Documentaries Archives

This Netflix documentary about the Formula One legend makes for compelling viewing, even if you’ve never heard his name

by Dennis Burger
March 30, 2020

Could Superman beat the Incredible Hulk? Is Batman a match for Iron-Man? These sorts of questions have filled the dreams of kids and comic-book geeks alike for decades, but they’re rarely seen as any more than conversation starters or flights of fancy. And yet, for some reason, asking who’s the greatest baseball player or quarterback or goalie of all time is viewed as legitimate discourse amongst grown-ass men and scholars alike.

Those of us who follow motorsports (serious ones, at least) know what a ridiculous question this is when applied to our own passion. Auto racing is as much about the team as it is the pilot. It’s as much about the car as the team. It’s as much about the chaos of meteorological conditions as it is the car. And, yes, we all have our favorite drivers (shout-out to Jan Magnussen), but that often has as much to do with personality or manufacturer affiliation as it does talent.

But such subjectivity didn’t satisfy Dr. Andrew Bell of the Sheffield Methods Institute, who set out in 2016 to use quantitative statistical analysis to remove (or at least account for) the differences made by cars, teams, weather, and even year-to-year variance in order to determine who was the best Formula One pilot of all time. I mention this research only because the resulting paper forms the backbone of the new Netflix documentary A Life of Speed: The Juan Manuel Fangio Story. And this fact alone—the use of scientific parsing to answer the question of who could beat whom if they never competed head-to-head—makes for one of the most fascinating sports documentaries I’ve seen in ages—perhaps ever.

As with any documentary focusing on the accomplishments of a single individual, A Life of Speed leans heavily on biography and provides a solid understanding of who Fangio was and what made him tick, even if you’ve never heard his name before. It also provides a pretty satisfying history of Formula One, a sport that emerged just as Fangio was making a name for himself in long-distance dirt-road racing. On top of that, it sprinkles in a bit of the history of automotive engineering.

Truth be told, if the film weren’t so well made, it would probably crumble under its own weight. It attempts to be three or four documentaries at once—which is at least two too many—and if not for the talents of director Francisco Macri and editor Luciano Origlio, it would be a mess. Somehow, though, it isn’t a mess. Quite the opposite—by juggling so many balls so effectively, A Life of Speed manages to be interesting in several ways simultaneously.

Of course, given its historical nature, the bulk of the film is comprised of archival photographs, old film stock, kinescope recordings, and even a few well-played VHS tapes. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing for Netflix’ 4K HDR presentation to latch onto, though. The present-day interviews and newly filmed historical reenactments are beautifully framed, wonderfully composed, and have a distinctive low-contrast look that still makes great use of the enhanced dynamic range and color gamut of modern home video standards.

If there’s one glaring criticism I can level from a creative perspective, it’s that the score is just awful. If you’ve ever used one of those power-nap apps that are all the rage these days, you’ll recognize the New Age-y ambience in a heartbeat.

Also, the film is presented in a 2.39:1 aspect ratio, which wouldn’t be a problem except for the fact that Netflix positions its subtitles halfway into the black bar at the bottom of the screen, with no way of moving them. So if you’re using a constant-height projection setup, you’ll likely miss half the film’s dialogue and narration (unless you speak Spanish, Italian, German, and English).

Don’t let those quibbles turn you off, though. Even if you’re not a fan of Formula One—indeed, even if you’ve never heard the name Fangio—A Life of Speed is one of those rare documentaries whose quality isn’t contingent upon your interest in the subject matter.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE | Although most of the film is made up of archival material, Netflix’ 4K HDR presentation does a great job with the present-day interviews and newly filmed historical reenactments

Review: The Edge of Democracy

review | The Edge of Democracy

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This Oscar-nominated Netflix film is less a documentary than a personal journal about Brazil’s tentative hold on democracy

by Dennis Burger
January 28, 2020

The Edge of Democracy is one of the most infuriating, frustrating, and foreboding films I’ve seen in ages but also one of the most compelling, and without a doubt the most haunting. Had it been your typical faux-objective political documentary, I’m not sure that would have been the case. But in telling the story of Brazil’s relatively recent political struggles, filmmaker Petra Costa makes no pretenses about objectivity. What she’s really telling here is her own story—a story about watching her civilization collapse around her.

Right from the giddy-up, Costa lays all of her cards on the table. Her parents were revolutionaries who fought against the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil between 1964 and 1985. She was only five when the country officially returned to democracy in 1988. Her first vote in a national election was cast for Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The ideology of Partido dos Trabalhadores, the Worker’s Party, runs through her veins.

As such, when she began documenting the crumbling of Brazil’s fragile democracy, starting with the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2015, she didn’t do so dispassionately, with the eye of a historian. More than anything, The Edge of Democracy centers on her own frustrations, sense of foreboding, fury as she watches her country being torn apart by partisanship, fueled by the corruption of oligarchs and the malfeasance of the media.

