Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens: Ecosexuals

Since 2002, multimedia artists Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens have been exploring love, sex, and queer ecologies through filmmaking, performance, art exhibitions, activism, a book (Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover), and even walking rituals. It’s an unusual œuvre for a rather unlikely duo. Stephens has been a professor and two-time chair of the Art Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz for more than thirty years. Sprinkle comes from a much different world that’s given her a higher profile. Starting in the ’70s, she was a sex worker and porn star for more than two decades, as well as a feminist performance artist and “pleasure activist.” (She also holds a PhD in human sexuality and has been inducted into all four adult film Halls of Fame.) The co-creators’ latest film Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency is billed as “a joyous ecosexual documentary born from the ashes of California’s devastating fires.” It’s an apt if brain-twisting description of this conclusion to Stephens and Sprinkle’s trilogy of queer environmental docs, beginning with 2013’s Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story (the first queer environmental feature documentary, according to Susan Stryker), which was followed by 2019’s Water Makes Us Wet: An Ecosexual Adventure.

To read my interview visit The Gay & Lesbian Review.

Playing With Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency — Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens [Review]

Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle’s Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency opens with a bright red “WARNING. This film contains environmental destruction, explicit ecosexuality and performance art.” It’s a playful start to a cinematic project prompted by a devastating event — a massive wildfire that ripped through Stephens and Sprinkle’s Boulder Creek community in Northern California. Though the pair, life partners and artistic soulmates for nearly a quarter century, returned to their refuge in the Redwood forest to find their home had been spared, not all their neighbors, plants and animals included, had been so fortunate. This in turn spurred the filmmakers to do what they’ve been doing since 2013’s Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story (hailed as the first queer environmental doc) and on to 2019’s Water Makes Us Wet: An Ecosexual Adventure: transform climate grief into radically joyful queer action.

To read the rest visit In Review Online.

It Goes That Quick

Moving at the speed of its title, Ashley Connor and Joe Stankus’ It Goes That Quick, which premiered at MoMI’s First Look last spring, is a beautiful love letter to the married filmmakers’ respective families. Though it’s crafted from footage the couple (Connor behind the lens, Stankus responsible for sound and editing) shot with their relatives over eight years, juxtaposed with home movies from their youth, the film isn’t a straightforward work of nonfiction but rather a sort of Seinfeldian doc.

To read the rest visit In Review Online's collective New/Next Film Festival coverage.

The Luxury of Meaning: Julia Loktev on ‘My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile’

Julia Loktev’s NYFF and Venice-premiering My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile is, like last year’s NYFF-premiering My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow, a brutally riveting five-chapter epic that follows a group of Russian independent journalists branded traitors and terrorists in the eyes of the Kremlin. Primarily female, they risk everything to report on Putin’s corrupt regime and his senseless war in an effort to simultaneously save Ukrainian lives and free their own propaganda-run homeland. As we learn from the opening text onscreen, this latest installment begins just two days after Last Air in Moscow ended, and also that a week before it was still possible to live in Russia and tell the truth, but now it seems “unimaginable this world ever existed.” Thus, Loktev decides to follow her “undesirable friends” as they dash to the airport, often on an hour’s notice, and into the great unknown of forced exile. In the process, she’s able to intimately document the new surrealities of daily life, like trying to stay under the radar of Kremlin assassins while finding a partner on Tinder. Just prior to the NYFF debut of My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile, Documentary caught up with the acclaimed narrative and nonfiction filmmaker, who spoke about everything from shooting (in Prague, Tbilisi, Amsterdam, Riga, Kyiv and NYC) her abruptly rootless, peripatetic protagonists on an iPhone, to how Frederick Wiseman transformed her editing process, to thinking of meaning as a “luxury” in today’s chaotic times.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

CIFF 2026: Family Affairs

Having spent over a decade and a half mining cinematic nonfiction gems on the festival beat, only a handful of doc fests remain on my bucket list (Thessaloniki, I’m available). Which is why it was a bit of a thrill to finally be able to visit the Camden International Film Festival, an impressively content slop-free three-day event (September 17-20) in scenic Maine that takes place in an eclectic array of venues across Camden and neighboring Rockland, a 15-minute ride away. Fortunately for non-drivers like myself, the festival shuttle/school bus connecting the two towns ran frequently between the grand Camden Opera House, which also housed the Points North Forum, and the laidback YETI Lounge at the Yellow Barn in Rockland. (The Festival Hub at the Arctic Tern Sanctuary was also helpfully only a few minutes walk from the outdoor lifestyle brand-sponsored lounge, the spot to hit for free food, drinks and live music between screenings.)

