Despite reading tons of news, I’ve never been a regular reader of The New Yorker. At most, I’d read some particularly noteworthy article when it goes viral and gets shared widely. But this caught my wife’s attention as she’s a writer herself so why not. As the title indicates, this is a documentary commemorating the 100th anniversary of the magazine. Unfortunately they hype up the anniversary so much that it’s off-putting. Nor is getting celebrities to talk about the significance of the publication itself terribly interesting. What does work is highlighting the few special articles that has since gone down in history. The magazine itself may be great but this film about it is merely mediocre.

The famous American newsmagazine turned 100 in February 2025 and wants the world to know it. It marked the occasion with a special, double-sized issue featuring its mascot Eustace Tilley from its very first issue, and a whole series of events such as a showing of films related to the magazine. This film documents all this and tries its utmost to impress upon the viewer the significance of the publication as an American institution, including getting celebrities to talk it up. Along the way, we get a history lesson from its founding by Harold Ross to the other editors’-in-chief who succeeded him. More interesting are the introductions to some of its staff writers and what they do as part of their jobs and we even get a peek into its fact-checking department. All of this praise is unnecessary however as they could have just featured more of the great writing that established its reputation. Here, they cover John Hersey’s Hiroshima, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood but could have easily included more such as its fiction by writers like Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami, Vladimir Nabokov and many others.

Unlike the magazine itself which has to grapple with accusations of being elitist, this documentary is very much mass market and worries about the viewer not having even heard about it. Asking recognizable celebrities to come into the studio to talk about the magazine is an easy way to get the general public to realize this really is a big deal but is of no value to anyone who actually cares about it. Hyping up the 100th anniversary so much and even counting down to it is cringe-worthy. It’s jarring that such a witty, sophisticated magazine would be the subject of such a low-brow, by the numbers documentary with no real panache at all. This is a crass advertisement for selling more magazines and doesn’t pretend to be otherwise. It refrains from any serious criticism with the exception of the time when Tina Brown abruptly left to found a new media enterprise with Harvey Weinstein. Any mistakes by its fact-checkers are played off as amusing anecdotes with little consequence.

The documentary does understand that what really established The New Yorker‘s reputation are its serious essays and long-form journalism. Its coverage of the big name articles are laudable but there should have been more of them. I also liked giving them space to some of the staff writers to talk about what they write about and how they go about doing it. Unfortunately most of their commentary is relatively shallow and still comes across too much like an advertisement. Is it asking too much to have them read more from examples of their best writing? Perhaps it’s just inherently difficult to showcase a text-heavy medium in a film format. Or maybe director Marshall Curry is being unimaginative or isn’t all that passionate about the magazine himself. I can’t recommend this at all as you’d be better off reading the magazine on your own.