You wouldn’t think this would be fodder for twists and turns, but it is. Rather than plot twists, though, the film dwells in personal, emotional twists. There’s the revelation, for example, that Costa has just as many familial ties to the oligarchs at the center of the corruption scandal that rocked the country as she does to revolutionaries.

That adds another shade of gray to a very personal story that’s all shades of gray, really. It’s a story told with nuance, but also with passion. More than anything, though, what impresses me is Costa’s ability to deftly and clearly straddle the line between the specific and the general. She never fails to articulate the unique failures of the Brazilian political and judicial system that make all of this a distinctly Brazilian problem. On the other hand, she clearly illuminates some universal truths about the ways in which any representative government can devolve into plutocracy and then autocracy through demagoguery and manufactured consent.

The rhythm with which she oscillates between these two perspectives is frighteningly effective. Just as I started to settle into a “Phew, that couldn’t happen here” sense of security, Costa blindsided me with a stark reminder that, yeah, it totally could. The tempo and pacing of the film are also aided by deft editing and a non-linear unfolding of the story that emphasizes both the personal, emotional trauma this film represents, as well as its effectiveness as a warning to the rest of the world.

Much of the imagery that comprises the film is taken from archival film footage and TV broadcasts, some of it from source tapes and some of it from cell phones pointed at TV screens, mixed with handheld video that looks to be prosumer level and drone shots interspersed throughout for flavor. It definitely makes for a visually interesting film, though not one you’ll watch as demo material. Netflix HD transfer does the imagery justice, and is almost never the weak link in the delivery chain, except in those cases where a few seconds here and there of original footage might have benefited from high dynamic range and an expanded color gamut.

The Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 soundtrack unsurprisingly leans heavily on the center channel, with the mix focusing primarily on Costa’s narration (provided in your choice of English or Portuguese, although even if you opt for the former, the bulk of the audio is still in Portuguese with subtitles).

The sound design does occasionally get a little big for its britches, especially in its overuse of the surround channels to convey the chaos of celebratory crowds or demonstrations. I can’t help but suspect that what we’re getting here is a theatrical sound mix not a nearfield mix made for home theaters, but the good news is that such overemphasis on surround sound is generally limited to scenes without narration or even dialogue so it’s hard to grump about it. It never interferes with the telling of the story, although it does intrude on moments that could have served as a prompt for quiet reflection.

No matter. I haven’t stopped thinking about The Edge of Democracy since I saw it so I’ve had plenty of opportunities to reflect on my own time. It’s a rare political documentary I think I’ll revisit on occasion, not due to the revelation or illumination contained within its 121-minute runtime—although there is plenty of that—but more due to the fact that it’s simply one of the most engrossing and intimate human dramas I’ve seen in ages, genre be damned.

PICTURE | Netflix’ HD transfer does the imagery justice and is almost never the weak link in the delivery chain, except when a few seconds of original footage might have benefited from high dynamic range and an expanded color gamut

SOUND | The Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 soundtrack unsurprisingly leans heavily on the center channel but does occasionally overuse the surround channels to convey the chaos of celebratory crowds or demonstrations

Review: Life in Color

review | Life in Color

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Netflix makes major strides toward picture-perfect reproduction with this David Attenborough nature series

by Dennis Burger
June 24, 2021

If you have someone in your life who insists that streaming simply isn’t capable of delivering an AV experience worthy of a true home cinema, here’s a fun little experiment you can perform, assuming you’re willing to spend a few bucks. If you don’t have one already, go out and buy a Roku Ultra for $75 or whatever they’re selling for at the moment. Hook it up to the biggest and best display in your home. Fire up either of the first two episodes of the new Netflix/BBC co-production Life in Color and skip past the opening credits. Then invite the bitrate dogmatist in your life to sit and watch a few minutes of the series. If they’re anything like most videophiles, they’ll soon be begging to borrow the disc or at least know what it’s called so they can order their own copy.

And that’s when you spring the trap. Hit the back button on your remote and return to the Netflix homepage. If your guest balks, hit Play again and implore them to point out any flaws in the imagery. Challenge them to show you any noteworthy compression artifacts. Ask them to point out any instances of less-than-razor-sharp detail, any loss of color purity. Or, you know, maybe take a kinder and gentler approach. It occurs to me as I’m writing this that perhaps there’s a good reason I don’t have more friends.

This series, played via good streaming hardware, needs to be put in front of the eyeballs of more home cinema enthusiasts, if only as a prime example of just how much streaming has improved in just the past few years. But even if you’re not here to inspect the imagery with a magnifying glass and marvel at the masterful application of high-efficiency compression, there’s a lot to love about Life in Color. The series is, in many ways, a bit of a throwback for host David Attenborough, a return to a time when he wasn’t merely narrating documentary footage but actively participating in the filming. I thought we’d seen the end of that era, given Attenborough’s age (95, for those keeping count). And this may be the last time we see him traipsing through the jungle to point out something cool and eye-catching.

