An Honest Liar, 2014 - ★★★★½

You can also find this review on Letterboxd

I went into this completely blind, I never heard of the Amazing Randi before. I only knew this is about magic, or, to be more specific, about magic debunking.

James the Amazing Randi is now 86 years old. He started off as an escape artist and magician, but devoted the latter part of his career to debunking "psychics" and other liars. This documentary is about him and this later career.
The style of the documentary is talking heads, he has interviews from many people (for example Penn and Teller and Adam Savage) who talk about Randi and of course Randi and the people he affected. These interviews are underpinned by old tv footage of shows he was on or that had psychic guests. Every now and then we get title cards about the major evehts that we look at.
In some points the title cards are weird and don't help at all, one titlecard in particular either didn't make sense or I just missed something on the way.

The music used fit well, even though it was standard documentary music, nothing new there.

I liked that, even though at first it seemed like this is a one sided documentary with only Randi fans/friends speaking, in the end we even get some statements by Randis "arch nemesis", Uri Gellar.

Most of all I love Randis attitude, his mindset. He thinks that you shouldn't trick people, shouldn't play with them, shouldn't be a charlatan. If you were a magician, but didn't say you were and called yourselfna psychic for example, he would come after you. He did this to help people, to raise awareness. And I really enjoy his mindset.

Also we get to see some cool magic tricks.

There are by the way almost no tricks explained, he mostly proves that it's just a trick by copying it. On the one hand I would have loved to see some of the stuff explained, on the other hand I understand that a magician never reveals his tricks.

I really liked this documentary, it had me watching the whole time, was very interesting (probably because I'm a sucker for magic anyway) and even moved me at some points.
I'm giving it 4.5 out of 5 stars and a like