The Witness (Netflix)

By this point, most of us only know the Kitty Genovese story as the briefest of stories in a sociology textbook: a young woman was brutally murdered in Queens while 38 witnesses stood by and did nothing to help her. The Witness, the debut documentary from James D. Solomon, goes back and tries to figure out exactly what happened to Kitty on that fateful night and how much of her story is actually true. It follows Kitty’s brother Bill, only 16 when his sister was murdered, as he tries decades later to piece together his sister’s story.

The first half of the film acts as a straightforward detective tale. Bill discovers witness stories that were never complete, reads trial transcripts of a trial he and his family never attended, and returns again and again to the scene of the crime to wrap his own head around the 37 minutes his sister was struggling for her life. As the film goes on, though, you realize that the details of the crime are only part of the story. Only the Macguffin. Instead, we are watching Bill try to make sense of his own life, a life that he defined by his sister’s murder, and discover that his sister was a lot more than he ever understood her to be. We watch him struggle with her death in new ways and try to come to terms with almost 50 years of history.

By the end, Bill has put himself through a series of almost torturous exercises in his attempt to exorcise the demon of his sister’s murder. The last couple steps on his path are almost painful to watch (I won’t spoil them here, because their power is watching them unfold almost blindly). We are left, however, with a very layered portrait of a man in pain trying everything in his power to make a peace that may never fully come.

De Palma (Amazon Prime)

It seems telling that the first image of De Palma, Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s film on the career of Brian De Palma, starts not with a clip from a De Palma film but instead with Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. De Palma the director has been long burdened with accusations that he apes Hitchcock more than pays homage to him, something that De Palma the film doesn’t shy away from. The director, who is the only talking head in the film and narrates the entire procedure, is open about the influence Hitchcock has on him and how many of his films generated directly from Hitchcock’s films. Unfortunately, he doesn’t dig a lot deeper than that.

I am not a Brian De Palma fanatic. I have seen most of the major films, and enjoyed some of them, but there were a lot here that were foreign to me (the film touches on, I believe, every film De Palma has directed). If the film does anything, it makes you want to visit or revisit a lot of his films. Hearing him talk about them, part anecdotally and part aesthetically, gives them a new light and a fresh life. It highlights the greatness of his cinematic output, although by giving us only De Palma’s viewpoint, the film is also missing a lot. This isn’t a critical analysis but a celebration of an artist. There is the promise of a lot more, but what there is enlightens and entertains.