My brain didn’t understand, but my body seemed to. Surrounded by scions of wealth and power—and the stray cats, opossums, and raccoons they’ve taken in as guests, which famously required the Maysles to wear flea collars while filming—the Beales spiral into a bizarre, insular existence that ultimately inspired a Broadway musical and an HBO movie. Claude Lanzmann’s seminal nine-hour examination of the Holocaust, in which he interviews countless survivors and perpetrators of one of the darkest moments in history, is more an act of witness than of documentary filmmaking. Disgraced. . very depressing” (Vincent Canby, The New York Times), and among the greatest rock documentaries ever made (Rolling Stone). Naila and the Uprising. In his review, Roger Ebert wrote that “a film like Hoop Dreams is what the movies are for. Knowledge comes in different ways through our five senses. Evil Genius: the True Story of America's Most Diabolical Bank Heist. Culled from archival clips from close to 200 sources, along with new interviews and original material, Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui’s documentary is shaped around five of Alexander McQueen’s intricately wrought, high-concept collections, conjuring his life as much personally as aesthetically. The latest fashion news, beauty coverage, celebrity style, fashion week updates, culture reviews, and videos on Vogue.com. Werner Herzog pieced together recovered snippets of more than 100 hours of video shot by a former actor named Timothy Treadwell—who spent 13 summers living among wild grizzly bears in Alaska before he and his girlfriend were eaten by one of them in 2003—to make the astounding, seminal, and critically lauded Grizzly Man. “For some people, it’s an environmental film. “The idea was, how do I come up with the ultimate Baldwin?” the director told Vogue’s Julia Felsenthal in 2016. Once viewed as something stiff and obligatory, documentary film has, in recent years, risen to the top of the heap—thanks in no small part to some of the earth-shaking, needle-pushing, and ultimately world-changing films that are listed here, which find their focus in war, love, sex, death, and everything in between. Chris Smith’s “portrait of a fiendishly determined filmmaker” named Mark Borchardt, a 30-year-old odd-job man from Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, captured the “spirit of maverick independent filmmaking,” according to Janet Maslin in The New York Times, and has also proved to be a pivotal influence on young filmmakers across the globe. . Filmmaker Craig Foster documents his experience of forging a—to say the least—unlikely friendship with an octopus in a cold underwater kelp forest near Cape Town, South Africa in this surprisingly heartwarming breakout hit. The 50 Greatest Best Picture Losers. All the essentials: top fashion stories, editor’s picks, and celebrity style. Documentaries are nonfiction and made with the intention of displaying reality for historical purposes and to educate those watching the film. It takes us, shakes us, and make us think in new ways about the world around us. Michael Moore confronts America’s relationship with guns in his trademark good-natured style in this film, using the school shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, as his starting point. (As of 2012, the series is now at 56 Up.) American Pimp is a 1999 documentary that examines the pimp subculture in the United States. . Long an essential text for Sondheim fans, Original Cast Album is also a fascinating treatise on the terrifically hard work of making very good art. And the future of the country depends on that.”, Brett Morgen pieces together formerly lost footage shot by Jane Goodall’s first husband (the dashing National Geographic photographer Hugo van Lawick) in this critically lauded documentary about her early years observing chimpanzees in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park; and, more generally, about wildlife conservation and sustainable development and environmental awareness, the crusades of her past three decades. List RulesDocumentaries about prostitution and the sex trade. “Cameraperson is the work of a documentary cinematographer—Kirsten Johnson, who has collaborated with the likes of Laura Poitras and Michael Moore—but it’s more a memoir than a straight-up documentary. Hof keeps a high enough profile that he might as well also call himself “America’s PR Master General.” 