The times would be a-changin' for both the media and this 26-year-old messenger very soon.A masterpiece of what-if storytelling, Peter Watkins's chilling featurette depicts the aftermath of a British nuclear war from a you-are-there perspective.
(He was also asked to pretend that a female friend of the director was his onscreen wife.) It's both an angry film and a compassionate one—a true watershed in the gay-rights struggle.Filmed in dramatically crisp black and white yet far from didactic, Tony Kaye's landmark examination of the smoldering battleground of abortion leaves no conviction untested. All rights reserved.
Look out for your first newsletter in your inbox soon!Thanks for subscribing! He'd pushed the nonfiction form into bold, exciting territory: Once he'd crossed that line, a legion of other filmmakers followed.Any discussion of Holocaust documentaries must include Alain Resnais's sober, deeply affecting half-hour short. Check out some of the best true crime documentaries you can stream right now on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and other platforms.
– , a fascinating doc that examines radicalized Americans.
showcases another controversial figure: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. From the ‘65 Watts riots to the rise of L.A.’s gang culture, is an unflinching look at a city’s difficult and often violent history. Inclement weather and a war between Peru and Ecuador ground filming to a halt—but egotistical star Klaus Kinski made all complications seem quaint.Emile de Antonio tears into political fearmonger Senator Joseph McCarthy with righteous rage and footage of the infamous Army-McCarthy hearings. Jason is PCMag's how to content generator. Risk. But the filmmaker was also crafting a meta-statement about the concept of truth itself, and it treats what could have been a typical investigative film into a real-life . Those who praise the power of the camera to effect change rightfully consider this a landmark.Throw on your oversize, boxy suit, hit PLAY on your boom box and make flippy-floppy with Jonathan Demme's unfailingly awesome Talking Heads concert doc. Each viewer is bound to have their own favorites: The playful, near-subliminal opening shot of three Icelandic girls walking down a rural road; the Japanese temple dedicated to cats (a very Marker place to visit); the illuminating aside on Hitchcock's . It's an insightful portrait of Ali as a 20th-century icon transformed into a symbol of tenacity for a beleaguered continent—and proof that the charismatic champ was indeed "the greatest. And if a documentary can do this, it's special. A female narrator speaks over the images as if they were letters home ("He wrote me...") even though the episodes play out right in front of us. "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" Kevin Pearce was one of the best professional snowboarders in the world until a brain injury in 2009 ended his career prematurely. Warhol's notion of iconic repetition gains power. Try another? In 2015, Elizabeth Holmes' company Theranos was valued at $9 billion, but it all came crashing down a year later when it was discovered that the blood-testing device her company had invented didn't actually work. But it's also an affectionate look at the director's depressed hometown: On his journey, he talks with such colorful characters as Bob Eubanks ("Flint's most famous native son") and Rhonda Britton, an eccentric neighbor who sells rabbits for "pets or meat." Here, then, is cinema's grandest piece of propaganda, to remind us not only of the terror of fascism but of the power of the image. All rights reserved. Moore's defiant success (it's still the highest-grossing doc of all time) had a massive impact, if not quite the intended result. This was the movie that proved Moore was a peerless propagandist—and demonstrated that he was just warming up.An essential piece of cinema history, the Lumire brothers' 50-second film is an unedited shot of a locomotive pulling into a provincial French station. Resnais's camera glides over the landscape as if searching for clues to an unsolvable mystery, while photographs of Nazi medical experiments and their sickening results attest to atrocities that can't possibly be fathomed in full. If you click an affiliate link and buy a product or service, we may be paid a fee by that merchant. Kaye shows it all, as well as footage of the procedure itself; we must watch it.Everyone refers to Altamont as the official end of the 1960s; the Maysles brothers' doc shows you why. Our top choice was an obvious one. Nature and chaos, obsession and madness—the auteur's thematic preoccupations are all here, in a form that's somehow more moving than Herzog's fictional counterparts.Reality is always shaped by the documentarian—even the most respectful one makes a choice with every shot. But it seems Gypsy was not sick at all, and her mother might have been intentionally making her ill for attention—and lying about her daughter's age. As a 13-year-old Jewish captive, he was beloved by his SS guards for his voice.Chris Marker's enthralling, globehopping essay is perhaps the finest first-person documentary, one that can leave you rivetingly unmoored.