PFS Springfest documentaries include looks at ‘To Catch a Predator’ and Marlee Matlin

Reviewing ‘Predators’ and ‘Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore’

The Philadelphia Film Society’s Springfest film festival, which runs through April 24, boasts quite an impressive collective of feature documentaries. Two of them premiered back to back on the afternoon of April 20 (Easter Sunday, of all days). The two are very different, although both touch on the topic of child sexual abuse.

Some of the very worst aspects of modern-day culture, whether it’s accusations of pedophilia being treated as a trump card in online debates, or true-crime obsession that reaches the point of podcast fans thinking they’re law enforcement themselves, have their roots in To Catch a Predator. The series of specials aired on NBC, as an offshoot of the old Dateline newsmagazine, between 2004 and 2007. Because it lived on for a long time in reruns, it feels like it lasted longer.

Each episode had a distinct formula: A man has been lured to a house for a sexual encounter with someone underage. A “decoy” — usually a girl but occasionally a boy, always of age but looking much younger — answers the door, lets the “predator” in, and they have a conversation before they’re interrupted by TV host Chris Hansen, who tells the man to “have a seat.” They converse, and Hansen shows “receipts” in the form of the chat logs. At the end, Hansen tells him he’s “free to go,’ at which point the cops outside tackle and arrest him.

This show was a massive phenomenon during the mid-aughts, but even back then, I remember questions being raised about the journalistic ethics of the whole thing. No one doubts that adults who would harm children should be caught and arrested, but doing it in a televised gotcha scenario might not be the best way of going about it.

Hansen was a polished, put-together reporter, backed by a camera crew inside the house, a phalanx of cops outside, and implictly, the legal team of NBC News.

The “predators,” in most cases, were awkward, unsophisticated, pathetic men without criminal records, incriminating themselves on camera without a lawyer present. So the men usually found themselves at a disadvantage, even before the cuffs went on them. Hansen isn’t a cop or lawyer, and no one ever reads the suspect his rights. And this was before the incident when a suspect died by suicide during production of an episode.

Predators is a new documentary about that show, its legacy, and the question of what Hansen and To Catch a Predator were up to was ethical, proper, or even helpful.

The film is directed by David Osit, a veteran documentarian who is himself a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, who admits that he was a huge fan of the show back when it first aired.

The documentary is a fascinating exercise, but it makes some mistakes, both in leaving certain questions unanswered, and not making the strongest possible case against the show.

The first third or so recounts the history of the show, including interviews with the actors cast as the “decoys,” including one woman who (ew) reveals that her own father convinced her to be on the show. The second is about the modern-day phenomenon of social media knockoffs of the original series, and the third act catches up with Hansen today, culminating in him sitting for an interview with the filmmaker.

We also see him being greeted like a hero at a true crime convention that looks like the closest approximation of hell on Earth. The film also features an “ethnographer,” whose biggest contribution to the proceedings is confusing who the main narrating voice is.

Hansen now hosts a new version of the show — as part of what appears to be a Roku channel — and there are also lots of knockoffs on YouTube and TikTok, most of which don’t have the endgame of an arrest, but rather the creator beating the shit out of the suspects on camera, usually in the parking lot of a Walmart.

We’re introduced to one such creator, who calls himself “Skeet Hansen,” and his operation is low-rent to the point of almost unintentional hilarity, whether it’s the bad camera work, the motel room locations, the catchphrase (“you just got Skeeted”) or the “decoy girl” who looks like she’s well into her 30s. You can tell the local police have absolute contempt for this guy and just want to tell him how much he’s not helping.

The documentary goes into some questions, about incarceration and rehabilitation of criminals, that I sort of feared the culture had left behind in 2025. Although I did have to laugh about a collaborator of Hansen’s complaining about disappearance of cop-oriented reality shows during the George Floyd period. “They cancelled Paw Patrol,” the guy lies at one point. That isn’t true; Cops was revived in 2021, and even during its year away had about 40 years of re-runs to fall back on.

After watching the doc, I was left with quite a few unanswered questions. TCAP segments were often accused of “entrapment,” but the film has no discussion of what that means and whether their tactics meet the definition.

Also, we’re told that the To Catch a Predator segments were produced in conjunction with a vigilante group called Perverted Justice, but we’re told almost nothing about who that group was, what happened to them, and whether they’re still active today. And while we're told that a lot of the criminal cases from the show ultimately fell apart, in most cases we’re not told why.

Predators will stream this fall on Paramount+

Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore is a compelling documentary, told in an even more compelling way. It’s a career-spanning portrait of the actress, the first deaf performer to win an Academy Award, and by the far the most prominent deaf individual in the entertainment industry for the last 40 years.

The film was directed by Shoshannah Stern, an actress who is herself deaf, and the majority of the telling is through a one-on-one interview in which the two of them speak to each other in American Sign Language, with subtitles. It’s a great way to tell this story, and adds up to one of the year’s best documentaries to focus on a Hollywood figure.

Matlin’s biography is fascinating even beyond what we learn about her in the film: She won that Oscar at age 19, in 1985, for Children of a Lesser God, which was her first film. She had a romance with her co-star William Hurt, who was 15 years her senior and even presented her with the Oscar. Matlin revealed in her memoir, published in 2010, that Hurt had physically abused her during that relationship.

In that interview, illustrated with decades of archival footage, we learn from Matlin that she was sexually abused as a child, struggled with addiction in her youth, had a strained relationship with her mother, and often had trouble with the pressures of fame, including a sometimes strained relationship with the deaf activism community, who took exception to her speaking without signing as an Oscar presenter. (Another documentary film at the festival, Deaf President Now, also touches on deafness and deaf activism; both use footage from the same 1980s Ted Koppel interview.)

Matlin also dated Richard Dean Anderson (MacGyver!) before marrying a cop named Kevin and having four children; she recently became a grandmother. She’s continued to work consistently, including guest spots on just about every major TV show of the ‘90s and 2000s, from Seinfeld to The West Wing. This led up to her part in 2021’s Best Picture-winning CODA, for which her co-star Troy Kotsur joined her as a deaf Oscar winner.

If nothing else. I hope this film does something to rehabilitate the reputation of CODA, which has so often been called overrated that it’s actually become underrated.

For all the darkness, there are great kindnesses in the film as well. Henry Winkler solidifies himself as one of Hollywood’s great mensches, having met Matlin when she was a child, and later taking her in for two years after her breakup with Hurt. And a heartwarming throughline is Matlin’s relationship with her interpretator, Jack Jason, who has appeared with her for her entire career, and is seen tearfully interpreting a speech by Matlin the night of CODA’s Oscar win. And you can tell throughout what reverance other deaf performers have for Matlin, who turns 60 later this year.

Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore will come out in theaters in June, via Kino Lober.