There’s a new Errol Morris documentary playing on Apple TV+ called The Pigeon Tunnel, and it’s about the British ex-spy David Cornwell, better known as celebrated spy fiction writer John Le Carré. The film is very polished and informative and full of interview material with Le Carré, apparently unprecedented in its candor, about his strange and secretive life, recorded not long before he died in 2020.

It’s an extremely accomplished work, reflecting Morris’s long and lauded career in the documentary form, specializing in extremely revealing in-depth portraits of odd people, places, and topics. Unfortunately, I didn’t really love it, probably because I’m so familiar with the once-revolutionary stylings of Morris.

This is saddening for me, because I used to be such an admirer of Morris’s films. That was way back in the days of Vernon, Florida (1981), The Thin Blue Line (1988), Fast, Cheap and Out of Control (1997), and Mr Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr (1999). It’s hard to convey now how exciting a director he seemed then, fearlessly reinstating practices that had become practically taboo in documentaries since the cinéma vérite revolution. He certainly wasn’t the first to reclaim these elements, but he was definitely the showiest.