10. “Listen To Me Marlon”
An impeccably constructed, oddly profound confessional that feels as close to autobiography as possible, considering it was made more than a decade after its subject’s death, Stevan Riley‘s remarkable film sets a new standard in insight for the biographical documentary. Of all possible subjects, Marlon Brando has such a carefully cultivated mythos even to this day that it’s hard not to be blinded by his image till the contours of the man become indiscernible, like when you stare directly at the sun. But Riley locates his film in the one place where Brando’s reputation does not dazzle the eyes: within the man himself. Using his unprecedented access to hundreds of hours of tapes that Brando himself recorded, some of them rambling reminiscences, some of them attempts at self-hypnosis, along with interviews and occasional film excerpts, Riley ensures that Brando’s is almost the only voice we ever hear. And the result is fascinating: a cleverly shaped, formally rigorous impression of a man who was entirely complicit in the creation of his own brand of glamor until that brand took on a life of its own, cutting him off from ordinary life and forcing a retreat into a desperately unhealthy form of self-regarding solipsism. The many salacious events of Brando’s later life, especially involving his children —murder, incarceration, addiction, suicide— are treated exactly right: each is emphasized for the formative and devastating incidents they were but are not exploited. Never resorting to genre staples like voiceover or talking heads, Riley provides the barest minimum of outside detail, just enough to contextualize Brando’s musings, so it feels truly like spending a couple of hours in his company —and considering the reclusive, intensely private and tragic figure Brando ultimately became, that’s a privilege indeed. – JK
9. “Cameraperson” (2016)
Cinematographer Kristen Johnson worked on some of the most acclaimed documentaries of recent years (including “Citizenfour,” “The Invisible War,” and “Fahrenheit 9/11”). She assembled this essay film from the scraps of those earlier works – outtakes, pre-rolls, and other miscellanea. But the resulting collection of “images that have marked me and leave me wondering still” feels like a cohesive work, a searching, years-long exploration of the fundamental notions of the documentary form. Recalling and expanding on her most memorable moments and experiences behind the camera, Johnson’s absorbing work crosses continents and divides, dwells in public spaces and private homes, yet finds thematic and visual connections that transcend all of those barriers. It’s an evocative visual memoir and a thoughtful meditation on the idea of seeing – and of being seen. – JB
8. “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” (2018)
One of the most disappointing and shameless trends of the latter half of the decade was watching so many filmmakers attempt to capture the nationwide political zeitgeist through less than subtle visions of racial despair. Studios cashed in on shamelessly cynical attempts to evoke the Black Lives Matter era, while directors of color were often forced into fulfilling a quota, instead of being given genuine opportunities to tell the stories they want to tell. In other words: watching the lo-fi, deeply authentic vision of photographer/filmmaker RaMell Ross’s “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” was a much-needed breath of fresh air. A film of indescribable beauty and grace, Ross documented a small Alabama community over the course of several years, offering seemingly mundane glimpses at the everyday lives of a group of Black families and friends. Even the highest praise for Ross’s film often mentioned how “slight” or “simple” the film was, which was a massive disservice to Ross’s extraordinarily ambitious vision of Black lives. By avoiding the white gaze inherent to making “Black films” in a studio system still dominated by white men, Ross’s depiction felt vibrant and alive in ways that are almost overwhelming. In a decade oversaturated with films depicting Black existence through violence and trauma, “Hale County” felt groundbreaking in its resistance to the exploitation we’ve come to expect in these types of narratives – fiction or otherwise. By turning his eye on the ordinary, Ross made something truly and utterly extraordinary. — MR
7. “The Work” (2017)
In 1968, Johnny Cash visited Folsom Prison – the prison that had found itself the subject of his 1955 hit “Folsom Prison Blues”— to perform for the inmates serving time in the second oldest prison in California. It was a way for Cash to connect with the most downtrodden men in society, many of whom were fans. It also provided thousands of men living their lives in the confines of a small cell the opportunity to feel something again. Forty years later, filmmakers Jairus McLeary and Gethin Aldous stepped into the very same prison to document four days of one of the most unorthodox group therapy sessions you’re ever likely to experience. Filmed over the course of two years from 2019-2010, “The Work” offers viewers an immersive front row seat experience to the emotionally and physically draining meeting of civilians and inmates. Three average civilians are put into a group circle surrounded by men who have had their rights stripped away from them, and in the process, wrestle with their own toxic masculinity by examining their anger and deep-seated traumas. Not only a harrowing insight into the violent and destructive psychology hard-wired into the minds of most men, but also an unflinching look at the sociopolitical roots of the industrial prison complex. McLeary and Aldous’ film has no shortage of unforgettable moments, but if there’s one moment that has stuck with me since my first initial viewing, it’s this: Halfway through the film, two men emotionally embrace after a volcanic confrontation. Both mic’d up, the sound suddenly cuts out. There’s nothing but white noise for a few moments, but then something enters the mix. It’s the muffled but unmistakable pulsating rhythms of their hearts pounding against one another. It’s the kind of raw and unexpected moment you can only find in great documentary filmmaking. — MR
