The August 2026 documentary review 10-pack: 'Mockbuster,' 'Cold War in Philly,' 'Whatever It Takes,' 'Fear and Doping in Las Vegas,' 'Baby Doe,' 'Flood' and more

This month's roundup of documentary capsule reviews.

Welcome to my monthly roundup of documentary capsule reviews. This month, we look at documentaries about a maker of cheap knockoff movies, a famous international hockey game, a shocking corporate scandal, an ‘80s SNL sketch come to life, a harrowing murder case, a father and daughter’s political disagreements, a Filipino punk band, a dubious argument about the 2022 World Cup, a tribute to old movie theaters in the American West, and the world’s least-healthy love triangle.

Here we go…

Mockbuster

Anthony Frith, the subject and director of Mockbuster, is an Australian filmmaker who was hired to make a movie for The Asylum, purveyors of shlock knock-offs of more popular movies. So he made the movie — without much support, help, or money from the Asylum — and made a documentary about it at the same time.

It’s a project a bit more Australian than usual, as it broached the question of whether they could cast Yahoo Serious or put kangaroos in the picture.

My main takeaway, though, was that I came out of this movie with deep contempt for The Asylum. I know they probably see themselves as the heirs to Roger Corman, or Troma Films, or maybe even Ed Wood, but those filmmakers at least brought some joy, and occasional artistry, to what they produced.

By contrast, I don’t get the sense the Asylum much loves movies, or that they’re particularly scrupulous, either. Then again, once we start seeing AI-rendered knockoffs of blockbusters, there’s a chance I’m going to miss them.

Mockbuster, which had a brief theatrical roadshow this summer, is now on Kanopy and also VOD channels.

Cold War in Philly: Flyers vs. Russia 1976

This is a story that most sports fans in Philly know well: The 1976 matchup between the “Broad Street Bullies” of the Philadelphia Flyers and the Soviet Red Army team, who played a contentious game in Philadelphia.

Joe Amodei is the director of this documentary, which had a bunch of sold-out screenings at theaters around the Philadelphia area throughout the summer, which I kept having to miss. Featuring archival footage and plenty of interviews with players from that Flyers team, it’s a fun look back on a game that was famously chippy, even by the standards of 1970s Flyers hockey.

This was four years before the Miracle on Ice. And while Herb Brooks beat the Russians by playing a more Russian style, that’s not what the Flyers did at all- instead playing a style of chippiness and fighting, with which they’ve long been associated.

However, no one from the Russian side is interviewed; there have been two documentaries that interviewed the Soviet team that lost the Miracle on Ice game.

Flyers fans love to mythologize this time period and team, especially the Stanley Cups the two previous years, and the organization has been accused of living in the past, frequently hiring veterans of that team as coaches and team executives (the Flyers have since made a concession to time, instead hiring a guy who played for them in the ‘80s, Rick Tocchet, as coach).

Also, the film does touch on the protesters for Soviet Jewry who unfurled banners at that game, which were reportedly seen by their Refusenik brethren in Russia, along with then-Flyers owner Ed Snider’s advocacy for the Jewish community.

Sure, there’s a lot of the usual cliched, “we’re a blue-collar town,” “we were a lunch bucket team”-type stuff that’s familiar from every Philly sports documentary. But this is much better than that embarrassing Pelle Lindbergh doc that arrived last year.

Cold War in Philly is now on VOD, and some August and September screenings are set for the Philly area and, for some reason, Lexington, Mass.

Whatever It Takes: Inside the eBay Scandal

This is a true crime documentary, directed by Jenny Carchman, about a corporate scandal that I only vaguely remembered: A couple ran a website that reported news about eBay, and how they were subjected to an elaborate, horrifying harassment campaign- one that it turned out was orchestrated by elements within eBay itself.

There were threats, bogus pizza deliveries, invitations to fake orgies, and other dirty tricks- some real Nixon White House/The Plumbers-type stuff. It was directed by an executive named Jim Daugh, who ranks near the top of this year’s unofficial Documentary Villains list, as he supervised a unit whose other employees were all young women, whom he made watch Zero Dark Thirty for inspiration.

There are two things about this that I found fascinating: Not everyone in the tech world did this sort of stuff, but the doc is telling what’s becoming a very familiar story about how eBay started off as a great thing, but sort of slowly lost its soul, while at the same time, the tech press became more adversarial over time.

Also, they’re in Natick, Mass., so the subjects and cops interviewed have heavy Boston accents. (“That’s the kind of dep-aht-ment he ran”).

The film has been on the festival circuit since 2024, but it got a sudden New York Times write-up a couple of weeks ago. Whatever It Takes is streaming on Prime Video.

Fear and Doping in Las Vegas

If you watched SNL in the 1980s, you probably remember a Weekend Update segment, from 1988, imagining the first “All-Drug Olympics,” in which all performance-enhancing drugs and other banned substances were legal to be used. The punchline was a Russian weightlifter (Phil Hartman) losing both of his arms while attempting a world-record clean-and-jerk.

Earlier this year, the All-Drug Olympics became a reality with the debut of the Enhanced Games, a new competition in which, yes, PEDs were allowed to be used. No one lost any arms this time, but then again, not much of anything happened at all.

That was chronicled in this documentary, produced by ESPN as part of the E:60 series. It goes into some human-interest stories and the life stories of the competitors, much like the real Olympics are always covered. And we also hear from the organizers, who give the whole thing an air of MAHA- a combination of body worship, grifting, and questionable science. The whole thing even had backing from a venture capital group run by Donald Trump, Jr.

