This month’s lineup leans heavily into documentaries, with “The Invite” as the lone outlier. Watching these films, I kept circling back to my own life—each one opening up a different angle on identity and how I make sense of the world. I was drawn to the idea of finding some core truth in them, something that connects across stories, especially through the recurring themes of tension and connection.
All of these films premiered at Sundance before landing in Chicago. At the Doc10 Film Festival at the Davis Theater, I caught early screenings of “Cookie Queens,” “Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story,” and “Give Me the Ball!”. Over at the Chicago Critics Film Festival at the Music Box Theatre, I saw “The Invite” and “When a Witness Recants.” One standout moment was watching “The Invite” with Olivia Wilde in attendance, followed by a Q&A with Marya Gates that dug into the idea of finding balance later in life. I also sat in on a conversation with “When a Witness Recants” director Dawn Porter and critic Robert Daniels. I previously had the privilege of interviewing Porter about her documentary “John Lewis: Good Trouble,” so it felt very special to see her in-person after our pandemic zoom interviews in 2020 and 2021.
What ties these films together is how close they bring you to their subjects. There’s no comfortable distance—they pull you straight into messy, overlapping systems of family, justice, and intimacy. It feels like a kind of “cinema of proximity,” where personal stories can’t be separated from the structures around them. Whether it’s the friction between childhood and capitalism or the tension between truth and the forces that try to bury it, these films don’t just present experiences—they sit with them, turning them over until something deeper comes into focus.
Cookie Queens – Alysa Nahmias
There’s an easy temptation to reduce Girl Scout cookies to nostalgia—to think of them as simple transactions, a seasonal ritual tied to childhood. “Cookie Queens” gently but insistently dismantles that illusion. What begins as a portrait of four young girls selling cookies unfolds into something far more expansive: a study of early ambition, familial pressure, and the quiet complexities of American capitalism.
Alysa Nahmias approaches her subjects with a patience that allows contradictions to surface naturally. These girls are at once children and entrepreneurs, navigating quotas, competition, and self-worth in a system that rewards hustle but rarely acknowledges its cost. The stakes—financial, emotional, communal—become increasingly visible as each story deepens.
What lingers is not just the scale of this $800 million enterprise, but the way it filters into identity. Confidence is built, but so is pressure. Success is celebrated, but rarely uncomplicated. The film never loses its warmth, yet it refuses to soften the edges of what it reveals. By the end, the sweetness of its premise has given way to something more layered—an understanding that even the most innocent institutions carry the weight of larger systems.
Give Me the Ball! – Liz Garbus & Elizabeth Wolff
Legacies get built in different ways—sometimes through victory, sometimes by refusing to play by the rules at all. “Give Me the Ball!” lives right in that tension.
The film centers on Billie Jean King and moves with the same restless, electric energy that defined her career. The matches aren’t just about winning or losing—they feel like fights for visibility, for equality, for basic recognition in a world that kept trying to shrink her. Which is impossible for someone like Billie Jean because she is so magnetic. But what resonates most is how deeply her work extends beyond herself. King wasn’t just competing—she was building pathways for other women, pushing for equity in ways that reshaped the sport and the culture around it.
Watching that, I couldn’t help but see parallels in my own life, working to create space for underrepresented voices in the film industry—especially for women and gender-expansive people. There’s something grounding in recognizing that kind of shared purpose, even across entirely different fields. King’s enthusiasm—for life, for advocacy, for women’s sports—isn’t just inspiring in a general sense; it feels instructive.
That connection became even more tangible when I had the chance to ask her a question on the red carpet at Sundance this year. Her response was simple but telling: she hopes her story encourages others in their own work and journeys. That idea—of legacy as something that ripples outward—runs through the film just as much as any match or milestone.
Directors Liz Garbus and Elizabeth Wolff shape the story so it shifts seamlessly between archival highs and quieter, more introspective moments. The 1973 Battle of the Sexes isn’t just framed as a historic match—it lands as a cultural breaking point, a moment that redefined who gets to be seen and taken seriously.
Wolff mentioned that she often asks herself, “What would Billie do?” It’s a question that lingers after the film ends. If more people carried that mindset—rooted in courage, generosity, and a commitment to lifting others up—it’s hard not to imagine a different, better world.
There’s momentum throughout, but it never feels like the film is rushing past anything important. It stays locked into that push and pull—control versus exposure, self-definition versus public scrutiny. What comes through isn’t just greatness, but endurance. It’s about what it actually takes to claim space—and to keep that space open for others once you’ve carved it out.
Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story – Judd Apatow & Neil Berkeley
Comedy often asks us to laugh at what hurts. “Paralyzed by Hope . . .” asks what it means to live there—to not just transform pain into humor, but to exist in the unstable space between the two.
Maria Bamford has always operated in that space, and the film embraces her singular ability to collapse the boundary between performance and confession. In addition to her own unique voice, she is a mastet at nailing the voices of her close family members, specifically her mother, sister, and even her father. Co-directed by Judd Apatow and Neil Berkeley, the documentary resists the neat arc of rise-and-success. Instead, it moves in loops—through breakdowns, breakthroughs, and the strange continuity of being a person who feels everything intensely.
What makes the film resonate is its refusal to sanitize. Mental health is not framed as a hurdle to overcome, but as an ongoing negotiation—one that Bamford navigates with startling honesty and disarming humor. Voices like Conan O’Brien and Patton Oswalt offer context, but they never overshadow the central presence: Bamford herself, unguarded and searching.
