Jun 17, 2024 https://variety.com/2024/film/revie...d-the-sopranos-review-alex-gibney-1236037610/ “Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos” is Alex Gibney’s sensationally artful and engrossing two-hour-and-40-minute documentary about the greatest show in the history of television. If you’re a fanatic for “The Sopranos” (and who isn’t?), you probably already know a fair amount about how the show came to be, and “Wise Guy,” for a while, treads familiar ground. The film is framed as a profile of the show’s visionary creator and showrunner, David Chase (the opening credits redo the driving-into-Jersey “Sopranos” credits with Chase in the passenger seat), who is interviewed by Gibney on an exact mock-up of the set of Dr. Melfi’s psychiatrist office, a joke/stunt that recedes into the background yet never loses its playful resonance, since it pings off the way that “The Sopranos,” for Chase, was a kind of therapy. For him, even talking about the show, analyzing its secret sauce, is offered up with a certain gnomic reticence. (Within that, the disarmingly sincere and at times ruthlessly blunt Chase is actually something of an open book.) The documentary gives an insight into different storylines that were scrapped and footage that was not released along with great stories behind the scenes