72 Dangerous Animals: Latin America. To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. James Marsh’s Academy Award–winning film follows the French street performer Philippe Petit, who pulled off one of the boldest, craziest, and most irresponsible feats of the modern era when in 1974 he spent a good 45 minutes tightrope-walking between the towers of the World Trade Center. It was Danny Melnick from David Suskind’s office with another idea.” In a Star Wars-esque opening crawl, the filmmaker, known for his political and concert documentaries (including 1967’s Don't Look Back), explains that he was pitched a series centered on the original Broadway cast recording sessions. It was directed by the Hughes Brothers, the filmmakers behind Menace II … Ladkani effortlessly makes a worldly and complex issue feel close to home, emboldening viewers to step up for the cause, as the best of these kinds of … Covering a subject as sensitive as the Nazis is never an easy thing to do, but it … The Other Song is a documentary film directed by Saba Dewan. “As Torun’s nimble camera follows the cats doing their rounds—filching food, catching rats, scaring off interlopers—the film offers a glimpse of something richer and more poetic. The failures speak for themselves.”. For some, it’s an ode to technology. Like Wright’s book, Gibney’s film revolves around the personal testimony of former Scientologists (like Paul Haggis, the director of Crash) who have left the organization and provide harrowing details about its reported repressive, exploitative practices. Released 10 years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, Alain Resnais’s 32-minute Night and Fog is as much a documentary as it is a treatise on the impossibility of true documentation. “It is a brilliantly detailed report from one side of a battle that caused one death, several shootings, and a flood of violent bitterness; and that brought back to Harlan County memories of the much-bloodier coal strikes of the early 1930s,” wrote The New York Times. A SHOWTIME feature-length documentary examining the 2003 murder of college basketball star Patrick Dennehy by teammate Carlton Dotson, and the subsequent accusations against both Baylor University and head coach Dave Bliss. Documentary Reveals The 'Secret History' Of Hollywood Pimp Scotty Bowers A veteran of World War II, Bowers bought a gas station on Hollywood … . Filled with priceless footage of Russell and his contemporaries performing, A Poem Is a Naked Person serves as an artifact of the most iconic years in rock ’n’ roll history and unfolds like what The New York Times called a “jam session.”. . The most surprising thing about this exploration of globalism and the American working class from filmmakers Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert is how relentlessly gripping it is. A friendship was born, and in 2001, the band agreed to let the directors document their attempt to make a new album, surviving the fallout from bassist Jason Newsted quitting and James Hetfield’s alcoholism. © 2021 Condé Nast. Greene films that investigation, and it becomes, as Vogue’s Julia Felsenthal notes in her review something of a double documentary—both about Chubbuck and about Sheil’s effort to understand and inhabit the character, and whether it’s morally decent to do so. It is... 101 Rent Boys is a 2000 documentary film that explores the West Hollywood hustler scene. “America’s Pimpmaster General” runs Nevada’s famous Moonlite Bunny Ranch brothel, which HBO featured in its Cathouse reality documentaries and series. They give the people around them a vision of another freer, wilder, more spontaneous form of life, one that can be easily lost in a huge, stressful, rapidly modernizing place like Istanbul.”, Director Godfrey Reggio’s wordless, plotless, characterless, and wildly influential film combines epic, remarkable cinematography with the swelling intensity of Philip Glass’s score and lands somewhere in the realm of a rumination on man, nature, and modern life and technology. . “It’s meant to offer an experience, rather than an idea,” said Reggio in a 2002 interview. Long Live the Pimp a Documentary on the Life and Legacy of Pimp C 1 Taxi Driver (1976) Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver is considered to be one of the best films of its decade and a powerful and influential American masterpiece. But if you think I’m a nigger, it means you need it, and you got to find out why. Watch a huge selection of Documentary movies on SHOWTIME. The harrowing documentary is one of the most popular documentary films ever made among men, yet a young woman – Coco Schrijver made the film. Wrote the Times, “He’s an aesthete and an ascetic, a member of the establishment and a bohemian, and among the last of his kind.”