Director Alex Gibney makes cinematic lemonade from lemons whose flavor was most likely enhanced through prohibited methods. Gibney had to shelve his documentary on seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong's miracle comeback in 2009, because, of course, it turned out it wasn't a miracle. Rather, it seems it was …
The story of the rise and fall of Jack Abramoff — “the number one lobbyist in Washington” — ranges far and wide (the Republican Revolution, the Mariana Islands, Angola, Hollywood, Indian casinos, Tom DeLay, John McCain), but the message stays single-track: the sellout of democracy, with clips of James Stewart …
Serviceable, not overly salacious, perhaps not sufficiently salacious, summary of the sex scandal that brought down the Governor of New York and former State Attorney General, alias “The Sheriff of Wall Street.” (Spitzer himself dutifully takes a spot in the rotation of talking heads: “This goes back to the days …
Everything you already knew about the plundering energy giant -- and worse. Archival clips (CNN, C-SPAN, etc.), talking heads, and the disembodied voice of Peter Coyote, narrator, retrace the route from boom to bust: a chance to be horrified and disgusted all over again. Some of the horror and disgust …
Six documentarists — Seth Gordon, Morgan Spurlock, Alex Gibney, Eugene Jarecki, and the team of Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady — pitch in, in turn, to popularize further the views of economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner — on “the hidden side of everything” — in their nonfiction best-seller …
Documentarian Alex Gibney (Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine) takes on Scientology.
The truth-bending journalist, doper, drinker, gun enthusiast, and suicide (1939-2005), in words and pictures, the latter ranging from a fuzzy video of the TV game show, To Tell the Truth, to big-screen impersonations of him in Where the Buffalo Roam and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and the former …
Remember Lance Armstrong? Sure you do. Bicycle champion disgraced by use of performance-enhancing drugs. Documentarian Alex Gibney made a pretty good movie about him three years ago called The Armstrong Lie. Then Showtime did a dramatic take on the story the next year called Stop at Nothing. Now Stephen Frears …
Documentarist Errol Morris takes a crack at the Abu Ghraib scandal, not long after Alex Gibney took a crack at it (among other things) in Taxi to the Dark Side. Morris’s talking heads are unusually well-lit, and they speak revealingly from the inside, sometimes in ways they might not intend. …
When Apple co-founder/mastermind/personification Steve Jobs died in 2011, documentarian Alex Gibney (The Armstrong Lie) found himself marveling at the massive outpouring of public grief and love. Why, he wondered, were we so upset that a rich, ungenerous businessman had left us? As the resulting documentary makes clear, he wasn't a …
Documentarist Alex Gibney, director, writer, and narrator, takes as his starting point the death of an Afghan cab driver in U.S. detention at Bagram Air Field, and the fall guys are talking to him on camera. The path of investigation, from there, stretches out to Abu Ghraib (the familiar photos …
One can’t wait for the election to end. If the best man wins, it will bring down the curtain on countless hours spent in the service of tRump-bashing docs so that we may once again rejoice in the simpler virtues of narrative storytelling. Having said that, Alex Gibney’s (Enron: The …
Taking its lead from a magazine piece and later a full-blown book by Christopher Hitchens ("He's a sewer-pipe sucker," fumes Al Haig. "He sucks the sewer pipe"), this BBC documentary explores the question of whether Nixon's one-time Secretary of State is prosecutable as a "war criminal" for his role in …
Investigative documentarian Alex Gibney (Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God) turns his camera on Julian Assange and his crusade to make information free. Assange has denounced the project and refused to participate. Make of that what you will.
Documentarian Alex Gibney (Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine) takes on the Stuxnet story — and more importantly, its implications for the future of international relations, foreign policy, rules of combat, what have you. You know, global-scale life-and-death stuff. It’s more fun following the narrative if you don’t know …