To read all about it visit Hammer to Nail.

Social Landscapes

Jonas Meier’s Social Landscapes, which debuted at CPH:DOX earlier this year, is a fantastical cinematic trip to some of the most coveted and unexpected tourist spots around the world. It’s also a hilariously innovative dive into the minds of those who visit them — or rather review them as we’re all critics now. Indeed, while the images might be intoxicating (and Meier’s purposeful use of AI controversial) you wouldn’t know it from the entirely Tripadvisor-sourced narration, which includes critiques ranging from “they should cut all the trees down” (at a forest) to “the beach is too sandy.”

To read the rest and subscribe for free visit Beyond Nonfiction on Substack.

Black Zombie

“Turning someone into a zombie is like putting them back into slavery. Forever,” a Haitian voice says at the start of Maya Annik Bedward’s Black Zombie, a compelling and eye-opening investigation into the true story behind the pop culture monster. Combining clips from classic Hollywood horror films with fictional historic reenactments shot in dramatic B&W, the comprehensive doc, which opens in select theaters September 11th, also includes interviews with a diverse array of talking heads. Indeed, we hear from historians, Black and white alike; Vodou practitioners in Haiti, New Orleans and Montreal; and several zombie fans, including Zombie Walk founder Thea Munster and Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash. (John Russo, co-writer of George A. Romero’s 1968 cult flick Night of the Living Dead, and Romero’s makeup and special effects artist Tom Savini even make memorable appearances.) It all adds up to a thorough retracing of the modern zombie narrative back to its birth in Haitian Vodou, and in the process transforms the rapacious creature from a symbol of irrational evil to that of resistance against enslavement.

To read the rest and subscribe for free visit Beyond Nonfiction on Substack.

Teenage Wasteland

“Someone has to keep track of where everything is buried. It’s not just poison in the earth, it’s poison of the spirit as well,” notes Fred Isseks, an unconventional high school English teacher in Middletown, New York, a city 70 miles north of Manhattan that few New Yorkers have ever heard of (as confirmed by decades-old footage of a younger Isseks conducting man-on-the-street interviews). He delivers this missive while rifling through boxes of videotapes in his basement right at the start of Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine’s (Girls State, Boys State) September 4th Netflix-premiering Teenage Wasteland, a film I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of since Sundance 2025, where it debuted with the more mundane but perhaps less confusing title Middletown.

To read the rest and subscribe for free visit Beyond Nonfiction on Substack.

The Balkan Cowboy

Premiering at this year’s Sarajevo Film Festival (August 14-21), The Balkan Cowboy is a magical doc feature debut from acclaimed visual artist Dragana Jurišić, an “exile not an expatriate” long based in Ireland. Returning to the site of her homeland that vanished “like Atlantis in the realm of imaginary places and people,” as she narrates in VO, Jurišić captures the fracturing of Yugoslavia through the story of Harry Jackson, a cult director of Westerns, family friend and childhood hero (despite her iconoclastic idol repeatedly noting that she had “such an ugly name for such a pretty girl.” Though she goes on to explain that her distinctly Serbian moniker was bestowed by her dad just to piss off his Croatian nationalist father, and that rather than change it she decided it was wiser to change the country).

To read the rest and subscribe for free visit Beyond Nonfiction on Substack.

Yugo Goes to America

I’ve now taken my Sisyphean battle against streamer slop to Substack as well, posting pieces on an inspiration-strikes timeline! For my inaugural exclusive I’ve decided to review one of the most bonkers docs I've seen so far this year. The road-tripping Yugo Goes to America, in which a trio of buddies from Belgrade make their way across the US in a Soviet-era Yugo (widely deemed the worst car ever built), next plays the Sarajevo Film Festival. Note to US fests and distributors: Please import. (Note to readers: Please read for free and subscribe.)

