June 2025 documentary review 10-pack: 'Pavements,' 'The Best of Me,' 'Going Inside,' 'Wick is Pain,' 'Deaf President Now,' 'Ada: My Mother the Architect,' 'Antidote,' 'And So It Begins,' 'and more

Reviewing ten documentaries from recent weeks.

Welcome to my monthly review roundup of ten new documentary films. This month, it’s a reality/fiction hybrid about a great band, the man who tried to kill a famous pop star, the end of an acclaimed sports TV show, a leadership battle at a deaf college, the making of a beloved action franchise, an architect’s story told by her daughter, an examination of comedy today, looks at political despotism in Russia and the Phillipines, and a look at film editing.

Pavements

Director Alex Ross Perry’s batshit examination of the ‘90s indie rock band Pavement is several different things at once: A nostalgia-laden archival documentary about the band’s 1990s history; a contemporary examination of the band’s reunion and comeback in 2022, a look at the making of Slanted! Enchanted!: A Pavement Musical, a jukebox musical featuring a more theatrical version of their songs, and of Range Life, a biopic of the band starring Joe Keery as frontman Stephen Malkmus.

The jukebox musical is very real — Ross Perry directed it, in workshop form, in 2022 — although the biopic is completely ficticious, and functions as more of a parody of biopic conventions, as well as of deranged Method acting. So, the question can likely be raised about whether this should even be considered a documentary at all.

I liked Pavement back in the day, but they were never one of my favorite bands or anything. I did, though, greatly enjoy the old footage, and the return to ‘90s aesthetics- and their music, in retrospect, was pretty damn great. And all of those different elements work way better together than any one of them would have been separately, especially when music from the different corners of the film is allowed to bend together.

Pavements is in theaters, opening wider on Friday.

The Best of Me

This is an absolutely unnerving documentary, very difficult to watch, but expertly put together.

Directed by Heather Landsman, it’s an archival documentary about Ricardo Lopez. He was the Florida man who, in 1996, plotted to murder the pop singer Bjork, in a bit of racist pique over the singer having a Black boyfriend, and to simultaneously commit suicide.

For about eight months before he died, Lopez produced a video diary, in which he laid out his plans, ranted about his horrible circumstances in life, and sometimes danced. In the majority of the videos, Lopez is either shirtless or naked.

Lopez functions as a bit of a precursor of the incels and school shooters that would come later, as well as of the Youtubers and Tiktokers who rant in their cars and say disgusting things (two groups, alas, with quite a bit of overlap.)

The film is assembled entirely from footage on Lopez’s tapes, except for a brief AP video of Bjork. This is the right choice; a lesser documentary would have included talking heads laying all this out or trying to psychoanalyze him.

The Best of Me, which I caught last week at PhilaMOCA, is rolling out to theaters slowly.

Going Inside

This documentary, like so many, didn’t end up in the form that was likely originally envisioned.

A look at the final year of Inside the NBA on TNT, featuring lots of behind-the-scenes footage of Charles, Kenny, Shaq, and the gang, was likely meant to depict the last days of one of sports TV’s most beloved shows.

However, the news broke about halfway through filming that Inside the NBA will continue after all, and just be licensed to ESPN.

In the meantime, we get lots of “lasts”- the last All-Star Game, the last regular season game, etc., and just last week there was the last playoff game. There was already an entire doc about Inside the NBA’s history, featuring all four main hosts getting their own hour, but this is a worthy companion piece.

Going Inside is streaming, but I could only find it by searching the Hulu + Live archives for Inside the NBA itself.

Wick is Pain

“We didn’t have a single shaky-cam,” Chad Shahelski, the director of the John Wick movies, says early on in Wick is Pain, a new documentary feature about the making of the first John Wick movie, and its three sequels.

Is this a commercial for those movies, meant to tie in with the release of the spinoff Ballerina? Absolutely. Does it look a lot like a DVD feature? Sure. Is it too long, at over two hours? Certainly.

That said, I liked how the film provides insights into the filmmaking process, especially Stahelski’s approach to action, which is exciting, coherent, and good, unlike all those years of camera-swooshing Peter Greengrass-ism.

Keanu Reeves, an active participant in the doc, has an outstanding line: “I had a John Wick decade. My 50s. Fuck yeah.”

