In this month’s picks, a portrait of a vanguard filmmaker, a look back at a televised clash between writers, and a reflection on a Hollywood star and pinup.
By Ben Kenigsberg
Nov. 28, 2025
The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we select three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.
‘My Mom Jayne’ (2025)
Stream it on HBO Max. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango at Home and YouTube Movies & TV.
The “Law & Order: SVU” star Mariska Hargitay was just 3 when her mother, Jayne Mansfield, died in a car crash in 1967. Hargitay herself was in the back seat and only survived because her 6-year-old brother had the presence of mind to ask where she was — that is, why she hadn’t been retrieved from the wreck. In “My Mom Jayne,” Hargitay sets out to learn more about a parent of whom she had no memories, and whose public image differed starkly from her private life.
Early on, we see a clip in which Mansfield was a guest on Groucho Marx’s show; Marx emphasizes that she is far more than the ditzy-blonde avatar her audiences perceived. In another clip, she bristles that her figure had received more attention than her intellect. “My Mom Jayne” explains she was multilingual and had a passion for piano and violin. She was exacting about her career and harbored ambitions to be a serious actress, but was told at an early Paramount audition that she was wasting her “obvious talents.” Hargitay confesses to being upset by the high-pitched, Marilyn Monroe-esque voice with which Mansfield spoke in movies and on TV, which wasn’t how she talked in life. (There is brief footage in which she speaks about wounded veterans that the movie presents as showing the real her.)
But “My Mom Jayne” is more than a simple effort to show that Jayne Mansfield was deeper than her fans knew at the time. Her troubled relationships with men and early death left Hargitay with tangled family dynamics (she was raised by Mickey Hargitay, the bodybuilder who was Mansfield’s second husband, and Mickey’s later wife, Ellen, in what’s portrayed as a loving, close-knit group) and a lot of questions about the past. “My Mom Jayne” is in some ways closer to documentary psychodramas like Lynne Sachs’s “Film About a Father Who” than it is to a standard celebrity portrait, and it has a tenderness that is rare in the genre.