Moviepro (www.moviepro.net)

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work opens in a very profound way, with several shots of Rivers without makeup. It isn’t as profound as you might imagine, focusing only on small portions of her mug at a time, but it establishes right from the start that Rivers’ guard is down and we’re really about to get an inside look. Director Ricki Stern and Anne Sunberg’s film follows Rivers through an entire year, and from the outset she isn’t ashamed to admit that it’s a rough one, in which her datebook consists primarily of the thing she dreads the most: blank white pages. In fact, Rivers isn’t ashamed much of anything, and she often pokes fun at her own plastic surgery overdose and tosses in a few jokes about her low rung on the fame ladder.