July 2025 documentary review 10-pack: ‘Prime Minister,’ ‘The Last Class,’ ‘The Diamond King,’ ‘The Astroworld Tragedy’ and more

Capsule reviews of ten recent documentary films.

Image: Magnolia Pictures

I present to you this July’s documentary 10-pack, featuring reviews of ten recent documentary releases of note.

Prime Minister

This Sundance debut, released in theaters last month, takes a probing look at the eventful six-year term of former Australian New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, which included the Christchurch mass killing as well as the COVID pandemic.

Ardern was someone who often “went viral” during the COVID times, with a certain side of the political spectrum often raising her in contract to the behavior of Donald Trump, something the arrival of the documentary now allows them to do again- especially now that Ardern, with a Harvard fellowship, is living in the United States.

In the film, directed by Michelle Walshe and Lindsay Utz, Adern shows herself a capable and engaging on-camera presence, even if you’re not implicitly wishing she were the leader of our country.

The Last Class

Speaking of political people-turned-college professors, this documentary is about Robert Reich, the Clinton Administration Labor Secretary, left-wing thorn in the side of various governments, and now professor at UC-Berkeley. The documentary, directed by Elliot Kirschner, features a series of interviews in the lead-up to Reich’s retirement from teaching.

The documentary, released in theaters in late June, recalls what it’s like to sit in a university lecture and be enthralled.

Which was somewhat personal for me, since Reich taught at my college, Brandeis University, while I was there, although I never took his class, something I now very much regret (I feel the same way about Ed Koch, who was a visiting professor one semester and was notorious for snapping at students constantly.)

I do remember seeing Reich around campus, including one time he was seated across the table in the student union from another celebrity Brandeis professor at the time who represented a name from the 1990s political past, Anita Hill.

The Diamond King

Released briefly earlier this year and now streaming on Tubi, this is a fantastic documentary that’s sure to appeal to anyone who loves baseball, or who ever collected baseball cards.

The film is the story of Dick Perez, an artist who’s made it his life’s work to create portraits of great baseball players. He was responsible for the “Diamond Kings” Donruss baseball cards in the ‘80s, did a stint with Topps as well, has been the official artist of both the Philadelphia Eagles and Phillies, as well as, for the last 20 years, the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Perez, now in his 80s, is a wonderful interview subject — he looks, for some reason, just like Paul Krugman — and the film also features a narration by John Ortiz, which was written by the great baseball writer Joe Posnanski.

The film was directed by Marq Evans, who also directed another excellent doc about art, Claydream, a few years ago.

Trainwreck: The Astroworld Tragedy

One of the recent installments of Netflix’s Trainwreck series looks at the November 21 tragedy, in which ten people were killed in a crowd crush at a Travis Scott concert in Houston. This led to numerous lawsuits against Scott himself, LiveNation, and other venues, although there were no criminal charges.

The film, directed by Yemi Bamiro, makes a good case that there was more than enough blame to go around.

Then again, one talking head says, “People don’t die at festivals,” but, you know, they do. There’s a long history in America of deadly tragedies at concerts and musical festivals- Altamont, Woodstock ’99, and others, all of which have had documentaries made about them.

Sally

Directed by Cristina Costantini, and now on Hulu and Disney+, this is a documentary about Sally Ride, the first female American astronaut in space, and a ubiquitous cultural figure for a long period in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Comprising lots of archival footage, as well as contemporary interviews, it’s one of several recent documentaries (joining the ones about Luther Vandross, Paul Reubens, and Barbara Jordan) about famous people who were gay, but not really able to live openly in their lifetimes. Ride died of cancer in 2012, and her obituaries were the first time many learned that she had a female life partner.

We hear from that partner, Tam O’Shaughnessy. Sally’s sister, Bear Ride, is a fantastic interview subject.

There’s also a lot about the sexism she faced in the mostly macho space program, and yes, that “100 tampons” story is very much true. That's not the case, however, with everything you've heard about female astronauts.

