This Week In Documentary: 'Marlee Matlin,' 'Barbara Walters,' & 'Enigma'
Theatrical & Streaming Releases - New & Recommended - June 20-26, 2025
The last full week of June means the last full week of the first half of 2025. We continue to get the occasional Sundance selections in theaters and on streaming sites, but they’re not the heavy titles I’m most excited to share. We’re still mostly seeing celebrity docs (many of them are pretty good ones, at least), generic true-crime series, weekly installments of Netflix’s disappointing, sensationally nostalgic Trainwreck franchise, and the usual fun NatGeo nature content. A lot of it is still fluff.
Below, find this week’s documentary highlights, including reviews of new nonfiction films and series. They are followed by daily listings for all notable releases and airings and a brief look at what’s coming soon for doc fans. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to receive more in-depth highlights and reviews in the future.
Nonfics Pick Of The Week: Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore (2025)
In my review of Deaf President Now!, I questioned its decision to dub ASL in place of subtitles or captioning. Ultimately, the film is worth seeing regardless of whether that was the right choice. I’ve now seen Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, and it proves that subtitling ASL works just as well for viewers and is a much more respectful choice. The biographical feature sometimes works as a companion to the historical narrative of the earlier release (both premiered at Sundance this year, too), as this film profiles the life and career of Oscar-winning Deaf actress Marlee Matlin, who was a supporter of the Deaf President Now student protest at Gallaudet University in 1988.
Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore marks the directorial debut of Deaf actress Shoshanna Stern. When she interviews Matlin, the two share a couch, sitting more in profile to the camera as they face one another and sign their conversation. Some of the film’s other interviewees sign, and are subtitled, and those who aren’t Deaf speak. It’s no different than any documentary with a mix of English-speaking and non-English-speaking interviewees. Stern often cuts to herself on camera during these other interviews, as well, and normally that would be unwarranted and distracting. Here, it makes for a rather casual and communal vibe.
While the film is specifically focused on Matlin, it also addresses her place in the larger discussion of what it means to be the first of something, to break through a ceiling, and see what follows. For decades, she was the only Oscar-nominated, let alone Oscar-winning, Deaf actor, and that made her achievement feel even more significant for longer, and even more of an exception. For other Deaf performers interviewed and for Stern, they may see Matlin as not just a trailblazer but still an unparalleled paragon. At the same time, it’s interesting to see where Matlin clashed with others in the Deaf community, reminding us that no marginalized group is monolithic in its makeup; there are always individual viewpoints in disagreement with one another. Nevertheless, Matlin kept fighting for the community as a whole.
That’s in addition to fighting for herself, which is another important part of Matlin’s personal story. The film covers her abusive relationship with William Hurt during and after they made Children of a Lesser God, and how she became an advocate for herself as a woman, as well as a person with a disability. In the end, Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore is a portrait of a sole personality with a distinct perspective — she’s not just the Deaf actress — who has also come a long way in finding herself an equal among others, as in she’s not just the Deaf actress. Also, I now know to thank her for captioning on TVs being universal, since it’s not only beneficial to Deaf viewers. Many of us middle-aged people prefer to have them on despite not being hard-of-hearing.
Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore opens in theaters on Friday, June 20.
Other Documentary Highlights
Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything (2025)
Another celeb doc about a pioneering woman, Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything is a surprisingly worthy profile of the titular broadcast journalist, considering it was made by her old employer, ABC News, and even features Disney CEO Bob Iger as a talking head. Early in the documentary, Katie Couric notes that Barbara Walters “sometimes asked questions that revealed a lot about herself.” While not meant to be the thesis of the film, this idea does wind up informing much of its editorial structure. For instance, we’ll see a snippet of an interview with someone discussing the difficulty of being a working mother, and that will lead into a sequence about Walters’s motherhood. It’s a highly reverent film that, like Walters, never stoops to puffery.
Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything begins streaming on Hulu on Monday, June 23.
