8.6
Ten years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, filmmaker Alain Resnais documented the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek in NIGHT AND FOG (NUIT ET BROUILLARD), one of the first cinematic reflections on the Holocaust. Juxtaposing the stillness of the abandoned camps’ empty buildings with haunting wartime footage, Resnais investigates humanity’s capacity for violence, and presents the devastating suggestion that such horrors could occur again.
6.6
The MTV sensation made the leap to the big screen with this feature-length shock-fest in which Johnny Knoxville and his merry band of maniacs perform the daredevil stunts and gross-out pranks no one would let them pull on television. From tightrope-walking over a pool of alligators to wreaking havoc on the streets of Japan, from golf-cart carnage to an unmentionable finale that takes a toy car where it has never gone before, JACKASS: THE MOVIE is everything that made the original series a cultural phenomenon—just even bigger, wilder, and more insane.
8.3
Two ordinary inner-city Chicago kids dare to reach for the impossible, professional basketball glory, in this epic chronicle of hope and faith. Filmed over a five-year period, HOOP DREAMS, by Steve James, Frederick Marx, and Peter Gilbert, follows young Arthur Agee and William Gates and their families as the boys navigate the complex, competitive world of scholastic athletics while dealing with the intense pressures of their home lives and neighborhoods. This revelatory film continues to educate and inspire viewers, and it is widely considered one of the great works of American nonfiction cinema.
8.2
Where does voguing come from, and what, exactly, is throwing shade? This landmark documentary provides a vibrant snapshot of the 1980s through the eyes of New York City’s African American and Latinx Harlem drag-ball scene. Made over seven years, PARIS IS BURNING offers an intimate portrait of rival fashion “houses,” from fierce contests for trophies to house mothers offering sustenance in a world rampant with homophobia, transphobia, racism, AIDS, and poverty. Featuring legendary voguers, drag queens, and trans women—including Willi Ninja, Pepper LaBeija, Dorian Corey, and Venus Xtravaganza—PARIS IS BURNING brings it, celebrating the joy of movement, the force of eloquence, and the draw of community.
8.1
“We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.” In 1976, director Francis Ford Coppola arrived in the Philippines to begin shooting what would become his Vietnam War masterpiece APOCALYPSE NOW. It was the beginning of one of the most arduous and notoriously troubled productions in film history—a herculean struggle against the forces of nature, myriad cast problems (in particular a totally unprepared Marlon Brando), and the very sanity of all involved. Codirected by the filmmaker’s wife, Eleanor Coppola, who shot and narrated the the vivid behind-the-scenes footage, HEARTS OF DARKNESS is a riveting look at a man pushing himself to the edge of destruction for the sake of art.
8.2
An extraordinary, transformative experience, Allan King's DYING AT GRACE is quite simply unprecedented: five terminally ill cancer patients allowed the director access to their final months and days inside the Toronto Grace Health Centre. The result is an unflinching, enormously empathetic contemplation of death, featuring some of the most memorable people ever captured on film.
8.2
A true twentieth-century trailblazer, Harvey Milk was an outspoken human rights activist and one of the first openly gay U.S. politicians elected to public office; even after his assassination in 1978, he continues to inspire disenfranchised people around the world. The Oscar-winning The Times of Harvey Milk, directed by Robert Epstein and produced by Richard Schmiechen, was as groundbreaking as its subject. One of the first feature documentaries to address gay life in America, it's a work of advocacy itself, bringing Milk's message of hope and equality to a wider audience. This exhilarating trove of original documentary material and archival footage is as much a vivid portrait of a time and place (San Francisco's historic Castro District in the seventies) as a testament to the legacy of a political visionary.
8.2
Seattle, 1983. Taking their camera to the streets of what was supposedly America’s most livable city, filmmaker Martin Bell, photographer Mary Ellen Mark, and journalist Cheryl McCall set out to tell the stories of those society had left behind: homeless and runaway teenagers living on the city’s margins. Born from a “Life” magazine exposé by Mark and McCall, “Streetwise” follows an unforgettable group of at-risk children—including iron-willed fourteen-year-old Tiny, who would become the project’s most haunting and enduring face, along with the pugnacious yet resourceful Rat and the affable drifter DeWayne—who, driven from their broken homes, survive by hustling, panhandling, and dumpster diving. Granted remarkable access to their world, the filmmakers craft a devastatingly frank, nonjudgmental portrait of lost youth growing up far too soon in a world that has failed them.