It’s also something of a return to the more specialized sort of documentaries he more commonly made in the ’80s and ’90s. For the past few years, Attenborough has been focused on making grand statements, as if every new documentary released under his name was made as if it would be his last. But, as its name in implies, Life in Color is content to go deep rather than wide, focusing on one topic with laser precision: The variety of colors in nature.

The first episode, “Seeing in Color,” focuses on all the ways life uses chromaticity to attract mates, signal friends, and repel foes, as well as the different ways animals see in color, both within and outside of the spectrum visible to humans. The second episode, “Hiding in Color,” focuses mostly on camouflage.

The third episode, “Chasing Color,” is a weird one, and I mean that in the best possible way. It sets itself up as a sort of making-of for the first two episodes, exploring the new camera and lens technology developed specifically for this series. But then it veers off to answer to the question: “How do you know that?” In other words, it’s a pretty satisfying explanation of the science behind the surprising little bits of trivia dropped by Attenborough throughout the earlier episodes.

As much as I loved the series—although, truth be told, I would happily consume nine hours of Attenborough narrating golf, or paint drying, or my last colonoscopy, so maybe I’m not the best judge of its quality—I almost found myself distracted by how impossibly perfect it all looks. Just over two years ago, I absolutely raved about the gorgeousness of Our Planet. But Life in Color looks even better, mostly because the few remaining encoding flaws that made brief onscreen appearances in the older series are nowhere to be seen here.

There are underwater shots reminiscent of those in Our Planet, and yet none of the minor color banding that briefly reared its head there. There are scenes here that push the bounds of image complexity in ways Our Planet never did, and yet they appear without blemish. (There’s one shot, in which a peacock bristles its plume in slow motion, that’s such a kaleidoscope of fine detail that I would expect it to be riddled with some digital ookiness even at 100 mbps. And yet, with my nose on my screen, I couldn’t see any of the telltale signs of HEVC reaching its breaking point. I can only assume Netflix recently adopted a new encoder, because otherwise I just cannot make sense of why this imagery looks this pristine.)

Dolby Vision is also employed to stunning effect. There are colors on the screen that older home video technology simply wasn’t capable of reproducing—vibrant reds and yellows and greens that fall outside the boundaries of the color space used in the HD era.

I guess if you want to pick nits about the presentation, you could take issue with the fact that the audio is merely 5.1, not Dolby Atmos. But it’s still a lovely mix. And it up-mixes into Atmos beautifully, especially in the scenes set within jungles or forests.

So, yeah, maybe don’t take my advice when it comes to confronting your streaming-skeptical friends. Perhaps take a nicer approach. But make them sit down and watch Life in Color anyway. It’s honestly some of the most compelling home cinema demo material I’ve seen in years.

PICTURE | Dolby Vision is also employed to stunning effect, producing vibrant reds and yellows and greens that fall outside the boundaries of the color space used in the HD era

SOUND | The 5.1 soundtrack is lovely, and up-mixes into Atmos beautifully, especially in the scenes set within jungles or forests

Review: My Octopus Teacher

review | My Octopus Teacher

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This Oscar-nominated Netflix documentary is relentlessly self-obsessed but still worth watching for its nature footage

by Dennis Burger
April 6, 2021

Netflix’ My Octopus Teacher tells the story of Craig Foster, a South African director/cinematographer who, in the midst of a midlife crisis of sorts, commits to free-diving in the kelp forests near Cape Town every day to get his head together or whatever. During his dives, he quickly befriends a common octopus (Octopus vulgaris) and becomes obsessed with her life and daily habits.

Your enjoyment of the film will likely largely come down to whether or not you like Foster as a human being, because he not only narrates the film from beginning to end in the form of one continuous monologue but the footage often cuts to him sitting at a table, staring about three inches to the left of the camera, telling his tale Spalding Gray style.

He may be a perfectly fine man. I don’t know him. But he exhibits so many infuriating quirks that I found myself struggling to connect with him. He has an annoying habit shared by all emotionally distant people, in that he often refers to himself in the second person, present tense. So, “I realized” becomes “You realize,” and “I rushed to the surface as fast as I could” becomes “You rush to the surface as fast as you can.”

Far too often, when there’s the perfect opportunity to focus on the amazing underwater imagery of the octopus, we instead cut to Foster for absolutely no reason. He also almost never shuts up—except for a few shots where he stares into the camera and gulps pensively to let us know that it’s time to have an emotion. Shots that absolutely speak for themselves are narrated like a bad audio commentary from the early days of Laserdisc and DVD, when directors hadn’t figured out yet that they can occasionally stop talking if they don’t have anything interesting to say.

But those are pet peeves and don’t speak to the quality of My Octopus Teacher as a film. Here, too, I have some concerns, though. Most of the footage for this ostensibly nonfiction film was shot over the course of many months, and much of it was captured via handheld underwater cameras. In the process of stitching together a reasonably linear narrative, it’s obvious a lot of editorializing was done, which is totally fine. The problem comes from the fact that sometimes this editorializing feels far too forced.

