Written and directed by Chris Atkins (Taking Liberties), Starsuckers is a polemical documentary about the machinery of celebrity. Atkins’s thesis is simple: large media corporations exploit the public’s fascination with celebrity and the young’s longing for fame by a series of devious tricks that his film sets out to expose with a few tricks of its own. His overall explanation for our celebrity-“fixated” world is based on biological and evolutionary factors, thus missing crucial historical and sociological arguments. Also, his concern for what celebrity culture is doing to our children offers plenty of talking heads, but little in the way of hard evidence. Despite these limitations, however, Atkins deserves credit for a lively and thought-provoking documentary on a subject more suitable to a book than a film.

12A, 103 mins

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