Documentaries

Time, a gripping, touching, and relevant film, is one of the five nominees for the 2021 Best Documentary Feature Oscar. It centers on one extraordinary woman, Sibil Fox Richardson (nicknamed Fox Rich), as she fights boldly and relentlessly for the release of her husband Rob serving a long prison sentence.

Romanian-German filmmaker Alexander Nanau’s Collective (Colectiv in Romanian) is a searing exposé of systemic corruption, government cover-up, institutional injustice, and indifference to suffering – as well as a cautionary tale about the significance of honest, critical, and dispassionate press. World-premiering out of competition at the 2019 Venice Film Festival, the film later screened at the Toronto and Sundance Film Festivals.

Vigilantism is a topic frequently explored in movies, perhaps because it’s such an easy and visceral way to tap into feelings of individual helplessness in a cruel or unjust world. Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson helped mainstream and popularize the revenge genre in the 1970s, and it’s been a reliable commercial performer ever since – in stylized comic book adaptations, like The Crow.

While cities like London, New York, Nashville, Detroit, and Los Angeles can easily be identified as centers of musical influence, there was no place like Minneapolis in the 1980s. The Minnesota metropolis became the capital of funk, due largely to the purple man himself.

There are so many iconic images of legendary actress Audrey Hepburn: sitting on her New York balcony, strumming the guitar as she croons “Moon River” in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, riding her Vespa through the streets of Rome in Roman Holiday, dancing through Paris with Fred Astaire in Funny Face. Born in Ixelles, Belgium, Audrey Kathleen Ruston, as she was known, grew up in the throes of World War II, in desperate poverty and the product of a broken home.

MLK/FBI is the first film to uncover the extent of the Federal Bureau of Investigations’ surveillance and harassment of the reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The new documentary by Errol Morris, the acclaimed Oscar-winning director (The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S.  McNamara), is based on a memoir, Joanna Harcourt-Smith’s Tripping the Bardo with Timothy Leary: My Psychedelic Love Story, which was published in 2013.

Experiential in both subject and form, Viktor Kossakovsky‘s intimate documentary Gunda, chronicles the lives of a mother pig, a flock of chickens (one of which is one-legged), and a herd of cows. Born in the Soviet Union in 1961, Kossakovsky has been making original documentaries for the past three decades.

In a banner year for documentaries (both American and foreign), 76 Days stands out as one of the most immediate and visceral in depicting the disastrous event that has defined our present: the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s also the fastest non-fiction feature to get exposure and release.

It may be difficult, from the United States, to fully appreciate the stature of Diego Armando Maradona as an athlete and a world figure. The Argentine footballer who died suddenly aged 60 in Buenos Aires was, simply put, the biggest superstar to ever grace a soccer pitch.