In what has become a rewarding Christmas tradition, the last couple of weeks have been spent, in between shopping, cooking, arguing, eating, boozing and crying jags, catching up on some of the non-fiction releases from the past year. In recent times, the increase in quality documentary filmmaking — more about an increase in availability and profile, perhaps, but a borderline Cambrian explosion nonetheless — has been an incredible bounty, but also a bit of a daunting prospect. There’s so much to get through that though every year there’ll be several docs that stop us in our tracks, many others get swept along by the current, if they get seen at all.
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All of which is to say, the list to follow is partial (not everything that should have been watched could be watched), subjective (occasionally at odds even with our own reviewers), and only a thin scraping of the top of the documentary iceberg, further mapped in the honorable mentions and beyond. We’ve tried to keep to 2018 US releases — theatrical and streaming — and beyond that have allowed our (my) idiosyncratic tastes to lead us where they will. The only thing we can hand-on-heart promise, aside from a list of 20 of the most provocative, engaging, insightful and sometimes enraging films of the year, is that at no point in the lovingly crafted capsule reviews to follow, no matter how strong the temptation, will the phrase “blurring the lines between fact and fiction” appear. Here are our 20 Best Documentaries of 2018.
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Click here for our complete coverage of the best and worst of 2018.
20. “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead” [Review]
“Fuck you, fat man, take that legend and shove it where the sun don’t shine,” one commentator says colorfully during Morgan Neville’s irreverent look at the making of the Greatest Film Almost Never Made. He’s describing the point to which Orson Welles brought almost all his “The Other Side of the Wind” collaborators (except DP Gary Graves, who emerges as a Leon Vitali-like unsung hero — see “Filmworker” below), before unleashing a charm offensive to win them back onside. But he could also be referencing the Welles-mythos fatigue that some of us might be suffering, and to which Neville’s doc is the mischievous, highly entertaining remedy. The line-up is impeccable — Peter Bogdanovich, Danny Huston, Henry Jaglom, Oja Kodar, Rich Little, Beatrice Welles, Cybill Shepard and more all appear, as do spikily edited archival versions of John Huston, Dennis Hopper, and Welles himself. Whether all this sound and fury was worth the angst, you can now judge for yourself with the reconstituted ‘Wind’ available on Netflix. But this engaging doc is not simply a companion piece: As compelling as any of its arguments, playfully outlined in metafictional extracts from Welles’ back catalogue (especially his already meta “F for Fake“), is the suggestion that perhaps ‘Wind’ might have been better left unfinished, along with the eternal questions about art vs commerce that any discussion of Welles’ later career dredges up. It’s especially illuminating in its comparison between Welles and his star and close friend John Huston, with Huston the cynical pragmatist trusted by Hollywood with budgets and projects the like of which Welles, as ardent a movie evangelist as ever there was, could only dream. So as much as Neville’s doc is about an outsize ego, and an even more massive cinematic legacy, it is also a cautionary tale about how maybe the movies don’t want you to love them so much. Available now on Netflix US.
19. “Fahrenheit 11/9” [Review]
Not gonna lie, it takes an effort of will to sit down to watch Michael Moore‘s latest documentary, and not just because WARNING: THIS FILM CONTAINS A BRIEF CLOSE UP OF SENTIENT PILE OF FLAMMABLE RAGS STEVE BANNON. For anyone daily harangued by a news cycle that often feels like it’s out to get you personally, the prospect of over two hours of Moore’s brand of hectoring agitprop, especially around a crisis in which we’re all still enmired, certainly lacks appeal. But if you can make it through the opening section, which with excruciating too-soon-ness makes us relive the Presidential election — from “it’s in the bag!” to “what the fuck just happened” in one unthinkable night! — “Fahrenheit 11/9” makes a case for itself by marrying bluntness of approach with breadth of purview. Moore, a less intrusive on-camera presence than he has been before, displays a comprehensive understanding of the interrelation of the various catastrophes that we mostly now sum up with [helpless gesture indicating everything in the world]. The result is an almost Adam Curtis-like overview of how the macro and the micro are linked, and how Obama drinking that glass of Flint water is part of the same rotten system that secured the Presidency for a treasonous buffoon-savant, that infects the media (Moore not excluded) and kills children in classrooms and cages at the border. Crucially, there is none of Curtis’ zen-like, grand-forces-of-history tone. Instead Moore cycles through hope, disgust, despair, anger, and impatience, before stopping only just shy of an all-out scorched-earth conclusion, that does not comfort us but equips us, in rage and insight, for the next phase. Moore knows he’s not going to reach anyone who needs persuading, so rather than preaching to the choir, he’s arming it. Available now on Amazon and Vudu.