Blue - The Life and Art of George Rodrigue

This is a very enjoyable PBS documentary about Rodrigue, the famed Cajun artist who drew colorful paintings of blue dogs, as well as landscapes in his native Louisiana, and even Saints quarterback Drew Brees.

I admit I had barely heard of Rodrique before I watched this, but I was fascinated all the same, and not only because the kids’ cartoon cat Pete the Cat, a favorite of my kids when they were young, was inspired by Blue Dog, its creator has admitted.

Blue is streaming on the PBS app.

animal.

This documentary, released in late June, makes the case for the carnivore diet, spoken of in almost cult-like terms.

I’m a meat-eater. I love a good steak. But I was far from convinced by this film, which sports the aesthetics, music, and pitch typically associated with infomercials.

If it works for these people, great. You’d think, from this film, that the carnivore diet can cure just about every disease or medical calamity that exists, including depression and miscarriages. If anyone on earth ever tried the carnivore diet and not had it work out, you won’t hear about it here. And you thought vegans were smug about their lifestyle.

The talking heads roster is heavy on the influencers and podcasters, chiropractors, and one “board-certified holistic nutritionist.” And it’s told with a conspiratorial tone that feels very RFK Jr.-adjacent.

If there’s a corporate or medical establishment conspiracy to make people not eat meat, it hasn’t been a very successful one, because most people eat meat.

The Invisible Doctrine

If the animal. documentary thinks meat is responsible for all that’s good in the world, here’s a documentary arguing that neoliberalism is the source of all that’s bad.

British writer George Monbiot fronts the project, adapted from his own book of the same name, which argues for the world’s worst economic idea, degrowth.

But that is, somehow, not the worst idea at play here. The entire film is illustrated with AI slop images which, like most AI images at this juncture, look fake and stupid. Just find some archival stuff!

I’m not an anti-AI absolutist, but when it’s an entire movie of nothing but that? Ick. The awful, awful images are enough to push this towards “worst documentary of the year” territory.

Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem

Another installment in the Trainwreck series, also available on Netflix, this is a documentary about Rob Ford, a completely insane elected official. He was mayor of Toronto, trafficked in unhinged nonsense, smoked crack cocaine, got in occasional fisticuffs, and then died of cancer two years after leaving office.

He’s certainly a Trump-like figure, in personality and populism, with some key differences: Ford didn’t have nearly the staying power of his American counterpart, while Trump, by all accounts, has managed to avoid substance abuse issues.

The Ford story was funny, until all of a sudden it wasn’t, and the documentary tells the story in a fairly straightforward fashion, using mostly journalists and staffers as talking heads.

My biggest complaint: Why is this only 47 minutes? It’s not like there wasn’t enough material for way more.

Gawker broke the story of Ford’s crack usage, which shows that the Gawker archives haven’t been mined nearly enough for movies or shows- I’d like to see a docuseries with that premise, maybe with a four-part finale about the Hulk Hogan sex tape case.

And finally, it should have been called Trainwreck: I’ve Got More Than Enough to Eat at Home.

Titan: The OceanGate Submersible Disaster

It was sad when the great ship went down…

James Cameron’s Titanic was largely about how the Titanic was sunk by human hubris, and that’s also the case with this Netflix documentary about the Titan submersible, that passenger vessel that imploded in 2023, killing everyone aboard.

Directed by Mark Monroe, who I interviewed last year when he made that docuseries about Pete Rose, the film shows that there were lots of warnings, most of them ignored, about things that were wrong with the company’s methodology.

There’s a challenge here, in that almost all the action happened off camera, but the filmmakers find plenty of fascinating archival and talking head footage.

Former New York Times gadget correspondent David Pogue, now on TV reporter, is on camera to reckon with his regrettable decision to shill for these guys on television.

And the film includes a clip from antisemitic scum YouTuber Stew Peters, who speculated that the submersible disaster was “a ploy to keep people from visiting the Titantic wreckage.” I have no idea what Peters thinks the Jews did to the Titanic…