Documentary reviews: 'Cover-up,' 'The Dating Game' and 'Ghost Boy,' at the 2025 Philadelphia Film Festival

Three documentaries at PFF34

The recently concluded Philadelphia Film Festival had one of its strongest lineups ever. Still, this year’s fest was somewhat light on documentaries, with only five films in the “Non/Fiction” section, although other docs were placed in different categories.

There were some docs in there that I saw and reviewed at previous festivals, such as the amazing Natchez, the wonderfully titled Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt, and a few I missed, like H.E.R.’s doc about Curtis Mayfield. At any rate, here are reviews of three docs that I did catch at PFF this year:

Cover-Up

Filmmaker Laura Poitras is best known for directing the Oscar-winning Citizenfour, which presented a close-up view of the Edward Snowden leaks, and has made several other films about those who thumb their noses at the national security establishment.

Her 2016 Risk looked at Julian Assange, and the film and filmmaker seemed to realize halfway through the project that the WikiLeaks founder is actually a charlatan, which is something to keep in mind, since the upcoming DOC NYC fest has a film that depicts Assange more sympathetically.

Now, Poitras, along with co-director Mark Obenhaus, takes a look at the career of the acclaimed and often controversial journalist Seymour Hersh.

The product, we’re told, of many years of Poitras trying to get Hersh to agree with such a profile, Cover-Up is refreshingly not a hagiography of its subject. It goes through Hersh’s major stories, most notably breaking the news of the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, and later the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in Iraq. At one point, he reads from the Nixon White House transcripts, in which Nixon and Haldeman talk about whether Hersh is on to them.

But it also explores some stories that Hersh got wrong, such as when he wrote a John F. Kennedy biography that relied in part on forged documents, or more questionable stories later on, involving Syria and, later, the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline. He also gets ornery on camera and threatens, during interviews, to quit the project, which is always a fun thing for a documentary to leave in.

Overall, it’s a fair and fascinating look at this complex man. Cover-Up lands on Netflix around Christmastime.

The Dating Game

Here’s a documentary about a dating coach in China that makes me want to paraphrase a line from Pulp Fiction: “I mean, they’ve got the same incels over there we’ve got here, it’s just the little differences.”

China long had a one-child policy, which was removed a few years ago. This has resulted in a new generation of men far outnumbering women, leading to greater competition for dates and companionship. And while you might think there are plenty of fish in the sea in a place like China — population 1.4 billion — things are never quite that easy.

Violet Du Feng’s documentary looks at a dating coach named Hao, whose advice is going to look familiar to anyone who’s familiar with pickup artist/redpill culture in the U.S. There’s nothing wrong with encouraging lonely young men to have confidence in themselves, but once it crosses into lying about everything, things get a bit uglier.

But one thing that’s not ugly is the cinematography. Maybe it’s because most documentaries I’ve seen about China in the last few years have either been about dry political matters, factories, or different aspects of the pandemic, but I can’t remember the last film set in China that made its cities — Chongqing, this time — look so beautiful.

The Dating Game has no release date.

Ghost Boy

“Spooky” is a good word to describe the documentary work of filmmaker Rodney Ascher. He made Room 237, that film about bizarre fan theories about The Shining, and while the theories were pretty much entirely bunk, I was so transfixed by it that I was hoping there would be a whole series like that about other movies.

Ascher later made the much less successful A Glitch in the Matrix, which was about simulation theory, that favorite conspiracy theory of all the dumbest people you know, and a film that gave the floor at one point to a guy who murdered his own parents.

With his latest, Ghost Boy, Ascher tells the story of Martin Pistorius, a South African man who fell into a vegatative state when he was 12 years old, staying in it for three years, but eventually regaining consciousness but suffering for a time after that from “locked-in syndrome,” meaning he was awake and aware but unable to tell anyone.

He’s since had a limited recovery, and has to speak through a speech computer. But he’s written a memoir, taken up wheelchair racing, married and fathered a child.

Recovering from locked-in syndrome is Jake Haendel, my wife’s cousin, and now a popular podcaster who has told his story in multiple media. Pistorius, like Jake, was able to overhear things from relatives, while “locked in,” that he wasn’t supposed to hear.

It’s a fantastic story, and Ascher tells it very well. Ghost Boy has no listed release date.