonita, an 18-year-old Afghan immigrant living with her sister and niece in Iran. Sonita is a restless creative, who aspires to become a rapper despite the personal, cultural, and political hurdles in her way. And perhaps the biggest hurdle comes from Sonita’s own family, who tell her she needs to come back home so they can force her into an arranged marriage. The reason for the marriage is purely financial: they’ll be selling her off to another family, and by doing so will have enough money to pay for the wedding of Sonita’s brother.

Sonita plays out as a conventional success story, and Maghami’s commitment to this structure eventually holds the film back from exploring issues beyond Sonita’s own story. It’s an issue that comes to a head around the midway point when Sonita is days away from being taken back to Afghanistan. After Sonita’s mother says she’ll postpone the wedding if they get some money, Maghami considers paying the family off herself, a breach of ethics that even her own crew tells her to avoid doing. Maghami’s transparency about her own involvement into the story, along with her selfish intentions (at one point she says that if Sonita goes to Afghanistan her movie will be over), adds a layer of complexity that winds up highlighting her film’s shortcomings.

By paying off Sonita’s family to let her stay in Iran, Maghami exposes her desire to mold the film in a way that fits the success story narrative. And while Maghami’s openness about becoming a direct player in her film is commendable, it’s not a topic she dwells on too much; the debate over her actions gets swept under the rug not long after it’s brought up, and the focus switches over to Sonita making a music video for her first proper single. It’s not the manipulation itself that’s bothersome (documentaries always manipulate in some form or another, and the expectation of objectivity is an archaic one), it’s that Maghami does it to help her film follow a smooth, accessible narrative arc.

Still, Maghami has found a compelling presence in Sonita, and her film has a feel-good quality that’s undeniable. But it’s hard to remove the feeling that, because of her motivations, Maghami is less of an observer and more of a puppet master.

The implicit trust that comes with viewing documentaries gets abused in Penny Lane’s NUTS!, a documentary about an interesting—and overlooked—story from Depression-era America. The subject in Lane’s film is Dr. John Romulus Brinkley, a doctor from Kansas who attempted to cure impotence by putting goat testicles into his patients. The method appeared to work, and Brinkley went on to be a success, turning his fortune into an empire when he invested it into building a radio station. As Brinkley’s success grew, the American Medical Association began targeting him because of his unorthodox medical practices, taking him to court and trying to ruin his businesses. Lane tells Brinkley’s story entirely through animated re-enactments, with a few talking head interviews along the way.

If the idea of goat testicle transplants curing impotence sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is; Brinkley was nothing more than an excellent con artist who took advantage of the placebo effect to paint himself as a medical genius. And Lane, taking inspiration from Brinkley, structures her film as a con job on viewers, treating Brinkley’s story as true until she pulls back the curtain in the final act. But Lane’s decision to deceive is misguided. In her attempt to point out how people are easy to let themselves be duped Lane only highlights the staleness of her message, along with the ethical murkiness of lying about such slight material. In reality, Lane’s deception is fueled by entertainment more than anything, as it gives her the ability to manufacture a twisty narrative while excusing her own behaviour by explaining herself at the end.

If NUTS! had a purpose for its narrative structure beyond trying to pull a fast one on viewers for kicks, it might have been less objectionable. Instead, Lane takes advantage of non-fiction for petty and selfish reasons, which makes Lane not too far removed from her own subject.

Watching a documentary filmed in real-time is always fascinating to me. Unlike a traditional doc that starts with an idea and involves months of planning, research, scheduling, and execution, a real-time doc feels much more adventurous; the filmmakers are just as unaware of what will happen next as the viewers. It requires a little luck, too. Picking a compelling subject for a traditional doc is one thing, but for something compelling to happen to a subject in a real-time doc is another thing entirely. Director Christy Garland hopes to capture some of that magic in Cheer Up.

The city of Rovaniemi, Finland is located at the Arctic Circle and, as one might expect, offers a stunning and picturesque winter landscape. But in addition to all that beautiful snow and cold, the city is home to the Ice Queens, a competitive cheerleading squad led by Coach Miia. The term “competitive” is as literal as it is generous, though. The squad technically competes at the Finnish National Qualifiers, but they are dreadful, even to the amateur eye. Tired of losing and tired of coaching a lackluster team, Miia seeks inspiration where nobody does cheerleading better: Dallas, Texas, USA. At Cheer Athletics, Miia visits with the staff and squads who put on a cheering (and coaching) clinic, producing the kind of results Miia could only dream about. Dazzled by the energy of the staff and the commitment of the cheerleaders, Miia returns home energized and ready to make some changes for—and to—the squad, until developments happen in her personal life that change the course of the team’s collective future.