At one point, for example, Foster’s octopus friend loses an arm in a shark attack. That in itself provides an opportunity to watch the fascinating process of her regrowing the arm over time. But since the narrative thread the filmmakers settled on centers on all the lessons Foster learned from the octopus, he of course has to concoct some hackneyed fable about how if this cephalopod could heal such a catastrophic wound, he could find a way to crawl out of his funk and hang out with his son. To call this a stretch would be to test the limits of elasticity.

About a quarter of the way into My Octopus Teacher, I really started to become distracted with the artifice of it all. And I say that as someone who is infatuated with David Attenborough’s world-spanning documentaries, many of which rely on footage that’s practically staged.

The difference is that Attenborough’s series don’t present themselves as personal journeys. My Octopus Teacher does. Foster tells the tale of his treks into the kelp forest as if no one else in the world existed, not even his family. The fact that he’s alone, that this is a solitary endeavor, is half the point of the narrative. And indeed, a lot of the best footage comes directly from his hand.

But then we’ll cut to a shot of him, underwater, holding his camera, which rightly raises the question: Wait, who’s filming that footage? There are also long top-down drone shots of Foster entering the ocean, which further undermines the integrity of the yarn he’s spinning about being oh-so-alone during this stretch of time.

So you’re probably wondering why I still recommend watching My Octopus Teacher despite all its problems. That simply comes down to the fact that Foster managed to capture some of the most compelling and fascinating footage I’ve ever seen of the daily life of an octopus. We get to see her hunting, hiding, and healing. We get to watch her study Foster as curiously as he studies her. But my favorite shot by far is a sequence in which Foster catches her playing, entertaining herself, staving off boredom. I wish he hadn’t intruded on this footage with his obvious observations about what she’s doing, because it’s clear to anyone with eyes. But there’s nearly literally nothing Foster could have done to diminish the value of this imagery.

And there are so many other shots throughout the film that have the same impact. Far too many documentaries about cephalopods focus on animals in captivity. Here we have the opportunity to see this magnificent alien creature in her natural habitat, and I only wish I could think of a word more poignant than “revelatory” to describe my reaction to it all.

Granted, not all of that footage is what you would describe as home-cinema reference quality. The most compelling of it is more than a bit raw, kinda dingy, questionably lit, and obscured by silt. This is interspersed with much more professionally shot footage and the aforementioned indoor interview shots of Foster. But given that so much of the video is so unpolished, it’s not surprising that Netflix’ presentation wasn’t mastered in Dolby Vision. We just get a UHD transfer with no HDR.

Still, even just a few short years ago, such a presentation would have been riddled with banding, so it’s heartening to see that Netflix has stepped up its game in terms of delivering non-HDR video. There’s one shot near the end of a setting sun that’s a bit clipped, but other than that, I didn’t spot any noteworthy video artifacts.

The Dolby Digital+ 5.1 soundtrack, meanwhile, is dominated by Foster’s narration and the sort of new-agey score we’ve come to expect from nature documentaries in this vein. There’s nothing really special about it, but it serves its purpose.

When you get right down to it, though, the soundtrack could have consisted of Gilbert Gottfried reading 50 Shades of Grey and I still would have suffered through My Octopus Teacher enthusiastically and with roughly the same level of frustration. You stick the word “octopus” in the title of a documentary and I’m going to watch it, just on the off chance of seeing these enigmatic beings behaving in mysterious ways I’ve never witnessed before. This one delivers on that in spades, and I imagine I’ll be watching it again sometime very soon. The next time I do, though, I think I might mute the soundtrack and cue up Pink Floyd’s Meddle on a loop in the background instead.

PICTURE | Aside from a shot near the end of a setting sun that’s a bit clipped, the UHD presentation, sans HDR, exhibits no noteworthy artifacts

SOUND | The purely utilitarian Dolby Digital+ 5.1 soundtrack is dominated by narration and the sort of new-agey score we’ve come to expect from nature documentaries in this vein.

Review: The Social Dilemma

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review | The Social Dilemma

This Netflix docudrama on the dangers of social media is so eager to please it nearly undermines its own arguments

by Dennis Burger
September 14, 2020

Netflix’ The Social Dilemma is one of the most frustrating viewing experiences I’ve had in ages—frustrating because it has a really important message to convey, but sometimes undermines that message with cutesy animation and heavy-handed musical accompaniment. It’s also frustrating because it wants to be equal parts documentary and drama, but fails in the latter respect. And it’s frustrating because I wanted to write it off entirely but ended up being won over despite my better judgment. But most of all, it’s frustrating because it relies on some of the same tactics it decries.

As you could probably ascertain from its title, The Social Dilemma is about the dual-edged sword of social media and the impact it’s having on society. What makes the documentary aspect of the film work as well as it does is the reliance on Silicon Valley experts like Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, who helped create the very tools that they’re now warning us about.

Harris—co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology and the “closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience,” according to The Atlantic—dominates the film with a series of cogent explanations about how the algorithms that drive everything from Google searches to Facebook interactions work. On the upside, he’s given a lot more room to breathe here than in his famous TED Talk on the subject, allowing him to connect some dots I’ve never seen connected before, at least not in the way they’re connected here.

