It’s exciting, and fascinating, to see a great director of documentaries try his or her hand at a dramatic feature, since in theory the essential skill set should all be there.
The best documentarians possess an acute visual sense, and they are all, of course, potent storytellers.
Yet for every attempt at this sort of crossover that triumphs, like Terry Zwigoff leaping from “Crumb” to “Ghost World,” there are many more that don’t.
Remember Joe Berlinger’s misbegotten “Blair Witch” sequel? Or Barbara Kopple’s “Havoc”? Or Michael Moore’s “Canadian Bacon”? And then there was Andrew Jarecki’s “All Good Things,” an attempt, by the creator of “Capturing the Friedmans,” to dramatize the life of the accused killer Robert Durst that proved to be such an ambitiously awkward movie that it spurred him to return to nonfiction with the far more powerful Robert Durst docu-series “The Jinx.
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