Marty, Life Is Short (Lawrence Kasdan, 2026). We’re in an era of every comedy figure getting an adoring documentary about their life, and it’s simply Martin Short’s turn. Director Lawrence Kasdan traces the career — and, to a more cautious degree, the life — of Short, who does come across as a worthy beneficiary of such attention when all the accomplishments are tallied up. There’s no one else who can claim to be a cast member of both SCTV and Saturday Night Live and can boast about a Tony on his shelf to boot. Marty, Life Is Short sometimes feels a little formless as Kasdan’s clear personal affection for his subject compromises his directorial rigor. It’s not that Short deserves the sort of scalding scrutiny that might be exacted against a political figure or war criminal or anything, but Kasdan’s lack of curiosity about probing into, say, Short’s apparent romantic relationship with Meryl Streep represents someone looking of for his pal rather than asking the natural questions that arise when making a nonfiction film. Kasdan assembles the highlights of Short’s career reasonably well, but the truest highlight of documentary is the abundant home video footage shot by short, much of it populated by an all-star cast of absurdly talented people.

Coconut Head Generation (Alain Kassanda, 2023). At a university in Nigeria, several students operate a film club that holds regular screenings that prompt discussions about the issues of the day. The exchanges can sometimes be fraught, as young people work through their prejudices and preconceptions in real time, often in the face of forceful counterarguments by others who have a clearer view of how oppressive beliefs can cause harm. Alain Kassanda’s documentary aims to be unobtrusive. The camera observes without pushing or cajoling. Kassanda isn’t interested in justifications or storytelling beyond what emerges in the room or in other interactions between the students. The cinéma vérité style of Coconut Head Generation yields rewards when it captures students immersed in their deep, impassioned conversations. It’s enlivening to see cinema crack open worlds and shift ways of thinking. The film can get a little dull aside from that, even when following harrowing scenes within the country’s protest movement.

Is This Thing On? (Bradley Cooper, 2025). I think it was a good idea for Bradley Cooper to scale down to a smaller story for his third directorial effort, but he has no feel for the intimacy of this drama about a divorce. At the beginning of Is This Thing On?, Alex (Will Arnett) and Tess (Laura Dern) are still putting up a guise of being a contentedly married couple, even as their relationship has fallen apart. The intent is to part amicably, and the effect is that two people are living in uneasy misery. Alex finds an outlet for his pain when he stumbles into performing standup comedy. He expresses himself on stage in a manner that his own emotional defenses have made unavailable to him in his life outside the murky club. Inspired by the experiences of Mark Chappell, who is co-credited on the screenplay with Cooper and Arnett, the seriocomic story is rarely compelling. It’s as emotionally adrift as its characters. Scenes are shorn back to a raw, naturalistic plainness. The whole endeavor winds up feeling inert, a quality that only calls attention to the self-conscious artiness that continually crops up in Cooper’s visual sense. Compounding the annoyance, Cooper casts himself as a character known only as Balls, a friend of Alex and Tess who provides blundering comic relief and fleeting moments of dullard wisdom.