by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Say what you will about Nick Broomfield: that he's shallow, that he's an ambulance-chaser, that he is, as one reviewer put it, "the unobservant voyeur." But whatever else they are, his films are compulsive viewing. His modus operandi–collecting a group of arresting individuals surrounding other, more central and elusive (or dead) ones–sucks the viewer into their vortex as testimonial after testimonial reveals both the film's subject and, as Broomfield would put it, the "soul" of the interviewer. The tapestry he weaves out of these apparently disparate interviewees is often overwhelming, even when you're not sure about the director's motives, and it keeps you watching to the final frames.