6. “The Overnighters” (2014)
Director Jesse Moss’s Sundance hit asked one of the most penetrating questions in this decade of hidebound moralizing and religious hypocrisy: what does it mean to be a Christian? North Dakota pastor Jay Reinke thought he was doing the Christian thing when he opened his church’s doors for more than a thousand men looking for work in the local oil industry, only to find himself on the receiving end of community ire – particularly when his own moral journey takes him in unexpected directions. This is tricky territory, but Moss navigates the religious and secular minefields with aplomb and lands one of the more surprising concluding passages in recent memory. – JB
5. “Shirkers” (2018)
In 1992, young Sandi Tan set out to make a road movie in Singapore with her friends. They were 19, and working with their mentor Georges Cardona. The story of “Shirkers” is the story of that film, the mind-boggling case of how the original footage was hidden for years, and one man tried to sabotage the dreams of three young women. Tan directs the meta-documentary revisiting the years, the relationships, the mystery that meant that first adventuring film never got made – but arguably makes something much more troubling and involving here. Through interviews with her friends at the time, people who knew Georges, and her own piecing together of her memories, Tan is both the investigator and the subject in this case, bringing to life both questions and long overdue answers with vivid detail. It’s a sad story, one of lost time and broken promises, but one so fascinating in terms of a debate on who really owns art, and what truly ends up living forever. – EK
4. “One More Time with Feeling” (2016)
There are films that are so immensely powerful that you can’t bear to revisit them for fear that a second viewing might tarnish the singular experience of watching it with fresh eyes. In 2015, Andrew Dominik set out to make a film about the recording of his close friend Nick Cave and the recording of his 16th studio album with his longtime band The Bad Seeds. In the middle of recording the album, something unimaginably tragic rocked the lives of Cave and his family. His 15-year old son, Arthur, had died. He didn’t face a slow death, riddled with an illness that gave the family some sort of timeline in which to properly prepare for the passing, not that you can ever really be prepared for death. It was a horrible accident that altered Cave in ways the prolific musician could have never imagined, and could only begin a lifelong journey of healing through his art. So what began as an immersive experience of the band’s recording (the film was mostly shot in black and white 3D by the brilliant team of Benoît Debie and Alwin H. Küchler) became something much more profound. Together, Dominik and Cave weaved two intimate acts together, one of process and one of grieving, resulting in a film that transcends the medium itself. A film of unadulterated power about the ways grief takes hold of our lives, it’s the kind of experience that not only lingers in the mind but pervades every part of the soul. It offers the audience an opportunity to find solace in the words of a man who changed so many lives with music, now bearing the most vulnerable depths of his soul to us as a form of cinematic catharsis. — MR
3. “O.J.: Made in America” (2016)
What does it mean to be Black in America? This is the question director Ezra Edelman asks us in his towering eight-hour masterpiece “O.J.: Made in America.” Released on the heels of Ryan Murphy’s entertaining, but goofy FX miniseries “The People vs. O.J. Simpson,” Edelman’s docuseries clearly had ambitions far beyond putting familiar faces in bad wigs. Instead of rehashing the familiar beats of the trial, Edelman set his sights on exploring the sociological and political ramifications of the controversial trial by untangling a complicated history of racial dynamics in American media and sports (yes, it was released as a mini-series on TV, but also an epic movie at film festivals and it won the 2016 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature). His vast scope covers everything from the unhealthy worshipping and monetizing of athletes to the ugly, underreported statistics of domestic abuse to the complex history of Los Angeles, a cultural melting pot living in segregation under the rule of a notoriously corrupt police department. Sure, Edelman still investigates the complexities of the case and the way it forever changed the 24-hour news cycle, but it’s his desire to understand what sort of society can create such a powerful, towering figure that sets it apart from so many other films covering similar ground. A devastating reckoning of the past and a tragic portrait of a city unraveling under a violent history of corruption and racism, Edelman’s film is a landmark cultural milestone. —MR [Capsule taken from our 100 Best Films Of The Decade list]
2. “Stories We Tell” (2013)