We also learn that the Enhanced Games were a massive flop, as they couldn’t get any significant athletes to participate, likely because doing so would end their careers in legitimate sports. The broadcast was a flop, and there wasn’t much athletic excellence to be seen.

I give the documentary credit for playing it pretty straight, although there are some other modern aspects of PEDs in sports that could use an examination. For one thing, there’s long been a body of thinking that steroids in baseball weren’t the worst thing to ever happen, and that it’s odd some sports like baseball, cycling and the Olympics treat PED use like a permanent scarlet letter, while others do not. The Eagles’ Lane Johnson had a PED suspension early in his career, and that’s treated as a footnote.

Fear and Doping in Las Vegas is available on the ESPN app, likely in the E:60 menu.

Baby Doe

If you thought the true crime doc about the eBay harassment team was intense, that was nothing.

Baby Doe, directed by Jessica Earnshaw, is a hard-to-watch crime doc about a shocking cold case, about a woman accused, 30 years earlier, of killing her own baby, after claiming to have not realized she was pregnant at all. The baby had been found dead in the woods and called the titular “Baby Doe.”

The woman, Gail Ritchey, went on to marry and have more children, with no one having any idea she was connected to the dead baby until advances in DNA testing decades later.

This reminded me a bit of Capturing the Friedmans, in that it treats an unspeakable crime with some complexity, without doing any particular advocacy, and shows some extremely raw moments among a family.

This is one of the best documentaries of the year.

Flood

This Independent Lens doc, from Katy Scoggin, about her quest to understand her father, from whom she had long been estranged.

They’re two very different people, with differences of generation, religion, and politics, and he remains devoted to both evangelical Christianity and Facebook-driven conspiratorial politics. And this is happening not in the deep South or Midwest, but rather the Inland Empire of California.

It’s a bit of a familiar story, and it’s familiar for a reason: There are a lot of American families out there with this same dynamic. Scroggin was director of photography on several films for Laura Poitras, who serves as an executive producer here, and the film features some gorgeous California vistas.

I give Scroggin credit for finding a human and empathetic way to tell this story.

Flood is streaming on the PBS app.

Eraserheads: Combo on the Run

Most years, I end up really enjoying at least one documentary about a band I had never heard of before, and this year it’s a Filipino band I admit I had never heard of before watching this.

Eraserheads — yes, they are named after the David Lynch movie — are a punk band from the late ‘80s, from the Marcos era. They decided to reunite after the election to the presidency of Ferdinand Marcos’ son, known as “Bong Bong.” Who, if I remember correctly from that great Imelda Marcos doc a few years ago, was a crushing mediocrity, the Jeb Bush of the Philippines.

Directed by Maria Diane Ventura, the film follows the band through their history and their reunion tour, as the members emerge as compelling real-life characters.

After a theatrical bow earlier this year, the film is on Netflix.

A Game of Double Standards

Qatar hosted the World Cup in 2022. If you remember anything about that World Cup, the conventional wisdom was that it must have won the bidding through bribery, and that Qatar, in stadium construction, used something resembling slave labor, leading to lots of death.

Now, released during the recently concluded World Cup, this documentary posits that this conventional wisdom is grossly unfair to the Qataris.

This is, to be blunt, a bunch of one-sided nonsense. It’s either a blatant PR job on behalf of the Qatari regime, or has the exact appearance of one.

Directed by Mohammed Salameh, the order of the day here is whataboutism. Corruption? Everyone in sports is corrupt! Safety standards? Uh, what about the Germans? Yes, FIFA is indeed one of the most corrupt organizations on Earth, but that doesn’t absolve anyone of anything.

Horrible labor conditions? Other countries do it too! Bans on homosexuality? What about? What about? One guy alleges a massive bribery scheme among journalists, without providing any real evidence of any of it.

Qatar probably wouldn’t much like this observation, but it’s hard to deny: The documentary is using a form of argumentation that I’m used to seeing from supporters of Israel, where the argument is not so much that they did nothing wrong, but rather that they were “unfairly singled out” compared to other bad actors, and that there are unfair double standards. All the journalists are biased, everyone’s out to get us, all of our regional allies are just jealous of us, etc., etc. It’s basically the pro-Qatar version of hasbara.

The Last Picture Shows

Directed by Rustin Thompson, this is a lovely documentary about surviving small town independent movie theaters in the Western United States, and how they have managed to keep going, especially in the post-COVID era. Thompson took a road trip, measuring “ten states. 10,825 miles. 123 theaters” and took stock of the theaters and how they’ve survived, nor not survived.

Inspired, clearly, by the Peter Bogdanovich movie with a similar title, the documentary is upfront about how most of these theaters are struggling and losing money.

The movie is full of beautiful shots of the theaters and their surrounding scenery, and is scored with fantastic American roots music.

Might I suggest an East Coast sequel, featuring the Gap Theatre in Wind Gap, Pa.?

The film opens in New York on August 7th and in Los Angeles on August 21 as part of a national theatrical roadshow.

A Toxic Love Story

Another true crime documentary, this time telling the story of a couple and an ex-girlfriend who reset themselves with major twists not once, but twice.

A newly married couple, expecting a baby, seems to be getting threats from a woman the husband used to date. But is that what’s really happening? And once we have that understanding, is the person we thought responsible really who was? And are we being manipulated, all along, by the filmmakers?

This all adds up to entertaining trash, although I did enjoy that the local news, at just about every stage, got the entire story wrong.

It’s available to stream on Netflix now.