In her third feature documentary, Christy Garland doesn’t simply cover the sad-sack exploits of the cheerless cheer squad. She also focuses her lens on the private lives of three individuals from the team: Coach Miia and two teenage cheerleaders, Aino and Patricia. On the surface, they are all unique. Aino is the raven-haired rebel, smoking behind the school and partying at night when she isn’t trying to land a flip. Patricia is the girl-next-door, but one garnering sympathy with a life marred by the loss of her mother. And Miia is the single woman whose obsession with Marilyn Monroe ranges from decorations on her walls to bleach-blonde hair and a “Monroe piercing” above her lip.

While these differences make the young women unique, and while cheerleading connects them, what bonds them (unbeknownst to them) are their fractured relationships with men and their sometimes staggeringly-poor life choices. Aino rushes to live with her immature boyfriend, Patricia is at stubborn odds with her father, and Miia’s man trouble defies even a veiled mention here for fear of revealing too much.

This is the kind of narrative that makes real-time documentary filmmaking so great—a director chooses a general topic that is unique, finds the smaller stories within the larger tale that might lead to something special, and pursues those stories. All of these components are present in Cheer Up, and yet the magic never quite happens.

Most of where Garland struggles is with trying to keep the story compelling. The monotony of the lives of these women seeps through the screen to turn the experience into a monotonous experience. This is no indictment of the women or their lives, but rather how they are presented on film. It’s as if Garland is concerned with being melodramatic, so she reigns everything in so tightly she creates something anti-dramatic. The result is observation to a fault.

Even the most structured and well-planned of documentaries need some kind of drama, so surely a real-time doc needs it too. Cheer Up doesn’t have it.

Garland also retreats from any kind of ongoing focus on the cheerleading aspect of the story, instead occasionally returning to it as a reminder that, oh yes, this is what these girls do. There are moments in practice when Miia pushes the girls harder, and there are moments when more than one girl loses a little blood in the process, but it’s all very rote in its revisitation. The lessons learned in life never translate to lessons learned in the gym, nor vice-versa.

Cheer Up is incredibly well-intended and has some good moments, particularly Sari Aaltonen’s cinematography. But with its flat presentation and dearth of any riveting moments, the film plays more like an after-school special about the pitfalls of teen decision-making than it does a documentary about young women struggling to make something more of their lives.

Wizard Mode, from directors Nathan Drillot and Jeff Petry, is named after a term used in the pinball community. Some pinball machines have something akin to a video game’s hidden or locked bonus level achieved after executing a series of difficult tasks. Salazar attempts to make a metaphoric connection between this achievement and the achievements of Robert Gagno, a top-10 globally ranked competitive pinball player and a twentysomething young man suffering from autism, who has been trying to live his life as normally as possible.

At a high level, the metaphor works. Just as Gagno strives to win pinball tournaments, climb the world rankings, and achieve “wizard mode” in those machines that have it, he realizes over the course of the film he has to put the same kind of focus on gaining his independence. He has goals—a job, a driver’s license, living on his own, and eventually romance—but it will take a “wizard mode”-level effort to achieve this.

Presented in the film are some components one would expect about the life of an autistic pinball wizard, like old home movies flashing back to Gagno’s youth while haunting voiceovers from his parents offer memories of learning about their son’s condition. There’s also footage of some tournaments Gagno competes in (with his father playing the role of chaperone, driver, and coach), plus a who’s who of globally ranked pinball players, about each of whom Robert can point out player strengths. But with the exception of that narrated home footage, none of these parts are the least bit compelling in their presentation. Even the moments at the tournaments—regardless of how Gagno performs at them—fail to generate any sense of excitement or intensity.

