Cinema News: L.A.’s top doc fest returns

April 17, 2026 | View in browser

By Mark Olsen

Staff Writer

Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.

This weekend is the L.A. Times Festival of Books on the USC campus. Several speakers should be of interest to movie fans. On Saturday morning, Joshua Rothkopf, Amy Nicholson, Glenn Whipp and I will get together to talk about our recent ranked list of the 101 best L.A. movies. Come and argue with us.

Also on Saturday, Josh will be leading a conversation with Roger Deakins and James Ellis Deakins about their recent book “Reflections: On Cinematography.” I will be joined by four authors — Jeff Chang (“Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America”), Paul Fischer (“The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg and Battle for the Soul of America Cinema”), Shawn Levy (“Clint: The Man and the Movies” and Paul Myers (“John Candy: A Life in Comedy”) — for a talk about depictions of modern Hollywood. Ticket and reservation info is available here.

Among this week’s new releases are David Lowery’s “Mother Mary,” a psychodrama revolving around pop stardom featuring Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel. Pete Ohs’ “Erupcja” stars Charli XCX in a tale of a friendship set in Warsaw, Poland.

In her review of “Mother Mary” Katie Walsh wrote, “‘Mother Mary’ is a phantasmagoric fever dream of a gothic pop opera, but it is also a single-setting conversation movie that pits two of our most mesmerizing actors against each other in a verbal pas de deux of wordy accusation and buried betrayals.”

Also opening is “Normal,” directed by Ben Wheatley and written by “John Wick” creator Derek Kolstad, starring Bob Odenkirk as the interim sheriff of a small town who stumbles upon an international crime ring. The film continues Odenkirk’s recent run of everyman action roles.

Josh Rottenberg spoke to Odenkirk, 63, about his recent career revision, notable for following his recovery from a scary heart attack. As he said, “Tom Cruise is just in better shape than me. I mean, he can do things I can’t sell.”

Odenkirk added, “My whole career has felt like risk and danger and potentially being very deeply embarrassed on a world stage. Some part of me says I don’t give a s— and that it’s fine if I’m embarrassed. I don’t know if that’s true. But I’m willing to risk it.”

Redefining documentaries with ‘This Is Not a Fiction’

The American Cinematheque has launched the third edition of its festival “This Is Not a Fiction,” which, while ostensibly a program celebrating documentary filmmaking, also finds smart ways to blur the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction and has quickly become the city’s best doc showcase.

The fest is already underway and among the remaining highlights will be the L.A. premiere of a new 4K restoration of Barbara Kopple’s 1990 Oscar-winning “American Dream,” about an extended labor dispute at a food processing plant in Minnesota. It feels extra-timely today.

In a 1992 interview with Kristine McKenna, Kopple said, “The kind of filmmaking I do revolves around my ability to immerse myself within a community, to live there and operate sort of like an anthropologist. I believe the people I make films about have something important to say and in order to communicate their point of view I have to get down and penetrate as deeply as I can. Making films like this you develop long relationships with people and they become friends — I never said I was objective.”

Filmmaker Ross McElwee will also be present for the West Coast premiere of a new restoration of his 1985 film “Sherman’s March,” which helped usher in an era of personal docs by tying together a retracing of William Tecumseh Sherman’s campaign through the South during the Civil War with the filmmaker’s own quest for love. McElwee’s 2011 “Photographic Memory” and 2025 “Remake” will also be shown.

There will also be in-person tributes to filmmakers Gianfranco Rosi and Caveh Zahedi.

Among the fiction titles in the program are Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone’s 2016 “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping,” Jeff Tremaine’s “Jackass: Number Two” and Peter Watkins’ 1971 “Punishment Park.” A screening of 2000’s “Best in Show” will include director Christopher Guest and actor Eugene Levy for a Q&A in tribute to actor Catherine O’Hara.

The festival will conclude with a screening of ”Los Lobos: Native Sons,” with filmmakers Doug Blush and Piero F. Giunti in attendance plus a live performance by the venerable L.A. band.

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An adventurous voice gets a retrospective

Filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari, who makes dynamic, abstracted examinations of societal structures, will receive her most extensive U.S. retrospective with “Worlds Apart: The Films of Athina Rachel Tsangari.” Presented by Acropolis Cinema and Mubi and running from April 17-May 17, the series will have screenings at 2220 Arts + Archives, the Los Feliz Theatre and Vidiots.