. The documentaries on this list prove that point and then some. Prosecutors mounted a lurid court case that portrayed the crimes as a part of a satanic ritual carried out by alienated teenagers who dressed in black and listened to heavy metal, one of whom had a “goth” hairstyle. That’s where Poitras and the journalist Glenn Greenwald met with the NSA contractor Edward Snowden, now occasionally referred to as the “most wanted man in the world.” Poitras began filming mere minutes after meeting Snowden in person for the first time, and continued filming him as the impact of what he had leaked to her and her reporting partner, Greenwald, reverberated around the world. Pennebaker’s Original Cast Album: Company begins in media res: “My phone rang. From 'Leaving Neverland' to 'I Love You, Now Die' these are the 25 best. When Pina and I planned the film together, we had a couple of ground rules: no explanations, no interviews, no biographies. What makes it worth referencing, or remembering, or even watching in the first place? Alex Gibney’s HBO film takes a deep dive into Scientology—with help from the definitive Scientology tome, by veteran New Yorker reporter Lawrence Wright—and the result is an excellent primer on the religion and its cloudy history, including the life of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, and its current figureheads: among them, David Miscavige and Tom Cruise. She hated explaining her movement; she hated interpreting it.” Or as Bausch once put it: “Words can’t do more than just evoke things—that’s where dance comes in.”. Ceyda Torun’s film offers a cat’s-eye view of Istanbul, where, since the Ottoman Empire, thousands of felines roam freely virtually everywhere and anywhere, peacefully coexisting with humans. The film eventually led to one of the biggest food companies in the world changing their policies. Fuyao resuscitates the shuttered factory as an auto-glass plant, but what happens next will confound any easy political narratives about the winners and losers of global capitalism. Long Shot. The original hypothesis of the series, which was initially commissioned by the BBC, was that class structure in the U.K. is so strong that a person’s life path would be set at birth. Ross McElwee’s idiosyncratic, charming film is ostensibly about the lasting aftereffects of the “total warfare” waged by General William Tecumseh Sherman during the final months of the Civil War, which the filmmaker intends to discover by following Sherman’s trail through Georgia and the Carolinas. First Kill is a very confronting documentary film that revolves around the psychology of war. With every vote, the order of the list will be changed to see which documentary about prostitution comes out on top. “Kimberly Reed’s documentary tackles a knotty legal subject: the history (and vital importance of) campaign finance reform, the repercussions of the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, and who is pulling the strings when it comes to our elected officials” Vogue wrote in 2018. Laura Gabbert followed the beloved Los Angeles Times food critic Jonathan Gold for her 2015 documentary, which showed her subject—a titan of taste and talent—to be as multifaceted a man as he was a writer. “Because I’m not a nigger. 72 Dangerous Animals: Asia. For some people, it’s a piece of shit. In 1994, three teenagers were convicted of murdering three young boys in West Memphis, whose bodies apparently showed signs of torture and ritual assault. His 2000 arrest at Sharpstown Mall is still bullshit. Today, Complex and Mass Appeal present Long Live the Pimp, a documentary that further explores the life of Pimp C, from his humble beginnings in … Understanding war. If you don't see your favorite on the list, add it along with the existing titles so that others may vote on it as well. ‘‘Rationality will not save us,’’ says another. https://www.businessinsider.com/best-documentaries-all-time-critics-2018-3 Few stories are as affecting and inspirational as the true ones that take place in the world every day. Hard to get more influential than that. Best Documentaries. The iconic Belgian-born filmmaker is arguably as well known for her idiosyncratic personal style as she is her role in the development of the French New Wave movement, and to join her, her handheld camera, and her small crew in the search for the modern-day equivalents of Millet’s “gleaners” in the potato fields of northern France, the vineyards of Burgundy, and the markets of Paris is to experience a new way of looking at the world around us. Simpson’s not-guilty verdict—though a painful, blatant miscarriage of justice—nonetheless a civil rights victory for black Angelenos long terrorized by both the police and the courts. It depends on who you ask. May I Be Frank? . The film interviews activists, academics, and politicians including Angela Davis, Michelle Alexander, and Jelani Cobb to get at the fundamental question of why the vast majority of incarcerated persons in the U.S. are Black; Rolling Stone's Peter Travers called the documentary one of the "most explosive" of 2016, and for good reason. It is a... Streetwise is a 1984 documentary film by director Martin Bell. 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