Those tournament scenes also expose two fatal flaws in the film. The first is that it’s incredibly one-sided. Perspectives are offered from Gagno and his parents, but the pinball community is not tapped to speak to the type of person or player Gagno is. The second is more of a technical issue: Salazar doesn’t know how to make pinball very interesting. There is a lot of visual action in the game of pinball, from the speed of the silver sphere to how much of a nudge will earn the player a tilt. All of that visual action, combined with the glorious sound of an arcade running at full speed, should grab the viewer’s attention, but that never happens.

Despite some strengths, Wizard Mode’s inability to ever find a rhythm is too much for the film to bear. Gagno seems like a good person, and pinball sure looks fun, but in this film neither of them are sold very well.

One of the great joys for fans of true independent documentary filmmaking is having the chance to hear stories that might not otherwise be told. High-profile documentaries are great, and those stories need to be heard as well, but for every flashy doc there are countless other docs that offer unique glimpses into unknown lives, uncharted worlds, and times that have long since passed. Such is the story of Hotel Dallas from Livia Ungur, who acts as co-writer and co-director on a film about her own experiences.

As the 1980s wound down, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu recognized that the people oppressed under the boot of his Communist tyranny were growing restless and itching for freedom. In a placating move, Ceaușescu allowed the state-run television station to air reruns of America’s wildly popular drama Dallas. The prime-time soap starred Larry Hagman as evil oil tycoon J.R. Ewing and Patrick Duffy as his much kinder brother, Bobby. So popular did the show become in Ceaușescu’s corner of the Eastern Bloc, an entrepreneurial individual modeled a building after the home of the Ewings’ fictitious Southfork Ranch and turned it into a hotel, where guests could temporarily pretend they were living in 1980s Dallas.

While it’s technically accurate to call Hotel Dallas a documentary, the term both oversells and undersells the film, a juxtaposition that offers an interesting opportunity for Ungur (and her co-creator/husband Sherng-Lee Huang), but one that hampers the work as a whole.

From the oversell perspective, Hotel Dallas offers less in the way of what a viewer might expect in a documentary set in this place and time. While the filmmakers properly frame the geopolitical landscape so the importance of the TV show to oppressed Romanians is clear, there isn’t a great amount of interest from the filmmakers in exploring it too deeply. There are some fine voiceover testimonies to be heard from people who lived there and then, and it’s clear the show was a godsend to those people (and perhaps something of a backfire on Ceaușescu), but they are only soundbites offering a sketch, not narratives offering a complete picture.

This is where calling it a documentary somewhat undersells the film, as it is far more artistically experimental than the average documentary, with parts of the film delving into everything from philosophical oppression to complete fantasy.

The highlights of this avant-doc portion of moviemaking are three scenes played out by Romanian child actors dressed as Pioneers—Romania’s Communist youth organization. In one scene, the kids reenact the death of Bobby Ewing as seen on TV (something Ungur admits to being traumatized by when she was a child). In another scene, Bobby Ewing is “reborn,” a moment taken from Dallas‘ now-infamous shower episode. In the third scene, and in keeping with themes of life and death, the children replay the Christmas execution of Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena—a chilling moment in stark monochrome, especially as performed by youngsters. There is also the chance to see an old Romanian oil company commercial starring Larry Hagman.

But the most fascinating artistic piece is the inclusion of Patrick Duffy himself throughout the entire film. He plays a character named Mr. Here (with a clever comic reason behind the name), but he channels his Bobby Ewing persona as if it were in a constant state of semi-consciousness. He is only seen onscreen once (in a recording studio scene that is slickly edited), and the rest of his “appearances” are voiceover, but from his POV. His purpose in the film is to bridge the gap between Hollywood fantasy and Romanian reality, along with bridging the time between Ungur’s modern-day existence and her Romanian youth. The pair actually travel back in time throughout the length of the film.

While some of the filmmaking is quite good when being judged on its own merits, the blending of documentary and drama becomes too cute by half. Even if every scene was good, the filmmakers don’t quite have the skills to pull off something this audacious. Using fantasy to tell the truth, or injecting the truth with fantasy to make a point, is tricky, and too often I found myself wondering what was real and what wasn’t, a question a viewer shouldn’t have when watching something that presents itself as factual. The filmmakers’ raw talent here is evident, but it’s unfocused. The facts are interesting, and the artistic choices are compelling, but the two aren’t meaty enough to work together very well.

