“I Called Him Morgan”
New York City, jazz and murder: “I Called Him Morgan” could be a classic film noir of some kind if it weren’t a true story, and a cracking documentary from Swedish director Kasper Collin at that. Collin tells the story of both jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan, a prodigious talent who squandered his potential through heroin addiction only to get back on his feet, and Helen Morgan, the woman who saved his life and then ended it. Told through the eyes of Lee’s bandmates and an interview with Helen the month before her death in 1996, it begins, per our review by Gary Garrison, “as a boisterous film… with a sense of excitement,” but becomes something sadder in its second half. “More than anything else, the film becomes a celebration of these two lives and the era of music that both created and destroyed them,” it’s a film “as beautiful to look at as it is to hear” (thanks in part to lensing from the great Bradford Young), and “a lean, thumping excursion into the life of a legend.”
“LA 92”
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the L.A. Riots that erupted in the shocking aftermath of the not-guilty verdict in the trial of the police officers that brutally beat Rodney King, and along with fiction movies (Halle Berry and Daniel Craig star in Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s “Kings,” and Sundance took a very different perspective with “Gook”), there have also been a plethora of documentaries. John Ridley’s “Let It Fall” and Showtime’s “Burn Motherfucker Burn” were both solid, but the best of this bunch was this film from Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin for the National Geographic Channel, which proved a hit at Tribeca a few months back. Assembled entirely from archive footage, it’s what our reviewer Chris Barsanti called “not just a defining work on the riots and a wrenching visual essay on power, race, media and mob violence in the modern era, but also one of the year’s best documentaries.” Broad in scope (comparisons to “OJ: Made In America” have been drawn) but detailed in approach, the film “resists easy answers while still holding a strong editorial viewpoint about the overlapping institutional defects that led to the riots,” a “delicate dance” that should make Lindsay and Martin serious names to watch in the non-fiction world.
“Last Men In Aleppo”
There were a number of Syria-set docs in contention for this list, but the finest of them might be Feras Fayyad‘s heartbreaking, powerful “Last Men In Aleppo,” the winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year. To some degree, it shares a subject matter with last year’s Oscar Documentary Short winner “The White Helmets,” following the heroic (and much derided in shitty circles) group of Syrian volunteers, most principally Khaled and Mahmoud here, who rush to the site of bombings to help save those that might have been caught under the debris. But with nearly twice the running time of the 40-minute “White Helmets,” Fayyad and his team get in much deeper, and as heartbreaking and horrifying as some of the imagery and events are, you become overwhelmed by the level of humanity shown by the two men and their colleagues in their face of such monstrous acts. And, while it feels a little crass to say so, the level of filmmaking craft is quite extraordinary: DP Fadi al Halabi and his crew capture some of the more breathtaking compositions we’ve seen on screen all year.
“Nobody Speak: Trials Of The Free Press”
It’s easy to make the “Alien Vs. Predator” joke of “whoever wins, we lose” about the trial that saw Hulk Hogan sue influential gossip-mongering site Gawker for publishing his sex tape, a trial that ultimately saw Hogan be awarded hefty damages, and forcing the site to shut down. But as “Nobody Speak,” the excellent doc from “The Internet’s Own Boy” director Brian Knappenberger on the case, makes clear, however much you might dislike Nick Denton’s sometimes glorious, often grubby site, that they could be brought down in such a manner is positively chilling. Knappenberger builds a clear, concise narrative of some complex issues, smartly keeping his villain Peter Thiel (who financed Hogan’s suit) in the shadows until late on, making the whole thing feel like a particularly entertaining and topical episode of “The Good Wife.” And while it doesn’t pretend at being balanced — it’s firmly on the side of a free press, as should we all be — it doesn’t let Denton and his crew completely off the hook either. Made with real wit and skill, and only occasionally stopping to contemplate the absolute absurdity of the situation, it’s an important film and one that’ll hopefully reach a substantial audience thanks to its Netflix presence
“Oklahoma City”
While certain presidents try to ban people from countries that have never committed terrorism in the U.S., the threat of domestic terror from right-wing militias continues to grow, and “Oklahoma City” couldn’t feel more topical or vital as a result. The PBS film by director Barak Goodman is ostensibly focused on the 1995 bombing of a federal building that killed 168 people and injured more than 700, at the time the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil, and still the worst domestic terrorism incident of all time, as well as the manhunt for its perpetrator, Timothy McVeigh. But Goodman brilliantly and concisely doesn’t just relate the events of those days, but also of those that led up to it, including the incidents at Waco and Ruby Ridge, and the mood that, perhaps even more than right now, caused some Americans to want to wage war on their government. It’s not the most formally interesting movie here to be sure, but it’s rigorous and gripping in the way that it retells the story and puts it in its proper context, covering a lot of ground but without feeling like it’s giving anything short shrift.