8.2
A startling and courageous film, Peter Davis’s landmark 1974 documentary HEARTS AND MINDS unflinchingly confronted the United States’ involvement in Vietnam at the height of the controversy that surrounded it. Using a wealth of sources—from interviews to newsreels to footage of the conflict and the upheaval it occasioned on the home front—Davis constructs a powerfully affecting picture of the disastrous effects of war. Explosive, persuasive, and wrenching, HEARTS AND MINDS is an overwhelming emotional experience and the most important nonfiction film ever made about this devastating period in history.
8
This Oscar-winning documentary is a twentieth-century fable, the story of an American dreamer who rose from humble origins to the heights of political power. Robert S. McNamara was both witness to and participant in many of the crucial events of his lifetime: the crippling Depression of the 1930s; the industrialization of the war years; the development of a different kind of warfare based on air power; and the creation of a new American meritocracy. He was also an idealist who saw his dreams and ideals challenged by the ambiguous role he played in history. Filmmaker Errol Morris lets McNamara tell his story in his own words, letting his subject draw lessons from the successes and failures of his career.
8.1
TURN EVERY PAGE explores the remarkable fifty-year relationship between two literary legends, writer Robert Caro and his longtime editor Robert Gottlieb, who passed away this June. Eighty-six at the time of filming, Caro is working to complete the final volume of his masterwork, “The Years of Lyndon Johnson;” Gottlieb, ninety-one, waits to edit it. The task of finishing their life’s work looms before them. With humor and insight, this unique double portrait reveals the work habits, peculiarities, and professional joys of these two ferocious intellects at the culmination of a journey that has consumed both their lives and impacted generations of politicians, activists, writers, and readers.
8.1
In July 1969, the space race ended when Apollo 11 fulfilled President Kennedy’s challenge of “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” No one who witnessed the lunar landing will ever forget it. Al Reinert’s documentary FOR ALL MANKIND is the story of the twenty-four men who traveled to the moon, told in their words, in their voices, using the images of their experiences. Forty years after the first moon landing, it remains the most radical, visually dazzling work of cinema yet made about this earthshaking event.
8.1
A tremendous, handmade monument to lives lost to AIDS, the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt demonstrated that grief and activism together could forge a powerful symbol of resilience. Winner of the Academy Award for best documentary feature, this moving film—buoyed by an original all-vocal score by Bobby McFerrin—explores the human stories obscured by statistics, examining the cross section of identities affected by HIV/AIDS, as well as efforts to combat the stigma, misinformation, and political obstruction that deepened the crisis.
8.1
Made with a righteous political anger that anticipates the incendiary polemics of documentarians such as Michael Moore and Joshua Oppenheimer, Kazuo Hara’s most renowned film is a harrowing confrontation with one of Japanese history’s darkest chapters: the atrocities committed by the country’s military during World War II. Hara’s unforgettable subject and collaborator in THE EMPEROR’S NAKED ARMY MARCHES ON is Kenzo Okuzaki—a former soldier, convicted murderer, and defiantly anti-establishment agitator—who has made it his life’s mission to expose the crimes committed by Japanese officers against their own men while stationed in New Guinea. As the often-violent Okuzaki resorts to extreme measures in his crusade to find out the truth about what happened to two soldiers murdered by their commanders, what emerges is at once a shocking piece of investigative journalism, a courageous condemnation of militarism and blind obedience, and a riveting portrait of a single-minded man driven by a raw fury bordering on madness.
8.1
Jimi Hendrix arrived in California virtually unknown. Returning stateside from London, where he had moved to launch his musical career, Hendrix exploded at Monterey, flooring an unsuspecting audience with his maniacal six-string pyrotechnics. JIMI PLAYS MONTEREY features the entire set of this legendary musician, a performance that has entered rock-and-roll mythology.
8
“To call RYUICHI SAKAMOTO | OPUS a concert film would be correct and also drastically inadequate . . . A testament to the artistic spirit and, above all, an act of love.” —Sheri Linden, “The Hollywood Reporter” “A spare, lovely work . . . The culmination of a lifelong journey.” —Bilge Ebiri, “New York Magazine”
8
In 1937, tens of thousands of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent were exterminated by the Dominican army, the killings fueled by anti-Black hatred fomented by the Dominican government. Fast-forward to 2013, when the Dominican Republic’s Supreme Court stripped the citizenship of anyone with Haitian parents, retroactive to 1929. The ruling rendered more than 200,000 people stateless, without nationality, identity, or a homeland. In this dangerous climate, a young attorney named Rosa Iris mounts a grassroots campaign, challenging electoral corruption and advocating for social justice. In STATELESS, director Michèle Stephenson traces the complex tributaries of history and present-day politics, issuing an urgent warning about what can happen when racism runs rampant in the government.
