A regular feature for paid Watch List subscribers: I suggest one reasonably under-the-radar movie from the recent or distant past, and you do what you want with that information.
Three Identical Strangers (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2, streaming on Kanopy, for rent at Amazon, Apple TV, YouTube, and elsewhere). The places this 2018 documentary takes a viewer are incredibly varied, from joyful reunions all the way into the darkest of institutional crimes.
It starts on a high: Three 19-year-old boys, triplets separated at birth, who rediscovered each other at the dawn of the 1980s, to their delight and, via clips of their many TV talk-show appearances, ours. It was a situation tailor-made to kick-start the debate over nature and nurture, over whether we’re born or made. Bobby Shafran, David Kellman, and Eddy Galland were raised by different families in different circumstances, but they came across like “The Patty Duke Show” +1: They walked alike, they talked alike, they smoked the same brand of cigarettes. Beneath the happiness of reconnection, however, was a bass note of uncertainty, and what the brothers didn’t have in common ended up looming larger than anyone expected. I don't want to spoil the surprises this sometimes gasp-inducing movie springs on the brothers and the audience, but just when you think the situation can't get any weirder or more morally appalling, it does. And does. And does again. I reviewed “Three Identical Strangers” for the Boston Globe over five years ago, but it still pops up to haunt me every so often, the way you feel the chill from a dream you’d forgotten you’d had. (N.B. In February, Variety reported that Ben Stiller was planning to star in and produce a limited series based on the brothers’ story.)
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