But for every illuminating observation from Harris, The Social Dilemma feels compelled to spoon-feed the viewer a disjointed dramatic narrative that feels like the mutant child of an ABC Afterschool Special and one of those awful Chick Tracts that used to litter the gutters of New Orleans.

It’s in these dramatizations that The Social Dilemma commits its greatest sin: Assuming the stupidity of the viewer. The story here is about a family whose two youngest children are being harmed by social media—one child whose entire sense of self-worth is based on “Likes” in response to photos she posts, the other who ends up sliding down the slippery slope of fake news and becoming radicalized.

Handled well, I suppose it could have worked. But in attempting to explain how the algorithms that encourage engagement trap users in a dopamine-driven feedback loop, the filmmakers decided to anthropomorphize these algorithms and give them dialogue, à la a twisted techie version of Pixar’s Inside Out.

This takes what is genuinely a malignant phenomenon and turns it into a seemingly malicious one, which undermines a lot of the film’s messaging. It also directly contradicts the views of the experts, who do a much better job of explaining the nuances of these wholly impersonal algorithms and the way they manipulate users to generate revenue, engagement, and growth. But nuance doesn’t suffice these days, I suppose, so we end up with these wholly unnecessary abstract dramatizations that do little more than confuse the uninitiated and drag down the film.

By the time its closing credits rolled, though, The Social Dilemma won be back with a well-developed conclusion that cuts straight to the heart of the divisiveness, anxiety, depression, suicide, social upheaval, and general discord sowed by social media—as well as some of the upsides of this technology. I wish some of this balance had been sprinkled more evenly through the rest of the film, because we can’t have an honest conversation about the impact of social media without covering the good as well as the bad (although, full disclosure: I’m a little biased in this respect since Facebook was responsible for my reunion with my daughter).

If the entire 94-minute running time of The Social Dilemma had lived up to the quality of the last 10 minutes or so, it would be much easier to recommend. But I’m left with a dilemma of my own here, because I think the message of the film is so important that you should view it despite its flaws. Just go in armed with the knowledge that director Jeff Orlowski employs some of the same psychological sleight-of-hand the film warns us about.

As for the presentation of the film itself, Netflix delivers The Social Dilemma in Ultra HD without HDR10 or Dolby Vision high dynamic range. As soon as I noticed this, I deliberately kept an eye out for the sort of visual artifacts inherent in high-efficiency streaming without HDR—banding, crushed blacks, poor shadow detail, etc. Surprisingly, I couldn’t see them, which makes me think Netflix may be employing a higher-than-usual bitrate for the film, but I’m just speculating. Whatever the explanation, it points to the fact that streaming services are constantly evolving in terms of quality of presentation. Even just a couple years ago, Netflix would have had to stick this SDR film in an HDR container to deliver a stream this artifact-free.

The Dolby Digital+ 5.1 soundtrack has a lot of overbearing sound effects and a generally doom-and-gloom score that could have easily gotten out of hand with the wrong sound mixer. Thankfully, it’s a mostly front-channel affair, and dialogue clarity is topnotch. It should sound fine whether you’re watching on a full-fledged home cinema system or a simple soundbar.

Again, I’m of two minds here: I want you to watch The Social Dilemma, but I also want you to know what you’re getting into. It’s a significantly flawed film, but it’s also an important one. If the hypnotic animation and ham-fisted dramatizations are too much for you to stomach, though, I highly recommend watching Tristan Harris’ TED Talk instead. It doesn’t connect the dots nearly as effectively as does The Social Dilemma, and it isn’t nearly as well-produced, but it also isn’t burdened by all the saccharine fluff that mires this docudrama.

PICTURE | Netflix delivers The Social Dilemma in UHD without HDR10 or Dolby Vision high dynamic range and yet the presentation is artifact-free

SOUND | Mostly a front-channel affair with topnotch dialogue clarity, the Dolby Digital+ 5.1 soundtrack should sound fine whether you’re watching on a full-fledged home cinema system or a simple soundbar

Review: Honeyland

review | Honeyland

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This Oscar-nominated documentary eschews most of the usual documentary conventions but is worth a look for the visuals alone

by Dennis Burger
updated July 31, 2023

Honeyland is unlike any documentary I’ve ever seen. There’s zero narration. None of the participants looks at or speaks to the camera. There’s no indication of where the story unfolds, except for a handful of references to Skopje, the northern Macedonian city that apparently isn’t too far from the little stretch of mountainous land where the bulk of the action takes place. What you do manage to pick up from the film will mostly be gathered from hard-won context clues. And in the end, I don’t think any of that really matters.

At its heart, Honeyland is a film about a middle-aged woman named Hatidze, a beekeeper who lives in harmony with nature and has a rule of always leaving the bees with exactly as much honey as she takes. “Half for me, half for you” she says as she harvests her hives. Soon after we meet her, though, her peaceful existence is disrupted by the arrival of nomads who drag their trailer into the plot of land next to hers with a pack of farm animals and an unruly pack of loathsome children. Hatidze does her best to teach the patriarch of this traveling brood how to harvest honey sustainably, to no avail.