Charlie Victor Romeo (2013)
I thought a lot about Charlie Victor Romeo while watching The Rehearsal Season 2, so I’m excited to share that the film is getting another streaming home this week. It’s a film that reenacts airline disasters and other tense cockpit situations using actual Black Box recordings for its script. Yes, it’s as terrifying as it sounds. In our review of Charlie Victor Romeo, Dan Schindel said it “could do for air travel what Jaws did to beach-going” were it to be watched by a mass audience. Here’s more from that review:
“This is the kind of documentary whose very classification as a documentary might be seen as contentious. Ultimately, though, it is a factual film that is dramatic, though the facts are filtered through thick recreation…Charlie Victor Romeo is imperfect, but it is a singular piece of work. It’s also enormously effective, destroying what’s left of what pretensions of safety you imagine whenever you feel a jolt on a flight. Each recreation is ridiculously stressful as it builds, as you have no idea when or how it will end. This is one of the scariest documentaries ever made, and one of my favorites this year.”
Charlie Victor Romeo begins streaming on OVID on Wednesday, June 25.
Enigma (2025)
Another Sundance selection is finally arriving with an official release date, and it’s one I’m surprised didn’t get more coverage during the festival. It’s certainly one deserving of discourse on a multitude of levels. Directed by Zackary Drucker (The Stroll), Enigma explores early trans history and identity while stressing the significance of Le Carrousel de Paris and showcasing such icons as April Ashley and Amanda Lear. The latter is the most fascinating but problematic subject of the documentary, as she continues to reject claims that she was assigned male at birth, even with Drucker refusing to let the question go throughout the film.
On the one hand, I get why Drucker and many others would want Lear to admit to being trans. On the other hand, the film veers toward disrespect in its hounding of the woman, not to mention its inclusion of her so prominently in such a documentary. I’m reminded of the scene in The Queen when Flawless Sabrina relays a conversation she had with another drag queen: “And you say, ‘That's marvelous, darling, but what was your name before?’ And the queen will look at you straight in the eye and say, ‘There was no before.’” If Lear wants to leave her past in the past, whatever it entailed, so be it. She doesn’t owe anyone anything. She identifies as a woman, definitively.
Enigma premieres on HBO and Max on Tuesday, June 24.
F For Fake (1973)
This classic “sort-of documentary” (as Criterion labels it) is a reflexive film that explores the line between truth and lies and wonders where art fits into the mix. Directed by and starring Orson Welles, F for Fake tackles the subjects of fakes, frauds, and forgeries with a little bit of sleight-of-hand magic thrown in, and your head will be spinning with delight as you make sense of it all. Here’s an excerpt from its entry in our list of documentaries that give the finger to the art world:
“This freewheeling cinematic essay starts as an interrogation of famed forger Elmyr de Hory’s career before spiraling off into various explorations of the nature of art and authenticity. Welles is keeping company with a host of other ‘fakers,’ mainly his fellow actors and directors, suggesting that there’s not too much of a difference between deception and ‘real’ art. Besides de Hory, Clifford Irving, another huckster who embarrassed the elites (and author of the infamous fake Howard Hughes biography), talks about his craft. And de Hory points out that the art dealers he worked with gouged a lot more out of people than he ever did — the cancer is within these institutions, not outside it.”
F for Fake airs on TCM on Saturday, June 21.
Man With A Movie Camera (1929)
Battling F for Fake for the title of most reflexive film of all time, Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera is part city symphony and part cinematic experiment. It explores Moscow, Kyiv, and Odessa while also exploring the craft of filmmaking. The silent masterpiece regularly tops lists of the best documentaries of all time, and I recently wrote about the film to examine why that is. Here’s an excerpt from my retrospective review of Man with a Movie Camera:
“This documentary uses techniques and tricks to show us more about life than we can otherwise discern. In addition to that capability, Man with a Movie Camera also makes us think more about what cinema is and can be. Movies, or “motion pictures,” are photographs in motion, but what is a photograph but motion in a state of pause? Cinema reanimates that motion. Another dichotomous relationship I like in this film is how it captures life in stillness, including the stationary shots at the beginning that might as well be still photography, but it also depicts non-living objects in action, moving about on their own through the technique of stop-motion animation.”
Man with a Movie Camera airs on TCM on Monday, June 23.