Actor turned director Sarah Polley’s lovely, magnificent “Stories We Tell,” is a phenomenal investigation on the ephemeral nature of the past, the slippery, porous quality of memory, and, the stories we tell ourselves to cope. A playful, inventive, quasi-autobiographical film that plays out like a mystery, the doc explores the filmmaker’s own tangled family history and the mother— an actress whose big personality left an indelible mark on everyone—who died of cancer when she was only 11. What might seem like a family photo album, soon blossoms into something deeper, the meaning of truth, and who that transiently shifts depending on whose perspective that truth is being interrogated by. What unfolds, and how it’s conveyed—much of it through reenactments that you don’t realize are such until much later— is unforgettable. Interviews, old home movies, newly staged scenes, and other surprises are layered over top of each other like an inventive collage and mosaic of memory and fleeting recollection. Secrets are unveiled, twist and turns occur, worthy of any thriller, and the bold nature of the filmmaking crafts something both exhilarating and profoundly moving. Enthralling and exquisitely crafted, Polley’s thoughtful inquiry into a family past compellingly examines self-made mythologies, the cracks in family folktales and the amorphous nature of storytelling itself. – RP
1. “The Act of Killing” (2012, Joshua Oppenheimer)
It’s hard to think of many films this past decade that have changed the way we look at films and narrative like “The Act of Killing” (and its stellar 2014 companion piece “The Look of Silence” which we sort of consider a tie for #1 since they’re so intrinsically connected). Director Joshua Oppenheimer spent years crafting his searing indictment of the 1960s Indonesian genocide that history almost erased, interviewing black market criminals-turned-genocidal war criminals Anwar Congo and Adi Zulkadry about their part in wiping out upwards of three million communist Indonesians and Chinese from 1965-1966. But Oppenheimer decided to play with the very notion of what a documentary can be, asking Congo and Zulkadry to recreate their crimes on movie sets designed to replicate the types of films they grew up adoring (westerns, musicals, and gangster dramas). By allowing Congo and Zulkadry to reflect on their crimes through the lens of genres that helped normalize warfare and violence, Oppenheimer prods the paradox of warfare as entertainment, and places blame not only the men responsible but the systems that perpetuate the never-ending cycles of violence. It’s an undeniably brutal but absolutely essential piece of filmmaking, admirably seeking to uncover the atrocities that history wants us to forget. — MR
Honorable Mentions
Yes, a lot of great docs are missing or just had to be edged out to make space for something else, we only made 55 slots and that’s life. But that’s not to say we didn’t love hundreds of more documentaries. Top of mind documentaries that hovered very close to making the list, but were ultimately, heartbreakingly removed from the main list were the trifecta of “Nostalgia for the Light,” “The Cordillera of Dreams,” and especially “The Pearl Button,” by Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán, Ken Burns’ “The Central Park 5” documentary which paved the way for Ava DuVernay’s “When They See Us,” and honestly, a must-watch documentary, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Indian music travelogue, “Junun” with Jonny Greenwood and friends, Brett Morgen’s Jane Goodall portrait “Jane,” and Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s extremely entertaining and watchable paean to their hero Brian DePalma in the doc “DePalma.”
If you’d like to get a super deep honorable mention and know how we felt more about things year to year—mind you writers come and go and sometimes tastes change, and or movies don’t have the same longtail resonance—you could also look to our Best Documentaries features per year where we cover around 20 best of docs per year if not more in some years: 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, (no, 2019 doc list sadly, the best of the decade will have to suffice, only so much time in the year, also missing are lists from 2010-2012, but that’s part of losing content in the migration from Ind*eW*re).
There are literally hundreds of other films we debated. Since we don’t really have time for context (for the most part), here’s a list and note that many of them are within those 2018-2013 doc lists if you’d like to dig deeper. So, in short, docs we love that we also considered include “Oxyana,” “Blackfish,” “20 Feet From Stardom,” “The Punk Singer,” “I Am Not Your Negro” “Filmworker,” “Apollo 11,” Rithy Panh’s “The Missing Picture,” “Monrovia, Indiana,” the inventive Nick Cave doc “12 Days 20000 Days on Earth,” Netflix’s “American Factory,” which is probably earning itself an Oscar Best Doc nomination, “Andre The Giant,” “Black Mother,” “Bombay Beach,” “The Brink,” “Casting Jon Benet,” “City of Gold,” “Cutie and the Boxer,” “Dawson City: Frozen Time,” ”Finding Frances,” “For Sama,” “(T)error,” “Fraud,” “Hail Satan?” “The Hottest August,” “Icarus,” “The Imposter,” “In Jackson Heights,” “Into the Abyss,” “Into the Inferno,” “The Jinx,” “Kedi,” “Knock Down the House,” “LA92” “Last Men in Aleppo,” “Lenny Cooke,” “Lo and Behold! Reveries of a Connected World,” “Marwencol,” “Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God,” “Meru,” “The Other Side,” “The Prison in Twelve Landscapes,” “The Queen of Versailles,” “Rat Film,” “Senna,” “Stray Dog” “Strong Island,” “Tabloid Tempestad,” “Untouchable,” “Wild Wild Country,” “Winnebago Man” and “Zero Days.”
Happy holidays and thanks for reading all our features, bless!