If it sounds like a simple story told simply, that’s because it is. But the way in which it’s told—without context, without explanation, without larger connective tissue—makes it as intriguing as it is inscrutable. When you get right down to, the visuals are the star of the show. (Spoiler warning: In digging around for any info about the film after the credits rolled, I learned that the filmmakers edited purely visually, ignoring their audio recordings until the final cut was locked down. And it shows.)

To get a sense of what I mean, watch the film’s trailer—perhaps the most honest and representative teaser I’ve ever seen. It’s a one-hundred-percent faithful condensation of everything this film is. Imagine another 87 minutes of exactly this, and you’ll have a pretty good indication of exactly what unfolds on the screen and how.

While limited to HD resolution even via Kaleidescape, Honeyland still exhibits more detail, crisper edges, and a richer overall look than you’ll find in most films shot and released in UHD. From the craggy terrain in and around Bekirlija to the dim and dingy interior of the hut Hatidze shares with her dying mother, every location is rendered stunningly, and every frame is a printable work of art.

And despite being of no concern to the filmmakers while editing, the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack brings the environment to life almost holographically. Every gust of wind through every sparse patch of grass, every flickering flame, and every stirring swarm of bees is delivered as if they’re emanating from the air rather than speakers in a room.

But, for as masterfully shot and edited as it is, I found much of Honeyland difficult to watch, and I’m not sure I’ll be returning to it any time soon—though part of me wants to, now that I have a better understanding of what’s going on. What keeps me from pressing Play again mostly boils down to several scenes involving child abuse (primarily verbal, but certainly with threats of the physical) and animal cruelty, which genuinely upset me to the point of near physical illness. So, if you’re squeamish about such things, perhaps it’s best that you take a pass.

If you can get past that, though, Honeyland is just such an unabashedly weird film that it’s worth at least one viewing. It’s a stark reminder of the importance of sustainability. But that message isn’t delivered preachily. In fact, the film is just as stark a reminder that sustainability is, at times, something of a luxury, especially to those for whom scorched-earth capitalism represents the ever-elusive but tantalizing promise of an escape from abject poverty.

If that gives you the impression that Honeyland is something of a Sisyphean tale, I can’t really argue with that. But it is a beautifully made documentary in the purest sense of the word, and its numerous critical accolades aren’t unwarranted.

PICTURE | While limited to HD resolution, Honeyland still exhibits more detail, crisper edges, and a richer overall look than you’ll find in most films shot and released in UHD

SOUND | The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack brings the environment to life almost holographically

Review: The Wonderful: Stories from the Space Station

review | The Wonderful: Stories from the Space Station

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This documentary gets more wrong than it gets right but still adds up to an intriguing look at the history of the ISS

by Dennis Burger
updated July 28, 2023

I’m not sure what to make of the new documentary/retrospective The Wonderful: Stories from the Space Station because, even though there’s more good about the film than bad, the whole is undeniably less than the sum of its parts.

The film simply has no idea what it wants to be about, aside from the obvious: The two-decade-plus history of the International Space Station. Is it a focus on the geopolitics behind this multinational endeavor? A celebration of the people involved? An exploration of the science done on the ISS? An investigation of the mechanics of this technological marvel?

The answer to all of those questions is, yes. And that’s unfortunate, because, in its attempt to cover all that ground, the 129-minute film merely scratches numerous surfaces but fails to fully satisfy in any respect. It skips entirely over the construction of the ISS, pays mere lip service to what it’s like to live on the station for months at a time, and offers only the most tantalizing glimpse of the work done upon it.

That would be fine if the film had more compelling stories to tell about the humans involved but more often than not we’re presented with the same story told over and over again about a child who dreamt of going to the stars, got rejected again and again, and was eventually selected as an astronaut. Seriously, if you removed all reiterations of that story and the accompanying shots of people standing in cornfields or plains looking up at the stars, The Wonderful would be half the length—and probably a better film.

There are exceptions, of course. Scott Kelly, an absolute legend of the modern era of spaceflight, lights up the screen, and his anecdotes about not only his life but also his year spent on the ISS are entertaining, engaging, and hilarious. But this brings up another problem: Kelly’s interviews are chopped up and dumped onscreen in two big chunks with absolutely no rhyme or reason, as are the segments featuring Cady Coleman and her family. It’s as if the filmmakers took elements shot for the film, shuffled them like a deck of cards, and let that dictate the structure of the finished product.

Had these segments been grouped chronologically or thematically, they could have better contributed to a larger story about what it’s like to be an astronaut assigned to the ISS. Given the overall lack of focus and haphazard editing, though, it’s hard not to conclude that the footage assembled for The Wonderful would have worked better as a YouTube playlist of five- or ten-minute video vignettes.

