The star is in positive, future-looking mode in this Disney+ documentary, directed by his husband, David Furnish, and R.J. Cutler.

“Martha,” a new documentary now on Netflix, offers a candid portrait of the rise and fall (and rebirth?) of the homemaker extraordinaire, who last year, at 81, appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

The re-evaluation of maligned celebrities — especially women who reached the height of fame in the 1990s — has become its own mini-genre of pop culture. Often the story tells a bigger tale: a culture bent on taking down successful women, or beautiful ones, or just ones who accidentally strayed into the spotlight.

As a vérité filmmaker for the past 31 years, Mr. Cutler has tackled a wide variety of subjects, from politics (“The World According to Dick Cheney”) to Vogue magazine (“The September Issue”) to e-cigarettes (“Big Vape: The Rise and Fall of Juul”). He has been nominated for an Oscar. He has won three Emmys, including one for “American High,” a docuseries that tracked 14 high school students over a year.

Elton John secured an EGOT on Monday night, joining the select group who have won all four major entertainment awards — an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony — when he won an Emmy for outstanding variety special for his livestreamed farewell concert at Dodger Stadium.

In a new documentary, the opinion columnist Charles M. Blow calls for Black Americans to move to the South to gain political footholds.

The documentarian R.J. Cutler (“The September Issue”) turns his attention to a horrific larger-than-life tale in this four-episode series that avoids the worst drooling habits of the true-crime genre. Jack Roland Murphy, known as Murf the Surf because of his early life as a surfer, gained notoriety as a convicted jewel thief and was later tried for murder and sentenced to two life sentences plus 20 years.