Darius McCollum loves public transit. More specifically, he loves the trains that stream through the MTA system. The New York subway has been a lifelong obsession for him—a playground, a safe haven, and a place where new friends are never in short supply. It’s also a forbidden source of temptation, as Darius has been arrested more than 30 times for impersonating a train operator as well as various other transit employees. Considering his passion for the Transit Authority and his considerable knowledge of subway routes and procedures, one might wonder why Darius doesn’t apply for a position with the MTA rather than continue on as a criminal. As director Adam Irving details in Off the Rails, the reality of the situation is not so simple.

At the root of Darius’s compulsion is his Asperger’s syndrome. A defining characteristic of the disorder is an intense interest in one subject, and this has led Darius to study everything there is to know about the New York subway system. There is nothing malicious about his repeated transgressions. While most hijackings of public transit might spring from violent derangement or anarchistic intent, Darius’ actions rise from personal fulfillment and uncommon dutifulness. He follows the schedules, making every stop without deviation and carefully attending to any malfunctions with the necessary precautions.

Off the Rails takes viewers through the origins of this infatuation using home movies, cartoons, and testimonies from his mother as well as extensive interviews with the subject himself. We learn that Darius was bullied as a child and struggled to make friends. He found solace in the subway, where people didn’t judge him. Beloved by MTA employees for his enthusiasm, Darius became a kind of junior volunteer, helping out the operators with various tasks and eventually being taught how to run the train (an experience he compares to losing his virginity). But things turned sour when he was spotted behind the controls by police at the age of 15. Darius was arrested on the spot and soon became Public Enemy Number One to MTA executives for his repeated crimes, as posters bearing his image covered the subway walls. Even after growing to be of age, every application Darius sent to the corporation was rejected. Most of his life since that first arrest has found him wavering between jail time and virtual homelessness.

The documentary builds upon the context of Darius’s past to deliver a compelling study of his character and inner conflicts. We spend a lot of time with Darius, as the filmmakers capture his feelings with a compassionate camera, juxtaposing personal reflections with vibrant montages of train yards, bustling subway stations and brief scenes of everyday NYC street life. Listening to Darius, one gets the impression of a heartbreakingly sincere man—a man who sees the value in a few words of levity spoken to brighten another person’s day, who refers to Superman as a moral standard to live by, and who wrestles with delusions of his capacity for self-control. Darius may call himself “shy,” but he makes some fascinating insights, and his consistent presence really holds the film together.

Unfortunately, the audience isn’t allowed to draw its own conclusions on his behavior, as multiple therapists and Asperger’s specialists are brought on as talking heads. A certain degree of clinical observation is necessary to better understand Darius’ needs, but the impulse to frequently cut to the experts feels excessive. Rather than letting the implications of the subject’s words and actions stand by themselves (with perhaps some minor supporting commentary from those close to him), the filmmakers lean a little too heavily on the objective assessments to fill out their central characterization. As a result, Darius’ narrative comes off as slightly less intimate and more constructed.

About halfway through Off the Rails, the film begins to shift its focus from Darius to the legal system he finds himself ensnared in. Irving confronts the perpetual cycle of law-breaking and incarceration, taking aim at a courtroom that fails to acknowledge Darius’ unique psychological circumstances and a correctional department that doesn’t know what to do with him. This is where the sound bites from therapists and experts are most meaningful. The film campaigns for common sense solutions, calling upon the MTA to hire a man who would likely be their best employee and arguing for court rulings that wouldn’t serve to exacerbate the situation. A portrait of injustice begins to take shape and Darius is effectively painted as the victim of institutional neglect.

Pulling its unusual subject matter from the tongue-in-cheek headlines of local TV news, Off the Rails serves to humanize a person too often made out to be an eccentric curiosity. It’s a solid character study that admirably balances empowerment, hardship, empathy, and advocacy.

Regardless of industry—sports, music, journalism, etc.—a Hall of Fame is the last stop for anyone who has had an impact on, or is a legend within, their field. And what usually accompanies an induction into a Hall of Fame is a retrospective of that person’s life and/or career. Burlesque is no different, and director Rama Rau uses the Burlesque Hall of Fame induction weekend as the backdrop to her new documentary League of Exotique Dancers.