Union (2024)
While Union did not make my list of the best documentaries of 2024, it was one of the most noteworthy of the year for its topical subject matter and its independent distribution status, the latter also being a topical issue for the film business. Here’s what I wrote when it opened in theaters last fall:
“There haven’t been a lot of documentaries this year that carry on the tradition of Robert Drew and the rest of the filmmakers involved in the observational Direct Cinema style, but Stephen Maing and Brett Story keep it going with Union. The film follows employees and former employees of a Staten Island Amazon warehouse as they campaign to unionize. It’s as political as you expect, pragmatically, and while there’s never any events as dramatic as in a classic Barbara Kopple union-focused film, it benefits in having a strong character in Chris Smalls, the main organizer.”
Union airs on PBS as the opening installment of POV Season 38 on Monday, June 23.
Documentary Release Calendar 6/20/25 - 6/26/25
Friday, June 20, 2025
Animal (2025) - A documentary about the carnivore diet. (In Theaters)
Esports World Cup: Level Up Episode 3 - The third part of a docuseries by R.J. Cutler on last year’s inaugural Esports World Cup. (Prime Video)
Grenfell: Uncovered (2025) - A documentary about the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in West London. (Netflix)
Harley Flanagan: Wired for Chaos (2024) - A documentary about the frontman of the punk band Cro-Mags. (In Theaters)
Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore (2025) - A documentary about the titular actress. Read our review of Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore in the highlights section, where it’s our Pick of the Week, above. (In Theaters)
Missing Presumed Dead Episodes 9 & 10: “Benedict Allen - Jungle Hell” & “George Linnane - The Cave” - The latest two episodes of this new series about real-life disappearances focus on an explorer lost in the Amazon rainforest and a trapped caver. (National Geographic)
Planet Weird Episodes 1 & 2: “Origin Stories” & “Superpowers” - The first two installments of this new nature docuseries about the world’s strangest species. (National Geographic WILD)
The Proof is Out There Season 5, Episode 2: “Infrared UFO Attack, Human Bear & Underwater Crop Circles” - The latest installment of this docuseries investigating UFOs, conspiracies, and mythical creatures. (History)
Soul in Cinema: Filming Shaft on Location (1971) - A short documentary about the making of Shaft. (TCM)
Saturday, June 21, 2025
Canadian Lancers (1956) - A short documentary about young horse riders. (TCM)
F for Fake (1973) - A documentary by Orson Welles about fraud and fakery. (TCM)
Okay for Sound (1946) - A short documentary celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Vitagraph sound-on-film process. (TCM)
Planet Weird Episodes 1 & 2: “Origin Stories” & “Superpowers” - The first two episodes of this new nature docuseries about the world’s strangest species. (Hulu)
Sunday, June 22, 2025
Holland in Tulip Time (1934) - A short documentary installment of James A. FitzPatrick’s TravelTalks travelogue franchise that explores Holland. (TCM)
Secrets of the Zoo: Down Under Season 5, Episode 7: “Carnivores Galore” - The latest episode of this docuseries filmed at Sydney’s Taronga Zoo showcases carnivore habitat members. (National Geographic WILD)
Underdogs Episodes 3 & 4: “Sexy Beasts” & “The Unusual Suspects” - The latest episodes of this nature docuseries narrated by Ryan Reynolds about evolutionary underdogs and how they survive. (National Geographic)
Monday, June 23, 2025
Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything (2025) - A documentary about the titular broadcast journalist. Read our review of Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything in the highlights section above. (Hulu)
Camp Widow (2025) - A short documentary about a gathering for widows. Presented as an episode of Independent Lens. (PBS)
Man with a Movie Camera (1929) - A reflexive city symphony film by Dziga Vertov, considered the best documentary of all time. Read our review of Man with a Movie Camera. (TCM)
MGM Parade Show #27 (1956) - This installment of the Hollywood-focused docuseries showcases the MGM films Captains Courageous and Forbidden Planet. (TCM)
Now You See It (1947) - A short documentary in the Pete Smith Specialty series about micro- and macrophotography. (TCM)
