7.4
WILD WHEELS is filmmaker Harrod Blank’s comic and revealing exploration of art cars —customized automobiles that reflect the individualistic spirit of their drivers. Traveling across the U.S. in his own wildly decorated VW bug, Blank discovers a memorable array of real-life characters obsessed with transforming their cars into mobile works of art. The result is an engaging and irresistibly eccentric deep dive into the heart of a truly unique, all-American subculture.
6.9
A mere twelve years after Los Angeles in 1984, the Olympic Games returned to the United States for the Games of the XXVI Olympiad. Bud Greenspan's Cappy Productions was commissioned to make the film, titled ATLANTA'S OLYMPIC GLORY, the fourth of the ten Olympic documentaries that Greenspan would make before his passing in 2010.
6.7
Restored in 2013 by the Austrian Film Museum and the Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in association with The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, LISTO laboratory in Vienna, Technicolor Ltd. in Bangkok, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Restoration funded by Doha Film Institute.
7.6
Mark Lewis takes the nature documentary into new realms of the humorous, surreal, and downright bizarre with this stranger-than-fiction tale of the ultimate environmental self-own. The cane toad—Bufo marinus, a species native to Central America—was imported by the sack-load to Australia in 1935 in an attempt to rid the country of the greyback beetle, which was rapidly destroying the sugarcane crop. The toads adapted beautifully to their new surroundings. Problem was, the beetle could fly and they couldn’t. What the cane toad is unusually proficient at, however, is making more cane toads—thousands upon thousands more. CANE TOADS: AN UNNATURAL HISTORY tells the wild story of this amphibious assault—warts and all.
6.6
This documentary by Mira Nair explores the power of laughter through the strangely popular phenomenon of laughing clubs in contemporary Bombay.
6.5
Bud Greenspan's film on the Games of the XXVII Olympiad in Sydney profiles Cathy Freeman, who surged to glory before her home crowd in the 400 meters, as well as Leontien van Moorsel, the Dutch cyclist who had suffered from anorexia and won the gold medal in both the women's cycling individual road race and individual time trial.
6.9
Charles Burnett cannily blends documentary and dramatic action with this searing, savagely ironic tale of a bank employee reduced to living out of his car, in a character study that doubles as a compassionate portrait of Los Angeles’s homeless community.
7.4
Christo and Jeanne Claude's first grand-scale urban project, wrapping the oldest bridge in Paris - the same bridge where Christo courted Jeanne-Claude. A love story set in the heart of Paris: between a refugee artist and a French General's daughter; between a 400-year-old bridge and the people of Paris.
5.5
Hal Hartley’s conscientious assistant in Berlin receives weekly letters from her boss and sends him the books he needs as he struggles in Amsterdam to stage Dutch composer Louis Andriessen’s opera “La commedia.”
7.7
Written and directed by George Stevens Jr., GEORGE STEVENS: A FILMMAKER’S JOURNEY is a moving portrait of the life and work of one of the greatest Hollywood filmmakers of the twentieth century. From SWING TIME and GUNGA DIN to SHANE and GIANT, George Stevens helped shape American cinema. This 1984 documentary includes interviews with filmmakers Frank Capra and John Huston, actors Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy, and many others.
7.7
Director Bud Greenspan, whose career covering sporting events had begun some twenty years earlier, seized the opportunity to helm the official film of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics with such gusto that he would become the IOC's go-to person for Olympic movies. And this 284-minute record of the 1984 Games set the tone for his nine Olympic films to come. 16 DAYS OF GLORY is audacious and fresh and springs from a fascination with the energy and ambition that drive the finest athletes.
7.3
Errol Morris turns his camera on one of the most fascinating men in the world: the pioneering astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, afflicted by a debilitating motor neuron disease that has left him without a voice or the use of his limbs. An adroitly crafted tale of personal adversity, professional triumph, and cosmological inquiry, Morris’s documentary examines the way the collapse of Hawking’s body has been accompanied by the untrammeled broadening of his imagination. Telling the man’s incredible story through the voices of his colleagues and loved ones, while making dynamically accessible some of the theories in Hawking’s best-selling book of the same name, A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME is at once as small as a single life and as big as the ever-expanding universe.
7
This documentary from Les Blank follows the indomitable Gerald ‘The Maestro’ Gaxiola, who turned to a life of prolific art making after years as an aircraft mechanic, traveling salesman, and body builder. While, in Gaxiola’s words, ‘art is a religion, not a business,’ THE MAESTRO: KING OF THE COWBOY ARTISTS is a joyful portrait of an irreverent, outsized life.