18. “This Is Congo” [Review]
The Democratic Republic of the Congo – the very name of the nation takes on an ironic tinge — is described early on as a God-given paradise and a man-made misery. But in a brisk, brusque, and occasionally brutalizing 90 minutes we get a great deal more of the latter than the former, as Daniel McCabe delivers a searing portrait of a people so accustomed to being at war that downed airplanes double as playgrounds and civilians turn itinerant to escape the fighting. The context is cursory, and Congo’s extraordinary history of colonial exploitation, propped-up corrupt dictatorships, mistrustful neighbors and playing host to an endless, decades-long war is reduced to its barest outline. But the title is in the present tense, and that is where McCabe’s film really lives, in its horrifically immersive, shattering first-person combat footage, recorded with so little apparent regard for personal safety that we’re always half-expecting the screen to cut to explosive black. McCabe follows four protagonists, two combatants and two civilians, but it’s the charismatic National Army colonel Mamadou (he who introduced the paradise/misery dichotomy in the first place) whose borderline mythic storyline comes to dominate the film as a microcosmic example of the neverending cycle of violence and corruption the nations seems doomed to live out on repeat. It’s hard not to notice, in the year of “Black Panther,” that with its rich veins of rare minerals, lush mountains, limitless water, a benign climate and vast soil deposits of gold, copper, uranium, and oil, this should really be Wakanda. Instead, this is the misery that generations of malevolent, corrupt, warlike men, outside and inside the country have made, and continue to make, of a potential paradise — this is Congo.
17. “Three Identical Strangers” [Review]
With the rising popularity of various documentary formats, there has also come a greater awareness of the way in which those forms can manipulate or massage the truth. The blowback over “The Jinx,” for example, or the podcast “S-Town,” while not invalidating those investigations, does force us to think about how non-fiction is structured and to what end. And there’s no 2018 title that sails closer to those winds than Tim Wardle‘s undeniably gripping “Three Identical Strangers” which tells the outlandish story of triplets separated at birth for shady pseudoscience reasons and raised by three different families. Unaware of each others’ existence until a chance encounter, years later all three reunite sporting identikit goofy grins, wrestler’s builds, and curly hair. The first half of the film is buoyant and borderline comedic, reveling in their delight at their matching togetherness. But as darker currents pull us into the second half, the omissions and elisions of Wardle’s approach become apparent, and the reasons why only two of the three brothers are interviewed — and each of them separately — become clear. There is something vaguely uncomfortable about the sensationalist manner in which a story that would be amazing even in its plainest retelling, is molded to the rhythm of the regular mic-drop, and it’s hard to know if the deliberate withholding of certain elements contributes to or lessens the film’s impact. So why does it feature here? Because, approached with a degree of skepticism, Wardle’s film is undoubtedly one of the most compelling documentaries of the year, not just for the legitimately insane story it tells, but also because of its very flaws. Into an ostensible investigation of the twin factors of nature and nurture, is introduced a third triplet, narrative, which begins to dictate proceedings in troubling, but never less than fascinating ways. Available now on Amazon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avh1OLmPODA
16. “Filmworker” [Review]
In any given year we expect more than a few documentaries that outline the achievements of great men and women — the figures who tower in their fields and whose stories fascinate us by virtue of seeming so much larger than our own. It’s far rarer, however, to get a portrait of someone adjacent to that greatness, an ostensibly ordinary person whose extraordinary support and devotion forms a massive, but unsung part of the Great One’s legacy. Tony Zierra‘s compulsive “Filmworker” persuasively suggests that if we need a name for such people, we could well call them “Vitalis,” after his subject Leon Vitali, the self-sacrificing right-hand-man to the famously laid-back and carefree Stanley Kubrick. But as much as we might want to paint Vitali (who cast and coached Danny Lloyd as Danny Torrance, championed R. Lee Ermey for “Full Metal Jacket” and gave us the twins from “The Shining” among other indelible contributions) as some sort of martyr, the man himself refutes that. Instead, the ex-actor, who played the dyspeptic Lord Bullingdon in “Barry Lyndon” but then gave up his promising thespian career to be Kubrick’s, well, everything, insists that proximity to the creative mind he admired so intensely was its own reward. The sixteen-hour days, the neglect of his family (who appear sanguine enough, but are frank about where they ranked in their father’s priorities), the prematurely aging stress of constantly meeting the demands of such a consummate perfectionist — fairly soon it starts to seem like Vitali may have been the more remarkable human of the two, especially with his continued dedication to the preservation and furtherance of Kubrick’s legacy. Chock-full of behind the scenes anecdotes about Kubrick’s crazily exacting process, “Filmworker” finally serves some long-overdue justice in giving Vitali (and by extension all the Vitalis out there) a little of the recognition he deserves, but never sought. Available now on iTunes.