The other big sin is the dearth of footage from the actual ISS. There are a handful of stunning shots here and there (some of them duplicated, for some odd reason), but it feels like most of the actual space footage in the film is contained in the trailer. That’s a major bummer.

But for all its lack of direction and momentum and narrative structure, The Wonderful does contain some footage I’ve never seen elsewhere. And the segments focusing on Scott Kelly and Cady Coleman are worth their weight in unobtanium. So you can’t write off the whole affair. It’s just a shame that the existing footage wasn’t handed off to a more skilled editor under the supervision of a filmmaker who actually had a vision for what kind of film he wanted to make.

If all of that doesn’t turn you off, you have oodles of choices for how to consume The Wonderful. I opted for Kaleidescape, and feel like that was the right call. While most online providers can handle 4K/HDR imagery perfectly fine, HD can be a bit hit-or-miss, and The Wonderful is only available in 1080p—fitting, given how much of the imagery was sourced from video feeds and footage shot for TV. (Why the film was framed at 2.39:1, I’ll never know. I guess it does give it a bit more cinematic street cred.)

There’s been a good effort to clean up and scale up most of the footage, but we’re still talking about occasionally noisy and glitchy video that isn’t the easiest to compress. Kaleidescape’s higher-bandwidth AVC encode does a fantastic job with all this, ensuring that the stock imagery is always the weakest link in the video chain. Newer interview footage is also presented cleanly and smoothly, with none of the banding in the backgrounds that might creep into lower-bandwidth AVC encodes.

Kaleidescape’s DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix also does a fantastic job with the soundtrack, which proves to be one of the most compelling things about The Wonderful. Whoever was in charge of selecting the songs for deserves props because the music always accentuates the mood and tone of the imagery without being egregiously manipulative. Moreover, the surround-sound mixing for the music is among the best I’ve experienced in any film in ages. It has a wonderfully holographic quality that really underscores the importance of a proper home cinema sound setup. Rather than merely surrounding you with music, it drops you into the middle of the songs, placing audio elements out in the room rather than merely around it. Front/back imaging, which is almost never a thing in surround music mixing, is employed here to give the songs both scale and immediacy. Aside from the interviews with Scott Kelly, it’s truly my favorite thing about the film.

Thatt’s not quite enough to save The Wonderful from its own excesses and its unfortunate lack of direction. But I don’t think you should let any of that scare you off. As I said, more of it works than doesn’t. It’s just frustrating that a documentary with such potential to be great ended up being merely pretty good.

PICTURE | The high-bandwidth AVC encode of Kaleidescape’s 1080p presentation does a fantastic job of cleaning up and upscaling the video-feed and TV footage

SOUND | The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix also does a fantastic job with the soundtrack, which proves to be one of the most compelling things about the film

Second Thoughts: Apollo 11

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The 4K HDR version of this visually stunning document of the Apollo 11 mission is a must-have for any serious movie collection

by Dennis Burger
updated May 4, 2023

If you’ve read my review of the original HD release of Todd Douglas Miller’s documentary film Apollo 11 from earlier this year, you may recall that it was a more of a rant than a proper critique. Not about the film, mind you. Apollo 11 still stands as one of the best cinematic efforts of 2019, especially in the more straightforward, less editorial approach it takes in capturing this monumental moment in history.

The rant was instead about the home video release, which was originally HD only, with no mention of a UHD/HDR followup. This was doubly troubling because Apollo 11 is among a handful of films released at that time to actually be sourced from a 4K digital intermediate. In fact, its original film elements were scanned at resolutions between 8K and 16K. Given that most modern films, especially Hollywood tentpoles, are finished in 2K digital intermediates and upsampled to 4K for cinematic and home video release, the lack of a UHD option for Apollo 11 was as infuriating as it was puzzling.

Thankfully, that mistake has been rectified. Apollo 11 has since become available in UHD with HDR on most major video platforms, including disc and Kaleidescape, with the latter being my viewing platform of choice. I mentioned purchasing the film in HD via Vudu in my original review but that purchase didn’t offer any sort of upgrade path for UHD the way Kaleidescape does.

I did a lot of speculation in that first review about the sort of differences I thought UHD would make, and having now viewed it, most of those predictions turned out to be true. UHD does reveal a lot of detail that was obscured in HD, which makes sense given that the source of so much of this film’s visuals existed in the form of 65mm/70mm archival footage.

One of the biggest differences when comparing the HD and UHD releases is in the textures of the Saturn V rocket. Ribbing in the first three stages that dwindle to nothing in HD are clear and distinct in UHD. The little flag on the side is also noticeably crisper, and the stars in its blue field stand out more as individual points of whiteness, rather than fuzzy variations in the value scale.

As predicted, the launch of Apollo 11 also massively benefits from HDR grading. The plume of exhaust that billows from the rocket shines with such stunning brightness that you almost—almost—want to squint.

