News

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...

A subject’s charm can take a documentary a long way. That’s the case in Matt Tyrnauer’s latest project, Nobu, a glowing portrait of Nobu Matsuhisa. The Japanese chef is best known for his empire of luxury sushi restaurants (and more recently, hotels), where guests can experience his medley of dishes inspired by his Japanese roots and early foray into Peruvian cuisine. In Nobu, based on Matsuhisa’s memoir of the same name, Tyrnauer (also in Telluride this year with Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid) anchors the global phenom’s name to a personality.

Nobu is a straightforward and admiring portrait of its subject. The film will likely appeal to fans of the chef (especially since this year marks the 30th anniversary of the first Nobu restaurant), but it may not completely satiate the culinary-curious. Less process-oriented and more wide-ranging than David Gelb’s glossy doc Jiro Dreams of Sushi,...

“The oddest throuple in Telluride,” joked the filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer, while driving from his Beverly Hills home to the film fest in Colorado, will be Tyrnauer and the colorful characters at the center of the two verité documentaries that he is premiering in the Rockies this Labor Day weekend: the legendary Democratic political strategist James Carville, subject of Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid, and sushi chef and restaurateur extraordinaire Nobu Matsuhisa, subject of Nobu.

Tyrnauer, 56, a longtime Vanity Fair editor-at-large and special correspondent turned prolific filmmaker of numerous critically and commercially successful nonfiction works — among them 2009’s Oscar-shortlisted Valentino: The Last Emperor, 2017’s Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood, 2018’s Studio 54 and 2019’s Where’s My Roy Cohn? — previously had a film at the fest in 2022, his Benington College doc The End of the World. But coming with two docs, both of which are still seeking U.S. distribution deals,...