Originally from Greece, Tsangari came to the U.S. to study in New York and Austin and had a small role in Richard Linklater’s landmark 1991 breakthrough “Slacker.” Aside from making her own films, she has collaborated with Yorgos Lanthimos on some of his earliest features and has taught filmmaking at numerous institutions including Harvard and CalArts.

“Every film I make is so different and I think that confuses people a lot,” Tsangari said in a phone call this week from her office at CalArts. “I feel like, of course, my sensibility is there and somehow there is a connecting thread, but I’m not the one to say what it is.”

The series will open tonight with the 2024 film “Harvest,” an immersive historical drama starring Caleb Landry Jones and Harry Melling, adapted from the novel by Jim Crace and shot by cinematographer Sean Price Williams. The Q&A will be moderated by filmmakers Barry Jenkins and “The Farewell’s” Lulu Wang.

Other evenings include the L.A. premiere of Tsangari’s first feature, 2001’s “The Slow Business of Going,” with a Q&A moderated by actor and filmmaker Julie Delpy. Tsangari’s 2010 breakthrough, the absurdist “Attenberg,” which won the actress prize for Arianne Labed at the Venice Film Festival, will have a Q&A moderated by “Eephus” filmmaker Carson Lund.

Tsangari says she is looking forward to revisiting her films with an audience, as it always takes some time before she can watch them again.

“For the year after, you’re so exhausted and supposedly it’s done, but you just see all of the stuff that you didn’t do right,” Tsangari says. “Or at least I do. So it’s actually nice to see them completely detached from the time and space when they were made. It’s sort of like diary entries.”

Points of interest

Bob Dylan live rarities

On Thursday, the Egyptian Theatre will present “Stepping into the Unknown: Films from the Bob Dylan Center,” with the center’s director, Steven Jenkins, in conversation with music journalist Chris Willman. A recent addition to the event is a live performance from the Bangles’ Susanna Hoffs.

The program will consist of rare live footage and TV appearances by Bob Dylan, putting a focus on Dylan as performer. This will be the first time this particular program will be shown in L.A., with highlights across the breadth of Dylan’s career including an acoustic version of “Tombstone Blues” from the notorious 1965 Newport Folk Festival, a 1975 TV performance of “Simple Twist of Fate,” a 1976 reading of “Going, Going, Gone,” a 1980 rendition of “Solid Rock” and a version of “The Times They Are A-Changin’” performed at the White House in 2010.

In a phone call this week, Jenkins described Dylan’s ongoing relevance. “This is — I don’t say this lightly — our Shakespeare, probably the artist who’s had the most impact on the way that our culture has been shaped from the mid-20th and now into the first quarter of the 21st century.

“It’s an unparalleled body of work,” he added. “Again and again, he has exploded the very notion of what a popular song can be or what popular music writ large can be. His blending of fact and fiction, his playing with persona, his range of material, moving from socially conscious work into personal and surreal lyricism, ranging through so many musical styles, doing all of this at such a high level of craftsmanship — there’s just really nobody like him.”

Walter Hill’s ‘The Warriors’

On Wednesday, the Academy Museum will show Walter Hill’s 1979 “The Warriors” with producer Lawrence Gordon in person. The story of this gritty action film, one of Hill’s signature stripped-down genre pieces touched by a bit of fantasy, concerns all the gangs of New York City out to get the members of rival Warriors, who have been wrongly accused of killing the leader of another gang.

The movie touched off nationwide controversy when it was first released because of the real-world violence that seemed to follow in its wake. A February 1979 Times article notes that the manager of Pasadena’s now-defunct State Theater was beaten up and there were fights in the lobby. The theater’s 21-year-old assistant manager said, “That night we just happened to get a bunch of people in here who hated each other. As far as I’m concerned they were just a group of stupid idiots who came in loaded. The same thing could have happened if they were in a bowling alley together.”

Lucrecia Martel ‘s ‘Our Land (Nuestra Tierra)’

On Wednesday at Vidiots there will be a special appearance by Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel with her first feature documentary “Our Land (Nuestra Tierra.)” Having achieved worldwide acclaim for narrative features such as “La Cienaga” and “Zama,” Martel now sets her sights on the true story of an Indigenous man who was murdered in a land dispute, capturing multiple perspectives on the conflict. The film will open locally later this year.

Former Times film critic Justin Chang will moderate a conversation with Martel and cinematographer Ernesto de Carvalho. “Our Land” will screen along with a new 4K restoration of “The Headless Woman,” Martel’s evocative family drama from 2008.