Wick is Pain is streaming on VOD channels.

Deaf President Now

Directed by Nyle DiMarco and Davis Guggenheim, it’s an impressively put-together archival documentary about the 1988 conflagration that happened when Gallaudet University, the nation’s only university for the deaf, tried to hire a non-deaf president. It also explores many of the nuances of deaf identity politics, especially through the fascinating figure of I. King Jordan, who ended up as the university’s first deaf president.

Much like the recent Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore – also a selection at the recent PFS Springfest in Philadelphia, the film looks at deaf activism and identity in the 1980s, even using a different clip from the same episode of Nightline.

One quibble: the documentary plays Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” which was… a year too late for these events. The first line, after all, is “Nineteen eighty nine…,” also the year when Rosie Perez danced to the same song in the credits of Do the Right Thing.

Deaf President Now is streaming on Apple TV+.

Ada: My Mother the Architect

This documentary about the Israeli architect Ada Karmi Melamede, directed by Yael Melamede, has an unmistakable echo of both The Brutalist — since he spent all last winter arguing about its depictions of architecture and Zionism — and of My Architect, since it’s a documentary about a famous Jewish architect, directed by the architect’s child. (And also, the younger Melamede worked on the latter film.)

The film tells Ada’s story, while told mostly in one-on-one interviews between mother and daughter. The 81-minute film is ultimately a bit thin, although it’s refreshing to see a movie about Israel and Israeli life, playing in the U.S., that isn’t about the conflict.

Ada was released in theaters in May.

Antidote

There have been quite a few documentaries over the years about Vladimir Putin and the journalists and dissidents who have sought to bravely challenge him, and this one, directed by James Jones, is firmly in that tradition.

A PBS Frontline debut in early May, this one features journalist Christo Grozev and political activist Vladimir Kara-Murza.

This isn’t quite on the level of Oscar-winning docs Icarus and Navalny, but it’s still very compelling, and also depicts actual courage, not the fake, self-aggrandizing kind.

Antitdote is on the PBS app.

And So It Begins

And speaking of PBS documentaries about foreign despotism… This doc, directed by Ramona Diaz, follows the most recent election in the Phillipines, which led to former dictator Ferdinand Marcos’ son, known as “Bong Bong,” assuming the presidency.

There was a fantastic documentary a few years ago called The Kingmaker, about Imelda Marcos, which depicted Bong Bong as a strikingly inept and uninspiring politician, a sort of Jeb Bush of the Far East, who ended up usurped by Rodrigo Duterte, the fascistic former president, who very clearly lifted large aspects of his public persona from that of Donald Trump.

Diaz’s doc tells a compelling story, although Lauren Greenfield’s doc about Imelda was much better.

And speaking of which, the ending will feel very familiar to anyone who experienced the aftermath of the 2024 election, especially a journalist questioning where he goes from there, with a majority in his country just electing a president who doesn’t respect him or his rights.

This, too, is on the PBS app, under the Independent Lens heading.

The Cinema Within

This is a documentary about a fascinating subject: film editing. It includes the participation of one of the best living film editors, Walter Murch. Also featured is film scholar David Bordwell, who passed away earlier this year. When assigned his book in film classes, I always found it completely impenetrable, and that’s also the case here.

I didn’t much like this, because while I’m into the subject, it’s presented in the weirdest, most off-putting way imaginable. There’s way too much testimony from psychologists — seriously, documentarians, WAY too much of that lately — and a musical score that sounds like it’s from an alien autopsy special.

The Cinema Within available on VOD channels.

How Comedy Became a Dystopian Imperial Hell World

This is a YouTube documentary, from something called The Elephant Graveyard, which I only heard about because Marc Maron mentioned it on his podcast a few weeks ago. That things mentioned offhand on podcasts have worst outcomes is a big part of the argument here.

It’s an Adam Curtis-style examination of the modern bro-comedy world, starting with Joe Rogan, but also continuing into “this shit area of comedy.” It’s a lot of the stuff Kliph Nesteroff and Seth Simons have been writing about for years.

Sure, there’s a bit too much psychoanalysis about Rogan’s father leaving when he was young. But the video’s got a great hook, on the concept of “Becoming a New Guy.”

This is available on YouTube (and embedded above.)