The film looks at the lives and careers of golden-age burlesque dancers, as recounted by the dancers themselves. The women, with sensational names like Gina Bon Bon, Kitten Natividad, and Lovey Goldmine, are as brash, sassy, and unfiltered as one would hope retired burlesque dancers would be. These “titans of tease” are also quite eager to capture one more moment in the spotlight, and they get their chance when asked to perform in front of a live audience as part of the induction weekend. The revisiting of their professional paths and personal perils within their vocation is positioned to offer a unique and thorough perspective on the history of burlesque dancing and the lives of its dancers.

In addition to the women’s tales, there are plenty of greater stories to be told in League of Exotique Dancers, including the history of burlesque (or at least its golden age), the impact—good or bad—the burlesque trade had on women (and not just the women featured here), and in the case of the dancer Toni Elling, how being an African-American burlesque dancer affected her in a racially-charged time in our country.

By the end of the film, none of these larger themes are ever explored. The perspectives of the dancers are certainly unique, but the thoroughness of their stories is the film’s ultimate weakness. This doesn’t happen in spite of the fact Rau has the shared experiences of these dancers in front of her, it happens because of it. Rather than pluck stories from each dancer’s life and use them to build any kind of greater narrative, Rau offers a hailstorm of experiences presented in such a staccato fashion that the film leaves the impression that each of the dancers filled out the same questionnaire and filmed their answers.

A few ladies talk about bad relationships. A few ladies talk about addiction. A few ladies talk about their current professions, and so on. It’s an attempt to tell history by way of list-making, and it fails to resonate. To its benefit, League of Exotique Dancers offers a terrific collection of vintage imagery, including still photos, old reels, etc., but these become nothing more than slideshow images accompanying a collection of verbal bullet points. There’s a story to be told about the golden age of burlesque. This film isn’t that story.

What begins as a search for a humourous news story turns into something far more insidious in David Farrier and Dylan Reeve’s Tickled, a documentary that’s living proof of how truth is always stranger than fiction. Farrier, a reporter in New Zealand, comes upon a website offering young men money to get tied up and tickled in front of a camera (something the site calls “Competitive Endurance Tickling” in the hopes of making it sound more professional). When he tries getting in touch with the site’s owners about doing a story, he gets a nasty reply mocking his sexual orientation followed by legal threats. The unexpected response only interests Farrier more, who recruits his friend Reeve to help investigate by flying to America in the hopes of finding out who creates these tickling videos. What they find is the stuff of conspiracy thrillers, except it involves an empire of online tickling fetish videos (like I said: truth is stranger than fiction).

Tickled is the kind of documentary that relies almost entirely on the twists and turns of its story, meaning that it’s best to go in knowing as little as possible about what Farrier and Reeve discover as they dig deeper into the rabbit hole they stumbled upon. It’s as if both directors know just how incredible their story is, preferring a straightforward, investigative approach that’s paced like a mystery/thriller. And while this approach is entertaining enough, its adherence to a more conventional narrative format winds up sidestepping some of the important questions and ideas that come up during the course of the investigation. There might be plenty to say here about the power of the internet, how for some it can be used more as a weapon than a tool, but it’s drowned out by Farrier and Reeve’s desire to package their film as something more accessible and familiar. Tickled tells a great, sensational story, one that will have people buzzing the same way that Catfish did back in 2010, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that Farrier and Reeve could have done a lot more with their story than simply tell it as is.

Deep in the wilderness of northern British Columbia beats the heart of the Tahltan people. They’re a First Nations tribe, surrounded by breathtaking snow-capped mountains and sharing space with various beasts they’ve called neighbors for thousands of years. The glorious expanse is seemingly timeless, largely unspoiled by deforestation and man-made structures. But as the Tahltan people struggle to retain their language and keep up native traditions in the 21^st century, a new threat to their land and way of life looms. Companies wanting to mine the area for its copper and gold set up shop, and their plans put the health of the land at stake.

Director Nettie Wild weaves a dazzling tapestry with KONELĪNE: our land beautiful. More formally experimental than the average documentary, the film doesn’t attack the environmental issues through any one perspective. In fact, there isn’t much of anything here that qualifies as an “attack” at all. The approach is far more meditative. A multitude of voices overlap, sharing feelings and personal histories while Wild showcases the region through expressive cinematography and editing. What this method produces is a lyrical ode to a bountiful and diverse landscape, along with the human beings who make it their home.