Revolutionaries Never Die — Mohanad Yaqubi [Locarno ’26 Review]

Mohanad Yaqubi’s Revolutionaries Never Die is the Palestinian filmmaker and archivist’s cinematic “answer” to the pioneering Lebanese journalist and filmmaker Jocelyne Saab’s invitation to collaborate, a request sent via email in 2018. Unfortunately, Yaqubi was unable to respond before Saab passed away several months later, leaving behind a storied career spanning documentary and fiction (and docu-fiction) filmmaking, as well as photography and video art.

To read the rest visit In Review Online.

The Golden Spurtle

Much like the dish at the heart of the World Porridge Making Championships, Constantine Costi’s The Golden Spurtle is more than the sum of its simple ingredients.

Read my capsule review of the delicious Wes Anderson-esque doc in the Summer 2026 issue of Documentary magazine.

The Welcome Table

The latest creative endeavor in award-winning filmmaker Josh Fox’s (Gasland, How to Let Go of the World, The Edge of Nature) decades-long mission to spur climate action, The Welcome Table follows the connected tale of environmental destruction across six continents (and one very long art installation), centering the stories of those who call the frontlines home, from Paradise, CA to the paradise lost of the Peruvian Amazon. In turn, these climate refugees are brought together at a thousand-foot table along a New Orleans levee (at least those not denied Visas) to share their experiences, take inspiration from one another, and of course, enjoy some musical interludes as Fox is a fervent believer in “protests that sing.” (Among the acclaimed New Orleans musicians featured is the jazz artist John Boutté of “Treme Song” fame, who serves as both EP and primary offscreen narrator alongside the director-writer-environmental activist who likewise performs.)

To read the rest of my review visit Hammer to Nail.

“Do You Love Me” Reassembles Lebanon’s Cultural Memory

Lana Daher’s debut feature, Do You Love Me (2026), is a kaleidoscopic exploration of Lebanon’s cultural memory. The Beirut-based multidisciplinary artist drew from 70 years of found footage and archival material to assemble this visceral 76-minute portrait of Lebanese history, which premiered at Venice Days and is now playing at Metrograph in New York. Daher stitches together clips from her country’s independent cinema, newsreels, and home movies, causing the past and the present to collide and recontextualize each other anew.

To read my interview with the exceptional director visit Filmmaker magazine.

‘Do You Love Me’ Review: Lana Daher’s All-Archival Cinematic Love Letter to Lebanon

“In Lebanon, contemporary history is not taught in schools,” reads the opening text of Lana Daher’s Do You Love Me. The documentary is a stunning visual and sonic excursion through Lebanon’s history comprised of material obtained from over 20,000 sources — a feat made all the more impressive by the fact that the country has no national archive. As images start to fly by too fast to read their accompanying (and not always subtitled) Arabic and French text, we’re cautioned that the narrative doesn’t follow a strict chronology as “disorientation is part of the journey...welcome to Lebanon.” Indeed.

To read the rest visit Slant Magazine.

“Refreshingly self-aware”: Boy George & Culture Club review

Admittedly, despite having grown up with the chart-topping pop band Culture Club a ubiquitous presence on the airwaves of my youth, I’m not the target nostalgia audience for Alison Ellwood’s Boy George & Culture Club, a film whose subject is apparent to anyone familiar with such prefabricated 80s tunes as “Karma Chameleon” and “Miss Me Blind.” Indeed, for likeminded new wave aficionados, the band’s tired mainstream sound always undercut any rebellious bonafides its theatrically-clad titular singer may have had. (Music snob queer kids much preferred the gender-bending vocals of Bronski Beat’s Jimmy Somerville and Yaz’s Alison Moyet.) Which is why it felt so refreshingly self-aware to hear George himself candidly stress from the start, “We were never cool.” (This after noting that the aforementioned 1983 hit “Karma Chameleon” was supposedly the “nail in our cool coffin.”)

To read the rest of my review visit Global Comment.