By the end, laughter feels different. It’s not just release—it’s recognition. A way of seeing, and being seen.
The Invite – Olivia Wilde
“The Invite” settles comfortably into this month’s thematic focus on tension and connection, but approaches it with a quieter, more introspective touch. It’s genuinely funny—laugh-out-loud at times—but beneath that humor is something more reflective, the kind of film that lingers and nudges you inward.
Like Joanna Arnow’s “The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed,” the film lingers in the complexities of relationships—how love can offer companionship while still requiring you to hold onto your sense of self. It made me reflect on how much we evolve over time, and how relationships either grow alongside that evolution or begin to expose their limits. The person I was in my twenties isn’t who I am now, and the relationships I’ve had mirror that shift. There’s something meaningful in finding a partnership that allows for both stability and change.
Directed by and starring Olivia Wilde—her third feature—the film brings together a compelling ensemble including Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, and Edward Norton. It opens with a familiar setup: a dinner between a married couple played by Wilde and Rogen and the couple who lives in the apartment upstairs, Cruz and Norton. What follows is far more gradual and revealing than that premise might suggest.
There’s a particular kind of tension that only exists in intimate spaces—the slow unraveling of conversation, the weight of what’s left unsaid. The film unfolds like an onion being peeled back layer by layer. With each interaction, something new is exposed—sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes sharply enough to sting. And like cutting into an onion, there’s an emotional reaction that sneaks up on you; the more you uncover, the harder it becomes to ignore what’s been sitting just beneath the surface. At the same time, those layers add depth, giving shape and flavor to the relationship in ways that aren’t immediately obvious.
As the night takes a turn, and then another turn, what’s revealed isn’t explosive but clarifying. Their conversations begin to illuminate what’s missing in their own dynamic, as well as what each of them quietly yearns for but hasn’t been able to name. The film is less about rupture and more about recognition—about what happens when you’re forced to confront the gaps between who you are and who you thought you were together.
Wilde leans into that restraint, allowing each moment to build rather than break. By the end, the question isn’t whether something will fall apart, but whether the couple can truly see themselves—and each other—without illusion.
Seeing the film at the Chicago Critics Film Festival added another dimension, especially after watching Wilde speak on a Women in Film panel at Sundance. Reflecting on her trajectory since “Booksmart,” she spoke candidly about the pressures placed on women directors—the expectation to immediately scale up, to chase something bigger before you’ve had time to process what you’ve already made. What stayed with me was her emphasis on support, and the need to create conditions where women feel they can keep going.
That idea echoes through “The Invite.” The film resists spectacle in favor of something more deliberate and observant, trusting that intimacy and self-reflection carry their own weight.
By the end, it quietly turns the lens back on you: why are you with the person you’re with, and how has that relationship shaped who you’ve become? It doesn’t hand you an answer—it just makes it harder to avoid the question.
When a Witness Recants – Dawn Porter
“When a Witness Recants fits” fits within this idea of “cinema of proximity,” but it cuts even closer than most. It doesn’t just examine a story—it immerses you in the fragile, often painful space where truth, memory, and justice collide.
Directed by Dawn Porter, the documentary opens with the voice of Ta-Nehisi Coates, as he reflects on a defining moment from his childhood in Baltimore What once felt like a shocking but distant tragedy becomes something far more devastating when revisited years later: three teenage boys—now known as the Harlem Park 3—were wrongfully convicted and sentenced to life in 1983, ultimately losing a combined 108 years to incarceration. Their names are Alfred Chestnut, Andrew Stewart, and Ransom Watkins. Their imprisonment was built on false testimony, extracted through coercion by a police officer who was never held accountable.
Porter’s focus is clear and deliberate—this is a film about truth, but more importantly, about whose truth gets heard. She centers the voices of the men who were wronged, allowing them to reclaim their own narratives after decades of being defined by a system that failed them. At the same time, she doesn’t flatten the story into simple answers, it’s more complex than that. The witness whose testimony helped convict them is also treated with a level of humanity, shaped as he was by pressure and manipulation from authority. What emerges is a deeply complicated portrait of a community turned against itself.
That sense of rupture extends far beyond the courtroom. The film carefully traces the collateral damage—the way trust eroded within the neighborhood, how fear replaced familiarity, how a single act of injustice rippled outward until an entire community was fractured. Doors that were once open suddenly closed. Relationships shifted. The damage wasn’t contained to those imprisoned; it reshaped the fabric of everyday life.
What makes Porter’s work so affecting is how personal it feels. She has a way of grounding systemic failure in human experience, forcing you to confront not just the mechanics of injustice, but its emotional reality. Her films challenge the idea that these systems are abstract or immovable. Instead, she reveals something more unsettling: that what we often accept as “systemic” is, in many ways, deeply ingrained and continuously reinforced unless it’s actively questioned.
The film builds toward a meeting decades in the making, when the men come face to face with the witness who recanted for the first time since they were teenagers. It’s not framed as closure—because closure feels almost impossible in the face of that kind of loss—but as something quieter and more uncertain. There’s acknowledgment, reflection, anger, and the fragile possibility of understanding, even if resolution remains out of reach.
What lingers is the recognition of just how precarious justice can be. Not in an abstract sense, but in a way that feels immediate and personal. “When a Witness Recants” doesn’t just ask you to witness this story—it asks you to sit with it, to question it, and to reconsider what truth really looks like when the systems meant to protect it fall apart.
