Film

Val

Val is less a biography than a scrapbook: forty years of Val Kilmer's own home movies, sifted by his son into one of the strangest, funniest, saddest star-portraits ever made. It's frank about the vanity and wreckage of fame, and about the throat cancer that took his voice. Watch it for the man behind Iceman and Doc Holliday, not the man you thought you knew.

TMDb rating7.2

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Listen to Me Marlon2015

Brando's own audio diaries assembled into a ghostly self-portrait, the direct ancestor of what Kilmer does with video - an actor becoming his own archivist and confessor.

But No new interviews, no outside voices - if you want context or judgement, this film refuses to give it.

Listen to Me Marlon poster

Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond2017

Jim Carrey's own making-of footage from Man on the Moon, decades later, showing how far an actor can vanish into a role and what it costs to come back.

But Carrey's philosophising can feel indulgent, and it's more about one film than a whole career.

Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond poster

Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind2018

A generous, clip-heavy portrait of another beloved, complicated performer whose public joy masked private struggle - warm, funny, and eventually devastating.

But Fairly conventional talking-heads structure, lacking the raw first-person texture that makes Val distinctive.

Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Dick Johnson Is Dead2020

Both are self-documentary projects where the camera becomes a way to face illness and mortality head-on rather than look away - Kilmer with his own throat cancer, Johnson with her father's decline.

A filmmaker stages her own father's death, again and again, before it happens, using the camera as a way to hold onto him - one of the most moving films about mortality and the making of art ever put on screen.

But It's about death, plainly and directly, with none of the movie-star gossip or humour that makes Val easy company.

Dick Johnson Is Dead poster
More like this (8)

Cobain: Montage of Heck2015

Built from the subject's own diaries, art and home tapes, this is grunge's answer to Val's confessional method - intimate to the point of discomfort.

But Cobain's story ends where you know it will, and the film doesn't flinch from that darkness.

Cobain: Montage of Heck poster

Amy2015

Amy Winehouse's rise and collapse told almost entirely through phone footage and answerphone messages, a masterclass in letting the archive do the talking.

But There's no relief in this one - it's a tragedy from the first frame, with none of Kilmer's dry humour to leaven it.

Amy poster

Life Itself2014

Roger Ebert filmed his own decline with the same unsentimental curiosity he brought to criticism, turning illness into one last great subject.

But It's frank about physical suffering in ways some viewers will find hard to sit with.

Life Itself poster

TINA2021no page yet

Tina Turner, in her own words at last, reclaiming a story the press told for her for decades - triumphant where Kilmer's film is more ambivalent.

But Polished and authorised, it's a tidier piece of storytelling than Val's scrappy home-movie chaos.

David Lynch: The Art Life2017no page yet

Lynch narrating his own childhood and early years over his own paintings and photographs, another artist explaining himself entirely on his own terms.

But Glacially paced and short on incident - it's mood and memory, not a career overview.

The Last Movie Star2018no page yet

Burt Reynolds, playing a version of himself, confronts old clips of his own younger face at a fan convention - fiction doing what Val does with footage.

But It's a much smaller, sappier film, and the fictional frame softens what Kilmer's documentary leaves raw.

Sunset Boulevard1950

Kilmer literally screens his own past glories to a dwindling audience at fan conventions; Sunset Boulevard invented that image of the star haunted by her own footage, decades before home video made it possible for real.

The original story of a Hollywood face the industry outgrew - Gloria Swanson's Norma Desmond watching her own old films is the blueprint for every faded-star story since, including Kilmer's.

But It's melodrama, not documentary - stylised and theatrical, seven decades old in its manners as well as its film stock.

Sunset Boulevard poster

Grizzly Man2005

Like Val, it's a life narrated back to us almost entirely through the subject's own camera - one man's self-mythology handed to another filmmaker to shape into something like truth.

Werner Herzog builds a portrait entirely from a dead man's own obsessive self-filming, turning amateur footage into a meditation on ego, nature, and the stories we tell about ourselves.

But It's grimmer and stranger than a star biography, with a real death at its centre that Herzog doesn't soften.

Grizzly Man poster

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