8
“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes. If we opened me up, we’d find beaches.” Originally intended to be Agnès Varda’s farewell to filmmaking, this enchanting auto-portrait, made in her eightieth year, is a freewheeling journey through her life, career, and artistic philosophy. Revisiting the places that shaped her—from the North Sea beaches of Belgium where she spent her childhood to the Mediterranean village where she shot her first film to the boardwalks of Los Angeles where she lived with her husband, Jacques Demy—Varda reflects on a lifetime of creation and inspiration, successes and setbacks, heartbreak and joy. Replete with images of wonder and whimsy—the ocean reflected in a kaleidoscope of mirrors, the streets of Paris transformed into a sandy beach, the filmmaker herself ensconced in the belly of a whale—The Beaches of Agnès is a playful and poignant record of a life lived fully and passionately in the name of cinema.
7.9
Bob Dylan is captured on-screen as he never would be again in this groundbreaking film from D. A. Pennebaker. The legendary documentarian finds Dylan in England during his 1965 tour, which would be his last as an acoustic artist. In this wildly entertaining vision of one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists, Dylan is surrounded by teen fans, gets into heated philosophical jousts with journalists, and kicks back with fellow musicians Joan Baez, Donovan, and Alan Price. Featuring some of Dylan’s most famous songs, including “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” DONT LOOK BACK is a radically conceived portrait of an American icon that has influenced decades of vérité behind-the-scenes documentaries.
8
Krzysztof Kieślowski made more than twenty documentaries, including the following short. In TALKING HEADS, Kieślowski poses the questions “What year were you born?” “Who are you?” and “What do you most wish for?” to forty different people, ranging from an infant to a one-hundred-year-old woman.
8
More than forty years ago, in 1978, WORD IS OUT: STORIES OF SOME OF OUR LIVES startled audiences across the country when it appeared in movie theaters and on television. The first feature-length documentary about queer identity made by gay filmmakers, the film was created by the Mariposa Film Group, a collective comprised of three lesbians (Veronica Selver, Lucy Massie Phenix, Nancy Adair) and three gay men (Rob Epstein, Peter Adair, Andrew Brown). Featuring candid interviews with twenty-six gay men and women across a wide range of demographics, it became an immediate flash point in the emerging gay-rights movement of the 1970s and forever altered the cultural conversation around LGBT issues.
7.8
The final film from the late, beloved Agnès Varda is a characteristically playful, profound, and personal summation of the director’s own brilliant career. At once impish and wise, Varda acts as our spirit guide on a free-associative tour through her six-decade artistic journey, shedding new light on her films, photography, and recent installation works while offering her one-of-a-kind reflections on everything from filmmaking to feminism to aging. Suffused with the people, places, and things she loved—Jacques Demy, cats, colors, beaches, heart-shaped potatoes—the wonderfully idiosyncratic work of imaginative autobiography VARDA BY AGNÈS is a warmly human, touchingly bittersweet parting gift from one of cinema’s most luminous talents.
7.9
Sam Harkness was fourteen years old when his mother, Jois, abruptly disappeared. Tracking cryptic clues of her whereabouts years later, Sam and his half brother—director Reed Harkness, who has been making short films with Sam since childhood—head out on a West Coast road trip to try to find her. But solving the mystery of Jois’s disappearance is only the beginning. What unfolds is a remarkable emotional journey that gradually reveals the ripple effects of trauma across generations of the Harkness family. Stitching together twenty-five years of home movies and filling the gaps in the archive with play, SAM NOW is a vibrant mosaic of love, longing, and loss, as well as a deeply empathetic attempt at healing.
7.9
Made over the course of ten years, this epic work of activist cinema joins the citizens of Sennan, Osaka, as they embark on an unprecedented uphill legal battle to receive reparations from the government for exposing their community to the deadly toxins of the city’s asbestos factories. Through wrenching interviews with the victims whose lives have been shattered by the agonizing effects of asbestosis, SENNAN ASBESTOS DISASTER paints a damning portrait of how decades of negligence exacted a devastating human toll while revealing the ways in which the tragedy is deeply entwined with issues of class and anti-Korean discrimination. It’s also a galvanizing look at the power of collective action and what happens when ordinary people take on their own government—going up against an unfeeling, often maddeningly slow-moving bureaucracy in their unceasing fight for justice.