For all the beauty of KONELĪNE’s visuals, it’s the human subjects who make up the bedrock of the film. A series of vignette-like sequences are threaded throughout, giving the audience some quality time with the lifestyle and viewpoints of Tahltan natives and foreigners alike. Wild follows local fishermen as they cast their nets, a woman guiding hunters on horseback through steep mountain ranges, and a man with a dogsled who speaks with pride about running the same trails his ancestors followed. She speaks with a driller who chronicles the area’s geological history, and turns her camera on a pair of conflicted Tahltan mining employees who say that, in their impoverished state, they can’t afford to turn down the jobs.

This is only a sampling of the subjects that take the spotlight. The doc’s colorful tableau of experiences brings the viewer close to the realities of living in the region, and Wild appears to take pleasure in documenting the nitty-gritties of everyday work, showing a narrow focus on the work each person does with their hands. Horseshoes are fashioned and fastened to scuffed hooves, transition lines are painstakingly set up by a small crew, and fish are carefully cleaned at homemade butchering stations by the riverbank—all of this captured with a strong attention to detail. For fans of Werner Herzog, some of these scenes may feel reminiscent of his film Happy People: A Year in the Taiga in their fascination with the earthly qualities of independent living.

The film cannot be discussed without addressing its handling of the environment. The remote countryside is lensed with the same attention to detail as the people, but the land conveys the added weight of something formidable and pure. Wide shots capture postcard-ready vistas, and well-placed close-ups—such as one of hailstones falling on butterfly wings—express a measure of fragility. As one of the interviewees notes, it’s a land “with a personality.” Aided by a soundscape that mixes twinkling bells with wind gusts and rhythmic tribal drums, Wild demonstrates how that personality transfers to the spirit of the people who live off the land.

KONELĪNE: our land beautiful is a serenely delivered tribute to the Tahltan people and the earth they’re tied to. The themes here echo environmentalism, but the film moves more like a poem than a preachy assault on corporate greed. This is transportive, ethereal documentary filmmaking that is well-worth experiencing on the biggest screen possible.

“It’s a once-only chance to make the dead live again.” So states William Grimes, former book and restaurant critic, and current obituary writer, for the New York Times, in director Vanessa Gould’s marvelous documentary Obit. While the quote perfectly captures the essence of what real obituary writing is about, the film goes deeper than that, offering a lesson in history, a glimpse behind the scenes at the New York Times, a course in journalism, and a clinic in succinct writing.

It’s a tricky story to tell, as it combines a morbid subject with an activity—writing—that doesn’t necessarily make for compelling viewing. Gould understands this and rises to the challenge by approaching her subject from several angles. The backbone of the film is the linear thread: the anatomy of an obituary, from a fact-finding phone interview with a decedent’s widow first thing in the morning, to discussions on narrative approach in the afternoon, to filing the piece just under deadline in the evening.

Routinely stepping away from this so as not to get lost in function, Gould features a collection of deftly edited discussions with the NYT’s obit writing and editorial staff. Each discussion is fascinating, but none more so than those with Jeff Roth, the gloriously eccentric man in charge of “The Morgue,” where the newspaper’s history, and by extension the history of everyone who has ever been mentioned in the paper, is stored and catalogued. These discussions offer terrific anecdotal insight into the perception of obituaries and, more importantly, their history. This is where Gould’s film takes off.

A highlight reel of dazzling breadth, consisting of memories, news clips, and even video footage, spotlights one of the most interesting facets of obituaries: who gets one. Unlike your local paper, the NYT doesn’t publish everyone’s obit; someone has to have had a measurable impact to warrant one.

And it isn’t just celebrities, world leaders, or titans of industry who are considered to have had an impact. Included in this collection are the inventor of the Slinky, the pilot of the Enola Gay, an exotic dancer with ties to Jack Ruby, and the last surviving plaintiff from Brown v Board of Education, to name only a few. Every story is as amazing as the one before it and after, and if the anatomy of an obit is the backbone of the film, these highlight reels are the alluring soft parts.

With Obit, Vanessa Gould proves something I’ve said for years: pound-for-pound…or perhaps word-for-word is more apt…there is no better writing, and no better storytelling, in any national daily newspaper than there is in the obituary section. Obits are more than resumés of the deceased; obits are everyone’s last chance at life.