Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (June 11)

Early in this documentary about the life of Joan Rivers, the comedian herself pulls out a stack of date books. She opens up one from the '80s and it's full of scribble: bookings, appearances, meetings, lunches, breakfasts. This is how a book should look, she says. She pulls out her current one: It's mostly white. She looks into the camera with a look of depression and disgust and you realize that everything she's done over the last 60 years — The Tonight Show, the QVC hawking, the red-carpet riffing, an appearance at a comedy club in Manhattan — has been done with the book in mind. If it's not full, she isn't. The rest of the documentary shows her preparing for Celebrity Apprentice, doing stand-up at a resort in Wisconsin (at which she destroys a heckler, then feels horrible about it), and writing and rehearsing a show about her life that opens in London. This movie is about a woman who works hard at 76 for the same reason someone works hard at 22: fear. A surprisingly excellent film about an admirable and underrated woman.