7.3
One of the most important documents of the AIDS epidemic, THE AIDS (Artists Involved with Death and Survival) SHOW deals with its impact on the community most affected by the disease: gay men. This unique work, one of the first films to deal with the subject of AIDS, was based on San Francisco’s long-running Theatre Rhinoceros stage production of the same name. It speaks to everyone who has ever thought about AIDS or any terminal disease. Excerpts from the play are combined with interviews with the show’s creators and performers, along with personal narration by the filmmakers—Peter Adair and Rob Epstein—in a powerful hybrid of documentary and drama.
A SEASON WITH ISABELLA ROSSELLINI catches up with the celebrated actor, model, animal-behavior expert, and all-around creative force as she is turning seventy, facing life with the same spirited curiosity and playfulness that have sustained her singular career across decades. Following her at work—on the set of Alice Rohrwacher’s film LA CHIMERA and rehearsing her own new play, “Darwin’s Smile”—and at home on Long Island, surrounded by her herds of sheep and goats, the film shows Rossellini at home in multiple worlds: a cosmopolitan European with a rich family history and an American pioneer with a twenty-eight-acre sustainable farm.
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.
7.6
CRUMB director Terry Zwigoff’s first film is a true treat: a documentary about the obscure country-blues musician and idiosyncratic visual artist Howard “Louie Bluie” Armstrong, member of the last known black string band in America. As beguiling a raconteur as he is a performer, Louie makes for a wildly entertaining movie subject, and Zwigoff honors him with an unsentimental but endlessly affectionate tribute. Full of infectious music and comedy, LOUIE BLUIE is a humane evocation of the kind of pop-cultural marginalia that Zwigoff would continue to excavate in the coming years.
7.5
The Making of Fanny and Alexander is a fascinating look at the creation of a masterpiece. Directed by Ingmar Bergman himself, this feature-length documentary chronicles the methods of one of cinema’s true luminaries as he labors to realize his crowning production. Featuring Bergman at work with many of his longtime collaborators—including cinematographer Sven Nykvist and actors Erland Josephson, Gunnar Björnstrand, and Harriet Andersson—The Making of Fanny and Alexander is a witty and revealing portrait of a virtuoso filmmaker.
7.2
Featuring enlightening interviews with Angela Davis, June Jordan, and Alice Walker, this essential documentary is an exuberant celebration of Black American women and their achievements. Within the context of the civil rights, Black power, feminist, and LGBT movements, the trio reassess how women such as Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer revolutionized American society and the world. Featuring the music of Prince, Janet Jackson, the Neville Brothers, and the Staple Singers, A PLACE OF RAGE illuminates a stirring moment in American history from the perspective of those on the forefront of social change.
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
In 1971, author and film scholar Donald Richie published a poetic travelogue about his explorations of the islands of Japan’s Inland Sea, recording his search for traces of a traditional way of life as well as his own journey of self-discovery. Twenty years later, filmmaker Lucille Carra undertook a parallel trip inspired by Richie’s by-then-classic book, capturing images of hushed beauty and meeting people who still carried on the fading customs that Richie had observed. Interspersed with surprising detours—a visit to a Frank Sinatra–loving monk, a leper colony, an ersatz temple of plywood and plaster—and woven together by Richie’s narration as well as a score by celebrated composer Toru Takemitsu, THE INLAND SEA is an eye-opening voyage and a profound meditation on what it means to be a foreigner.
7
For this documentary about the making of THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT, filmmaker Agnès Varda, director Jacques Demy’s widow, returned to the town of Rochefort for the film’s twenty-fifth anniversary. In it, she interviews actors Catherine Deneuve, Jacques Perrin, and George Chakiris, as well as townspeople who were present during the filming.
7.4
The 1992 presidential election was a triumph not only for Bill Clinton but also for the new breed of strategists who guided him to the White House—and changed the face of politics in the process. For this thrilling, behind-closed-doors account of that campaign, renowned cinema verité filmmakers Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker captured the brainstorming and bull sessions of Clinton’s crack team of consultants—especially James Carville and George Stephanopoulos, who became media stars in their own right as they injected a savvy, youthful spirit and spontaneity into the process of campaigning. Fleet-footed and entertaining, THE WAR ROOM is a vivid document of a political moment whose truths (“It’s the economy, stupid!”) still ring in our ears.
