Crumb

Crumb (1995) is a documentary you can watch online on iFILM — director Terry Zwigoff's unflinching, 119-minute portrait of underground cartoonist Robert Crumb, the man behind Fritz the Cat and Keep on Truckin'.

Zwigoff spent years gaining Crumb's trust, and the film shows it. Robert talks openly about the obsessive sexual imagery that runs through his work and about a childhood that left marks he never bothered to hide. His two brothers, Charles and Maxon, appear alongside him — both reclusive to a degree that makes Robert look like the well-adjusted one. Ex-girlfriends, his wife Aline Kominsky, and critics like Robert Hughes all weigh in, building a portrait that is funny, uncomfortable, and hard to shake.

The National Society of Film Critics named it the year's best documentary, and it holds up as one of the defining character studies of 1990s nonfiction cinema. Zwigoff later directed Ghost World — this film explains a lot about where that sensibility came from. Watch Crumb online on iFILM.