Shock Value: The Filmmakers Behind ‘The Haunting of Pennhurst’ Talk Horror, Disability, and Care

A “horror film about care” is how multi-disciplinary artist Nathan R. Stenberg has described his initial concept for the Tribeca-premiering The Haunting of Pennhurst, a simultaneously disturbing and empowering doc he’s crafted along with fellow interdisciplinary artist Katarina Poljak and filmmaker Mike Attie (2014’s In Country). The film is an archival and vérité look at the Pennhurst Asylum, a tourist destination in Spring City, Pennsylvania, famous for its visceral “haunted attractions” and likewise infamous for having once been home to the Pennhurst State School and Hospital, a facility that systematically tortured and experimented on its disabled residents for close to 80 years. But what makes the multimillion-dollar enterprise truly stand out is that the majority of the “haunters” staging those spooky attractions are themselves disabled, including museum director and volunteer trainer/makeup artist Autumn Werner, who serves as the main guide in the doc. For this group of creatives, what was once a house of horrors has become a space to retake the narrative and to educate others so that the dark, ableist policies of the past are never instituted again. (Whether that message stays with visitors as they exit the gift shop or browse the Etsy store is less clear.) Soon after The Haunting of Pennhurst’s debut in the Escape From Tribeca section, Documentary reached out to the diverse trio of directors to learn all about their unique collaboration, as well as filming in a place of preservation financed by fear.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

How to Feed a Dictator

FOOD / The elderly personal chefs of five strongmen expose the uneasy bond between cuisine, loyalty, and violence. Andrew Neel’s Tribeca and Sheffield Doc/Fest-debuting How to Feed a Dictator, shot across seven countries, teases out the stories of the now elderly personal chefs to Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Augusto Pinochet, and Kim Jong-il while they recreate the strongmen’s favourite dishes, the final creations framed as if in a culinary magazine. These contemporary images are then juxtaposed with archival footage, along with sit-downs with journalists, academics, and even several victims of the regimes who link food itself to extractive power (as crucial as guns, according to political science prof Bruce Beuno de Mesquita). This allows a sensational premise to ultimately become something much more satisfying, a thorny exploration of the line between banal complicity and circumstantial desperation.

To read the rest visit Modern Times Review.

Kids Like Me — Cynthia Lowen [Tribeca ’26 Review]

Designed to please any movie lover with a heart, Cynthia Lowen and Jon Cohrs’ Kids Like Me follows Oliver Odwazny-Beebe, a passionate indie filmmaker with a murder mystery obsession who is bent on bringing his latest vision to the screen, even if it means corralling everyone from friends, neighbors, and family members, to Tony Shalhoub and the local police. Indeed, the smart and scrappy director is convinced that “people are finally gonna recognize my artistic talents through the delightfully macabre world of murder.” Never mind that Odwazny-Beebe is only 12 years old, and with a rare genetic condition that requires him to be tethered to numerous life-saving (and quality of life-preserving) medical gadgets around the clock. His creative savant imagination seems to be fully operating at warp speed.

To read the rest visit In Review Online.

The Haunting of Pennhurst — Nathan R. Stenberg, Mike Attie, and Katarina Poljak [Tribeca ’26 Review]

Nathan R. Stenberg, Mike Attie, and Katarina Poljak’s The Haunting of Pennhurst is an archival and verité look at the transformation of the notorious Pennhurst State School and Hospital from a real-life house of horrors that warehoused the disabled for nearly 80 years to what could be considered a form of problematic dark tourism. But what sets today’s Pennhurst Asylum — which consists of “haunted attractions” as well as history and ghost tours — apart from the usual capitalistic ventures designed to profit from tragedy is that its marquis fright nights are sustained and run by a group of performers with a wide variety of disabilities. And they’re all as firmly dedicated to making visitors question why the unfamiliar often feels so threatening as they are to scaring them. In fact, Stenberg, a multidisciplinary artist and disability scholar who assumed he’d be documenting an “entertainment attraction commodifying atrocity,” has said that he instead discovered something far more nuanced — folks finding “community on grounds once designed for their death.”

To read the rest visit In Review Online.