Phillip Maciak at n+1:
AT THE BEGINNING OF The Velvet Underground, the first documentary film by Todd Haynes, a title card appears: “A documentary film by Todd Haynes.” I laughed out loud when I saw it, though not out of derision. I had been waiting for Todd Haynes to make a documentary for a while. Or, more accurately, I had been waiting for Todd Haynes to make something that he’d finally call a documentary. Since his emergence in the late 1980s with the generation of filmmakers B. Ruby Rich called the “New Queer Cinema,” Haynes has hopped from genre to genre, pastiche to pastiche, hard art house to Oscar-bait, though never quite to nonfiction film. But he’s been playing with documentary the whole time, calling upon its beats and conventions, flirting with biography and ethnography while always ultimately disavowing the idea of a “true story.”
more here.