5. “Newtown”
Kim A. Snyder doesn’t let audiences off the hook in the searing documentary “Newtown,” which ventures into the aftermath of the massacre that devastated Newtown, Connecticut, where 26 elementary school teachers and first-graders were gunned down and murdered by Adam Lanza in December 2012. It’s an impossible event to understand, particularly the lack of political action on gun control in the wake of the tragedy, and Snyder makes the film specifically about what we can and cannot understand. She makes some bold choices in the storytelling of “Newtown” that starkly renders the unspeakable nature of this event. The first part of the film, a haunting retelling of that day, uses police dash cam footage, 911 calls, and accounts from witnesses and first responders to recreate that day. Many of the doctors and rescue personnel can’t or refuse to verbalize the details of what they experienced, remaining stricken and speechless in sheer horror and disbelief. That senselessness is imparted to the audience, before we go on a deep dive into the experiences of three families who lost children that day, and have since dedicated themselves to gun-control activism. In creating a visceral, emotional record of this unspeakably evil and tragic mass murder, “Newtown” urges us as viewers and citizens to never become inured to or numb to this type of horror, as often as we are asked to grapple with it .
4. “Weiner”
Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg’s juicily sorrowful “Weiner” shines a light on disgraced New York Congressman, failed New York mayoral candidate, tabloid headline mainstay and incorrigible sexter Anthony Weiner, yet somehow makes him mildly sympathetic. As he is depicted here, Weiner is a passionate, if often bullheaded, politician, one that holds a fiery investment in the people, but who quite often finds himself victim to his own hubris and stupidity. In the company of his long-suffering (now ex-)wife Huma Abedin and their toddler son Jordan, Weiner is shown weathering a media firestorm that would cause most rational-minded individuals to cower under cover forever. But Weiner is, often impressively, resilient in the face of all of it, battling each challenge with persistence bordering on pure defiance. That he almost digs himself out only to bury himself again and again and again, with seemingly little regard for personal failure — or even human decency — is what makes this a documentary goldmine. These fly-on-the-wall filmmakers have a jaw-droppingly miraculous level of access here, giving us unfettered insight into Weiner’s own misery and chagrin, to bewitching and squirm-inducing effect, which is also the source of unexpected pity. “Weiner” might very well be the year’s most intensely intimate, deeply awkward and quietly absorbing cinematic accomplishment: You won’t see a more uncomfortably enthralling movie, fiction or non-, this year.
3. “One More Time With Feeling”
It’s only two years since the release of “20,000 Days On Earth,” Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s tone-poem meditation on the life and work of the amazing Nick Cave, and one might think that it’s too soon to return to the subject of the singer, given how definitive that film felt, even if Cave is a man of great depths, and even if a new movie was made by Andrew Dominik, director of arguably the best film of the last decade with “The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford.” But “One More Time With Feeling” is a very, very different movie, in part because of the awful circumstances behind it: A few months before recording his new record with the Bad Seeds, “Skeleton Tree,” Cave’s 15-year-old son Arthur died in a tragic accident. Dominik’s film, on a practical level, was conceived as a way for Cave to avoid having to promote the new record, with a feature-length film (shot by his friend, who he has composed scores for, in astonishing black-and-white 3D) doing the job for him. But it also becomes an elegy for the lost life, a portrait of mourning and bravery, and a song to the dead. It’s a vital portrait of how much Cave has changed in just a couple of years, a bruisingly beautiful performance doc, and an astonishing and haunting piece of filmmaking in its own right.
2. “Cameraperson”
Kirsten Johnson has shot documentaries for filmmakers such as Michael Moore, Kirby Dick, and Laura Poitras among many others, and she’s traveled the world over, from Bosnia to Nigeria, Uganda to Yemen, Guantánamo to Wyoming. If you think of the sum total of her filmography in those terms, then you may not think of her as a storyteller; rather, you may think of her as a facilitator for telling other people’s stories. You wouldn’t be wrong, either, but Johnson’s new film, “Cameraperson,” is as much about her as it is about her subjects and her material, comprised of unused footage from past projects. Call it a clip show, call it an outtake reel, but above all else, call it one of the most compassionate films of the year, a meticulously, deliberately edited montage of humanity made in celebration of the inherent humanity of both the camera and the person wielding it. The results feel like they shouldn’t work as well as they do, but Johnson is an intelligent, assured filmmaker, and the choices she and editor Nels Bangerter make in picking the movie’s connective tissue sustain cohesion even as “Cameraperson” hops between disparate ideas, places, and people. Roger Ebert once described the movies as “a machine that generates empathy.” No film in 2016 proves that better than this one.
1. “O.J.: Made In America”
With awards season upon us and “O.J.: Made In America” raking in laurels, nominations, and short-list spots, there are those who have hurled the accusation that the five-part, eight-hour project is *gasp* television, not film. But regardless of the length, distribution, or setting in which we saw it, Ezra Edelman’s compulsively watchable documentary was the greatest non-fiction story we saw this year. The length, in fact, makes the film, in many ways, as Edelman dives deeply into the life, times, and myth of O.J. Simpson. The theme that emerges is the way he used celebrity to “transcend” race, and the way that the racial tensions of LA in the ’90s made him a symbol that allowed him to transcend justice. The final chapter, in which Simpson grasps at the shreds of celebrity, the process by which he makes himself real in the world, is tragic, absurd, and darkly ironic, a perfect cap to the heavy-hitting chapters that came before, exploring the sociological and cultural forces that all had a hand in making O.J. It’s about what he means and meant in the world, but it squares his actions and who he is as a person around the legend, too. There’s no glossing over the victims and the violence committed against them at all in “O.J.: Made In America,” which grapples with the individual set against the cultural landscape.
Honorable Mentions:
Two of our favorite docs, which appeared on our 20 Best Documentaries of the Year So Far list back in June, haven’t yet hit theaters, so we chose not to include them in this list. Fortunately, Sundance Selects/IFC snapped up the rights to voguing documentary “Kiki,” so we’re sure to be seeing that one on next year’s list of Best Docs. We were also very taken with lyrical Mexican kidnapping diptych “Tempestad,” and are hoping it secures wider distribution soon.
As for other honorable mentions, as we said before, we chose “Into the Inferno” over Herzog’s other doc this year, exploring the interwebs in “Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World”; and went for “Audrie & Daisy” rather than “Amanda Knox” for Netflix crime docs.
There was also a plethora of fantastic music docs this year, and we want to shout out “Mavis!”, Jim Jarmusch’s Iggy and the Stooges doc “Gimme Danger,” and “Eat That Question: Frank Zappa In His Own Words.”
We also enjoyed “Team Foxcatcher,” “The Eagle Huntress,” “Strike A Pose,” “Jim: The James Foley Story,” “All These Sleepless Nights,” “Risk,” “The Lives Of Thérèse,” “Chicken People,” and the election doc from constant provocateur Michael Moore on his trip through “Trumpland.”
Let us know your favorite docs or our most egregious oversights in the comments below — we welcome the celebration of any and all non-fiction cinematic delights.
With Will Ashton, Andy Crump, Jessica Kiang, Oli Lyttelton, Kimber Myers, and Nikola Grozdanović.
