STOLEN KINGDOM, MAY CONTAIN: MY LIFE IN LIMITED U.S. RELEASE

STOLEN KINGDOM
Dir: Joshua Bailey | Featuring Adam the Woo, Dan Bell, Matt Sonswa, Kenny Johnson, Dan Becker, Dave Ensign, Leonard Kinsey, Seth Kubersky and Patrick Sykes.

RATING: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

One of my favourite Disney characters is the foxy 1973 animated incantation of that thieving anti-hero Robin Hood, and there's plenty of that character's spirit coursing through Joshua Bailey's debut doco. From a broader view that encapsulates the giddy thrill experienced by urban explorers - those trendy trespassers who break into abandoned malls, theatres and, in this case, theme parks - the Floridian filmmaker zeroes in on a handful of B&E-ers who found viral fame in the early days of the internet. Posting photos and videos of their after (sometimes, opening) hours adventures, the mateship formed in the service of cheeky lawbreaking provides the doco's heartbeat.

The narrative takes a darker turn as harmless thrillseeking morphs into black market supply, a development that peaks with the theft of EPCOT Centre's lovable boy-droid, 'Buzzy' (pictured, above). This pivot into true-crime territory is a tonal shift, and sometimes Bailey (himself a past Mouse House employee) is doesn't give his film and his characters room to breath; there's a lot of great material here that might have benefitted from a longer running time or multi-episode streaming arc. It's a minor complaint, however, with the thrill of forbidden access and the cost of greed and ego all on display in this unique study of outlier mentality.

MAY CONTAIN: MY LIFE
Director: Jen Greenstreet | Featuring Giles Kearns, Mandi Kearnes, Owen Osborne, Anna Stover, Hannah & Catherine Brown, Riya Gupta, Dr Ruchi Gupta, Dina Hawthorne, Augusta Maturo, Ava Kolker, Tanner Hagen, Zeina Montifar and Jerome Bettis.

RATING: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

First-person accounts of the very real struggles faced by food allergy sufferers are addressed with heart, humour and enlightenment in Jen Greenstreet's subliminally urgent call-to-action doc, May Contain: My Life. From the tragedy that inspired the Elijah's Law initiative to the takedown of pop culture's use of allergy sufferers as comic material, this Just Like You Films production soars on the voices of those who live with and adjacent to the moment-by-moment threat posed by the disease (yes, broader society, it is a disease).

Particularly effective is the intercut drama starring allergy-afflicted actor Augusta Maturo as a teen navigating the nut-and-dairy minefield that is a birthday party. What might have burdened the documentary with an 'after-school special' leadenness is instead a well-crafted, solidly-acted series of inserts that bolster the film's multi-tiered messaging. The final aspirational act of Greenstreet's doc carries significant heft, both as an argument for the immediate uptake on food allergy awareness and an emotionally-charged finger-to-the-chest that captures what is at stake if we don't act.