One of the new documentaries premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival is AUM: The Cult at the End of the World.

My review is at The Playlist:

The last few years have been great times for documentaries about cults. That does not mean it is a time of introspection about the questing impulses driving people into cults.  The appeal of content—generally of the limited streaming series variety—about cults has more to do with the queasy fright provided by seeing roomfuls of people prostrate themselves before a bored-looking bearded guy on a dais. The current vogue for such work may also be a condition of late-period “look at the freaks” reality TV programming. Ben Braun and Chiaki Yanagimoto’s ‘Aum: The Cult at the End of the World’ largely avoids such tactics…