‘Street Gang’ Film Review: Documentary Celebrates How ‘Sesame Street’ Changed the World

Mwah! Puckering up on camera is a major part of many celebrities’ careers — and some stars were fortunate enough to have good kisses from the start.

Chipotle shows the power of burritos in their new 2021 Super Bowl commercial!

Daveed Diggs is hanging out with the Sesame Street gang!

The Snyder Cut is real. The Snyder Cut is has a trailer.

In the last 20 years, as the internet steadily integrated itself into every facet of our lives, adolescence has been changed radically. No longer forced into interactions with other people their age by circumstance, more and more teens have found themselves alone on their computers, phones and tablets for immeasurable lengths of time.

It never fails: Every few months Sesame Street does something progressive — introducing an autistic character, acknowledging COVID-19 as a serious issue, teaching empathy — and a certain subset of social media is up in arms about how their beloved childhood favorite has "gone woke," or something.

Also Read: Rodney Ascher's 'A Glitch in the Matrix' Acquired by Magnolia Ahead of Sundance PremiereAscher takes a similar approach, wandering through as many musings that’ll elicit a “What?” as much as a “Whoa.”Speaking of which, it may not surprise anyone to learn that Keanu Reeves is the icon of this ideology, just as “The Matrix” trilogy is its Bible.

Chris Willman Music Writer“Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street” has the good fortune to be arriving with about a hundred more built-in advantages than most documentaries. Offering up vintage backstage footage of Jim Henson and Frank Oz operating the Muppets feels a little like Henry Houdini coming back to reveal all his secrets.

spoiler warning if you don’t want to know more — that the couple we’re so invested in is, indeed, keeping secrets. And not from each other, but from us, the audience.

evolution in talking about Sparks’ early music, we’ll see one or two seconds of a butterfly coming out of a cocoon, and if we’re told that their second album was more experimental than their first, here’s a shot of a car driving off a cliff.The obvious questions aren’t addressed in the slightest.

Also Read: 'Street Gang' Film Review: Documentary Celebrates How 'Sesame Street' Changed the World“I initially thought that maybe the white parents couldn’t handle Roosevelt because he was too Black, but it was actually the Black parents. It was the parents of the Black children who didn’t want that to be symbolizing their culture,” director Marilyn Agrelo said in TheWrap’s Virtual Sundance Studio.

The most important (and frankly, most difficult) achievement of Marilyn Agrelo’s documentary “Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street” is to take us back to a world in which “Sesame Street” didn’t exist – an all but impossible task anymore, because it represented such a seismic shift in children’s entertainment.

Also Read: 14 Buzziest Sundance Movies for Sale in 2021, From Questlove's 'Summer of Soul' to Rebecca Hall's 'Passing' (Photos)The story is specific to one group of women at one particular time, but five decades later, it’s certainly applicable to current questions about the role of religion in society, about the place of tradition and rigor in the Church and about how social justice movements intersect with biblical teachings.

Also Read: 'One Day at a Time' Star Rita Moreno on the 'Odd Resistance' to Latinx Representation on TVNonetheless, Pérez Riera smartly tames the endearing adulation and expounds the reach of the project, with honest conversations on gender violence and ethnic discrimination as they relate to Moreno’s experiences.

Also Read: 14 Buzziest Sundance Movies for Sale in 2021, From Questlove's 'Summer of Soul' to Rebecca Hall's 'Passing' (Photos)Liza’s premonition of doom, it turns out, isn’t just a bad feeling or a suicidal tendency; she’s not like Kate Lyn Sheil in the recent indie “She Dies Tomorrow,” with a seriously contagious sense of impending doom. No, in fact Liza is going to die tomorrow, and so is everybody else, because a meteor is going to destroy the planet in the wee hours.

Also Read: 14 Buzziest Sundance Movies for Sale in 2021, From Questlove's 'Summer of Soul' to Rebecca Hall's 'Passing' (Photos)The film was one of the opening-night presentations at the virtual Sundance Film Festival on Thursday, occupying the same position as previous music-focused docs like “Twenty Feet From Stardom,” “Searching for Sugar Man,” “What Happened, Miss Simone?” and last year’s “Miss Americana.” No doubt it left some viewers wishing that it had been the Eccles Theatre moving to the