One thing I didn’t predict, though—which ends up being my favorite aspect of this new HDR grade—is how much warmer and more lifelike the imagery is. In the standard dynamic range color grade of the HD version, there’s an undeniable cooler, bluer cast that never really bothered me until I saw the warmer HDR version. Indeed, the HDR grade evokes the comforting warmth of the old Kodak stock on which the film was captured in a way the SDR grade simply doesn’t.

The new UHD presentation does make the grain more pronounced in the middle passage of the film—where 65mm film stock gives way to 35mm and even 16mm footage. But that has more to do with the enhanced contrast of this presentation than it does the extra resolution. HD is quite sufficient to capture all the nuances and detail of that lower-quality film. But the boost to contrast does mean that grain pops a little more starkly.

That does nothing to detract from the quality of the presentation, though, at least not for me. And even if you do find this lush and organic grain somewhat distracting, I think you’ll agree it’s a small price to pay for the significantly crisper, more detailed and faithful presentation of the first and third acts.

It’s a shame Universal, the film’s home video distributor, has decided to hold back bonus features. The featurette included with the UHD Blu-ray release, which covers the discovery of the 65mm archival footage, is missing here—although it’s widely available on YouTube. And only Apple TV owners get access to an exclusive audio commentary. Then again, given how badly the studio fumbled the original home video release, it’s no real surprise they’ve dropped the ball on making the bonus features widely available.

But don’t let that turn you off of the film. This is one that belongs in every movie collection, especially now that it’s available in UHD.

Review: All That Breathes

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Eschewing conventional narrative and exposition, this Oscar-nominated Indian documentary encourages you to develop your own thoughts and feelings about the subject matter

by Dennis Burger
February 22, 2023

If you want to experience the concept of “show, don’t tell” embodied flawlessly in cinematic form, you owe it to yourself to check out Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes at your earliest convenience. Less a documentary—or indeed, a narrative—than a portrait that unfolds in four dimensions, the film opens with a slow panning sequence that establishes the rules straight away. It’s a shot of urban wildlife in the city of New Delhi—rats, specifically, scurrying around in a concrete jungle—devoid of narration or setup. It is, in a sense, pure cinematic experience—a combination of moving imagery and sound orchestrated to transport you elsewhere and make you feel whatever you’re going to feel without imposing its feelings on you.

Shortly thereafter, we’re introduced to Mohammad, Nadeem, and Salik, operators of a wildlife rescue focused on treating and rehabilitating black kites that fall from New Delhi’s toxic skies. What makes All That Breathes hit a bit differently is that it doesn’t explain who these men are or what they do. We discover the particulars of their lives organically, as they come up in conversation or in the course of their day-to-day lives. We witness phone conversations, only half of which can be heard. We’re privy to private discussions about the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the resulting government overreach without any mention of the Citizenship Amendment Act by name.

The filmmakers, in other words, don’t dot every “i” and cross every “t” because they don’t need to. You pick up from context what’s important—at least what’s important to the subjects of the film.

Scenes of family life and the work of the aptly named Wildlife Rescue are interspersed with a good number of the purely cinematic experiential sequences of the sort that open the film, all of which seem designed to make the viewer reflect on the way wildlife affects cities and cities affect wildlife and both affect humans. The beauty of it is, though, we’re not told how to interpret any of this. We don’t need to be. The images coming straight out of the camera are enough of a prompt.

Those images, by the way, were obviously captured at a higher resolution and with more dynamic range than we find in the HD presentation on HBO Max. The film was shot on a combination of Canon and Panasonic prosumer cameras, both of which record at 4K resolution with 10-bit dynamic range. And you can see the constraints of dynamic range at times, when highlights get blown out or shadows get a little muddied. All in all, though, the impeccably composed cinematography benefits from a bit of processing that seems to have muted contrasts a bit, and the footage is so mesmerizing that it transcends reproduction.

No such caveats are needed for the Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 soundtrack, which is an absolute master class in subtle but effective audio mixing. In fact, it upmixes perfectly into Atmos, if your surround processor is capable of such. Pans across the front soundstage are common, though inconspicuous enough that you might miss them. The surround channels are nearly constantly active but never distracting. Dialogue is beautifully rendered—although, it’s in Hindi, so intelligibility might not matter for those of us in the west who don’t speak the language. The baked-in subtitles are nicely done as well and seem better suited to viewing at cinematic proportions than the standard 55-inch TV on the other side of the room. That’s a nice but unexpected touch.

Overall, the only real complaint I have about All That Breathes is that it ends far too quickly. Granted, the 97-minute runtime already seems brisk on paper, but actually watching it, it doesn’t feel anywhere near that long. Some of that is due to the lack of a conventional narrative but a lot of it boils down to fantastic editing, compelling subjects, and mesmerizing cinematography. One simply hopes HBO eventually releases the thing in UHD/HDR so it can be experienced in its full splendor.

PICTURE | The images were captured at a higher resolution and with more dynamic range than are found in the HD presentation on HBO Max. You can see the dynamic-range constraints when highlights are blown out or shadows get a little muddied

SOUND | The Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 soundtrack is a master class in subtle but effective audio mixing that upmixes perfectly into Atmos

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