Union (2024) - A feature documentary directed by Stephen Maing (Crime + Punishment) and Brett Story (The Hottest August) about an effort by Amazon workers to unionize. Presented as an episode of POV. Read our review of Union. (PBS)
Tuesday, June 24, 2025
Action: The October Crisis of 1970 (1974) - A documentary about the French-Canadian terrorist kidnapping of 1970. (Blu-ray)
The Blues Under the Skin (1973) - A hybrid feature starring many famous blues singers. (Blu-ray)
Crass: The Sound of Free Speech - The Story of Reality Asylum (2023) - A documentary about the punk band Crass. (Blu-ray)
Drug Stories! Narcotic Nightmares and Hallucinogenic Hellrides (2018) - A documentary compiling anti-drug films from the 1960s. (OVID)
Enigma (2025) - A documentary exploring trans identity and history through a showcase of pioneering icons, including April Ashley. Read our review of Enigma in the highlights section above. (HBO and Max)
A German Youth (2015) - A documentary about the German revolutionary terrorist group The Red Army Faction. (Blu-ray)
A Life in Dirty Movies (2013) - A documentary about pornographer Joe Sarnos and his attempt to make one last film. (DVD and Blu-ray)
Long Lonesome Highway: The Story of Michael Parks (2025) - A biographical documentary about the blacklisted actor Michael Parks. (DVD)
The Monopoly of Violence (2020) - A documentary on violent police force. (Blu-ray)
Pusherman: Frank Lucas & The True Story of American Gangster (2025) - A documentary about American drug lord Frank Lucas. (In Theaters and DVD)
Satan Wants You (2023) - A documentary about the psychiatric memoir Michelle Remembers and how it spawned the “Satanic Panic” in the 1980s. (Blu-ray)
Trainwreck: Poop Cruise (2025) - The latest documentary in the Trainwreck franchise. This installment looks at a luxury cruise that infamously had severe sewage problems. (Netflix)
When We Went MAD! (2025) - A documentary about MAD magazine. (DVD and Blu-ray)
Wednesday, June 25, 2025
Border Security: Australia’s Front Line Season 15, Episodes 16 & 17: “Undeclared Danger” & “Fishy Truth” - The latest episodes of this docuseries continue to follow the work of the Australian Border Force. (National Geographic)
Charlie Victor Romeo (2013) - A documentary featuring reenactments of airline accidents using Black Box transcripts. Read our review of Charlie Victor Romeo. (OVID)
Expedition Unknown Season 15, Episode 2: “The Man-Eating Lions of Keny” - The latest installment of this docuseries following an archaeologist looking for lost artifacts. (Discovery)
Let Me Live (2025) - A short documentary about surfer Tom Lowe. (YETI’s YouTube channel)
The Racing Scene (1969) - A short documentary about James Garner’s racing team. (TCM)
Thursday, June 26, 2025
Butchers of L.A. (2025) - A true-crime docuseries about three serial killers in Southern California. (AMC+)
Secrets of the Bunny Ranch Season 1, Episodes 5 & 6: “The Lamar Odom Party” & “Too Close to the Sun” - The latest episodes in this docuseries about the Moonlite Bunny Ranch brothel. (A&E)Welcome to Wrexham Season 4, Episode 8: “Do a Wrexham” - The latest episode of this award-winning sports docuseries. (FX)
Sneak Peek At What’s Coming Soon
6/27 - My Mom Jayne - A documentary by actress Mariska Hargitay about her mother, Jayne Mansfield. (HBO and Max)
7/7 - Igualda: Refusing to Know Your Place - A documentary about activist Francia Márquez, who became Colombia’s first Afro-Colombian vice president. (PBS)
7/14 - Apocalypse in the Tropics - A documentary by Petra Costa (The Edge of Democracy) about former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and how the evangelical movement paved the way for his election. Find the film on our list of the most anticipated documentaries of 2025. (Netflix)
7/15 - Love & Rage: Munroe Bergdorf - A documentary about the trans activist Munroe Bergdorf. Watch the new trailer for the film below. (VOD)
7/17 - The Furry Detectives: Unmasking a Monster (2025) - A four-part true-crime docuseries produced by Alex Gibney and directed by Theo Love (The Legend of Cocaine Island) about an investigation into animal abuse in the Furry community. (SundanceTV, Sundance Now, and AMC+)
7/18 - Life After (2025) - A Sundance-winning documentary by Reid Davenport (I Didn’t See You There) about a disabled woman who sought “the right to die.” Read our review of Life After. (In Theaters)
9/9 - Becoming Thurgood: America’s Social Architect - A documentary about Thurgood Marshall. (PBS)