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Well, now’s the time to seek out documentaries that examine our place in the world — and those creating it, those destroying it, those rebuilding it.

The 15th annual edition of Doc NYC, New York City’s premier documentary film festival, launches November 13-21 in Manhattan, with 31 world premiere features and 24 U.S. premieres covering topics from banned (and burned!) books to activism, war, and artistry in the face of censorship and genocide.

While a few, like Eddie Huang’s profile of a certain media empire’s downfall “Vice Is Broke,” may be familiar to you off the festival circuit, many are getting exposure in the United States for the first time. Here, Ronan Farrow investigates cyber surveillance in HBO Documentary Films’ “Surveilled,” directed by Matthew O’Neill and Perri Peltz. In “Yalla Parkour,” U.S.-based filmmaker Areeb Zuaiter sifts through memories of her childhood growing up in Gaza while...

Exclusive: Fresh off the TIFF premiere of their new documentary Vice Is Broke, Get Out producer QC Entertainment has enlisted Gabrielle Union (Riff Raff) to star in The Casket Girls, a new horror film to be directed by Justin Dyck (Anything for Jackson), which they will produce and fully finance.

Written by Thomas Lennon & Robert Ben Garant (Night at the Museum), with revisions by Keith Cooper (Anything for Jackson) & Dyck, The Casket Girls is inspired by the true story of a group of young women sent from France to New Orleans to become brides to French colonists in the early 1700s. They arrived with small chests, or “caskets” of their belongings, hence the name given by locals. According to legend, upon the girls’ arrival, the homicide rate in New Orleans rose dramatically, with stories of men drained of their blood. The girls were blamed and feared to be demons or vampires,...

When Imagine Documentaries president Sara Bernstein pitched New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams on making a film about her career, even the veteran journalist didn’t understand why Bernstein was interested. “What do you want to make a doc about me for?” Adams asked the “Jim Henson: Idea Man” producer. “Everybody has a documentary. My dentist has a documentary!”

Good line — and she must have a great dentist.

An incomplete list of this year’s celebrity docs includes Simone Biles, Celine Dion, Steve Martin, Roger Federer, Stevie van Zandt, Brian Eno, Frida Kahlo, Devo, Christopher Reeve, Sue Bird, Andrea Bocelli, Elton John, Martha Stewart, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Paul Anka, Pharrell Williams, and Bruce Springsteen.

The appetite seems nearly endless, but producers say it’s increasingly difficult to find famous people whose lives haven’t flashed before our eyes. Said Bernstein, “The challenge today is, who hasn’t had a documentary?...

Even at the height of its power, which was built (in part) on a series of sexual how-to guides and the second-hand credibility of an HBO documentary series, Vice wasn’t big on teaching people anything they didn’t already know. No, Vice was all about access. It was all about telling stories from the inside out, irrespective of journalistic ethics or integrity, in order to seduce the internet generation with the truth of a world too fluid and fucked up for the New York Times to understand.

That truth was typically facile and/or exaggerated, but the illusion of extreme reporting played to the strengths of a brand that had always profited from selling freaks to squares, and supercharging that brand with the strength of traditional media turned it into an empire once valued at six billion dollars. I mean, it’s not like CNN could have — or would...

Many great investigative pieces have been written about Vice, the publication that had a spectacular rise as well as an explosive collapse, culminating in the mass layoffs of hundreds of employees earlier this year and subsequent attempts by those like co-founder Shane Smith to save it. Eddie Huang’s documentary, “Vice Is Broke,” is not going to be one of them.

This is something that the director, a former employee and host for the company who says he had to fight to receive full compensation for the work he did, would likely agree with. Early on in his documentary, Huang makes clear that he isn’t interested in following conventions of the form by relying on the familiar pattern of cutting to talking heads and recountings of what happened.

Instead, he sits down with a collection of former employees one-by-one to talk with them in extended interviews about their experiences...

The Toronto Film Festival on Thursday returned post-strikes with Hollywood star wattage as Ben Stiller and director David Gordon Green gave a glittering lift-off for their opening night film Nutcrackers.

Gordon Green introduced Stiller to the crowd at Roy Thomson Hall in the Canadian city that looked primed for film fest fun with the opening night comedy. The Zoolander and Tropic of Thunder star then recalled making movies in Canada.

“When people will talk to me sometimes about the Night at the Museum movies, they’ll say, Wow, what’s it like to shoot in the Museum of Natural History? And I’ll say it was actually a warehouse in Vancouver,” Stiller recounted.

“I’ve made a bunch of movies in Canada, and it’s always been an amazing experience,” Stiller added. His comments followed Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau touting Canada as a foreign location destination for Hollywood. “Our...

Eddie Huang came to both bury and praise Vice at the opening night of the Toronto Film Festival on Thursday.

The author, chef and former host of the bankrupt media company’s show, “Huang’s World,” was on hand with his new documentary “Vice Is Broke.” The film serves as both an ode to Vice’s anarchic spirit and the generations of aggressive, barrier-pushing, break-shit journalists and filmmakers it employed, as well as a darker look at the greed and questionable ethics that helped send it into Chapter 11. And Huang, who says he got an NDA he had signed waived in return for unpaid residuals, made it clear that Vice, or what’s left of it, isn’t too happy with what he made.

“Their lawyers are still trying to fight us on this film,” Huang said during a question-and-answer session following the documentary’s premiere at TIFF Lightbox Cinema. He added that Shane Smith,...

The title of Eddie Huang’s new documentary says it all: “Vice Is Broke.” The media company that defined counterculture sensibilities filed for bankruptcy in 2023. And Huang — the multitalented author, on-camera personality, and documentarian — began his new film with a grievance.

First, Huang says in an interview, he had a personal falling-out with controversial Vice executive Shane Smith, the face of the brand and the mastermind of the company’s scaling-up beyond what was sustainable. (Huang declines to go into the nature of the offense.) Then, he noticed that he was owed money for his on-camera work for Vice, including the TV series “Huang’s World,” in which he traveled and experienced other cultures in the style of his role model and late friend, Anthony Bourdain.

“I had been asking for an accounting since 2018,” Huang says. “They kicked the can down the road and never paid me my residuals. The bankruptcy...

The tradition of South Korean haenyeo is now being brought to the big screen.

Director/executive producer Sue Kim helms the highly-anticipated A24 and Apple documentary “The Last of the Sea Women,” which centers on elderly women divers. Peabody Award nominee Kim captures the haenyeo, who are called real-life mermaids, for the feature.

The official synopsis reads: “In ‘The Last of the Sea Women,’ an extraordinary band of feisty grandmother warriors wage a spirited battle against vast oceanic threats. The haenyeo divers of South Korea’s Jeju Island are renowned for centuries of diving to the ocean floor — without oxygen — to harvest seafood for their livelihood. Today, with most haenyeo now in their 60s, 70s, and 80s, their traditions and way of life are in imminent danger. But these fierce, funny, hardworking women refuse to give an inch, aided by a younger generation’s fight to revive their ancestral lifestyle through social media.