Matthew Heineman: Last News

The PGA Awards announced its nominees for Outstanding Producer of Documentary Motion Pictures today, a list noted for a number of snubs and surprises. 

In military parlance, the term retrograde can mean several things, among them withdrawal from a war zone, “where all or part of a deployed force voluntarily disengages from the enemy.”

Laura Poitras’s documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed appears to be on more solid ground as a possible Oscar frontrunner, after the release of DOC NYC’s influential shortlist of the year’s top nonfiction films.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic In early 2021, while Americans were focused on the transfer of power back home, daredevil director Matthew Heineman (“Cartel Land,” “City of Ghosts”) assembled a crew and flew to Afghanistan to check in on the status of America’s longest war. At that point, Osama bin Laden had been dead a decade, the Taliban was weakened but not defeated, and the U.S.-trained Afghan Army was holding its own fairly well — and yet, nearly 20 years in, there was still no end in sight for American involvement. That changed almost as soon as Heineman arrived, as the Biden administration made plans to pull out. In that moment, what might have been another business-as-usual desert war doc — with routine patrols, precisely targeted drone strikes and soldiers expressing their ennui — shifted to something audiences hadn’t seen before. The title, “Retrograde,” refers to the process by which military forces extricate themselves from conflict, removing or otherwise rendering useless the equipment they’d used to engage the enemy. For Heineman, that meant capturing all kinds of cinematic sights: A brawny soldier smashes a heap of computer monitors, helicopters airlift vehicles out, and things go boom as a team tosses all remaining ammo into a trench, douses it in gasoline and lights the pile with a well-aimed rocket. The Taliban won’t be using these bullets.

Tiger Woods is the latest sports superstar to be the subject of an upcoming television documentary.