On Oscar nomination morning, director RaMell Ross tuned in to see if his documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening would make the cut. A year earlier it would have seemed like the longest of long shots, a film without major distribution that defied easy description, dealing with African-American life in the…

Four of the most successful documentaries of recent years remain in contention for a prize beyond box office glory—the kind that comes with an Oscar trophy.  Won't You Be My Neighbor?, RBG, Three Identical Strangers and Free Solo all made the Oscar documentary shortlist as the Academy culled the list of 166 eligible…

The Motion Picture Academy did away with creating an Oscar category for 'popular movie' that would have allowed voters to select a Best Picture and a best box office hit. But in the documentary category there's no need to choose between popular success and artistic merit: Some of this year's top contenders offer…

It's unlikely any of the directors who made this year's Oscar documentary shortlist would describe their filmmaking experience as a breeze. But for Jennifer Brea, making Unrest posed a unique set of challenges. It's a story of her journey, and others like her, who live with ME—Myalgic Encephalomyelitis—often referred…

New York's ultra-Orthodox Hasidic community is rarely depicted on screen, but in 2017 two films succeeded in casting light on that insular world—one fiction and one nonfiction. Menashe earned rave reviews for its fictional story of a Hasidic widower working in a Brooklyn grocery store. One of Us won similar…

Acclaimed filmmaker Steve James has built his reputation primarily on the strength of Chicago-oriented documentaries, among them Hoop Dreams (1994), The Interrupters (2011) and Life Itself (2014). But he finds himself in the Oscar race this year with a story that took him from the Second City to the first. In Abacus: S…

One of the most unpredictable races in years for the Oscar for Documentary Feature has come down to 15 films, narrowed from a record-breaking tally of 170 qualifiers. Two films on Syria's civil war made the cut—Matthew Heineman's City of Ghosts, about the ISIS takeover of Raqqa, and Feras Fayyad's Last Men in Aleppo…

Few would dispute that Hedy Lamarr belongs in the pantheon of screen goddesses from Hollywood's golden age. But recognition has proven far more elusive for her work beyond the realm of movie stardom—"in the pantheon of great inventors," as filmmaker Alexandra Dean puts it. Dean's new documentary Bombshell: The Hedy Lam…

For over a year now progressives have wondered how Donald Trump managed to get himself elected president. The answer may be found in the documentary Get Me Roger Stone, directed by the trio of Morgan Pehme, Daniel DiMauro and Dylan Bank, a Netflix release that has qualified for Oscar consideration. It reveals how…

Like a cat that sneaks up stealthily behind you, no one saw the success of Kedi coming. "In the beginning all the festivals that we were applying to were turning us down," recalls Ceyda Torun, director of the documentary about the felines of Istanbul. "Sales agents were saying, ‘We don’t know how to sell this…

Mystery has always swirled around jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan, who rocketed to renown as a teenager. How could one so young be so good? And there's the puzzle of his death, at age 33, at the hands of a woman who loved him. Stories of Morgan's spectacular gifts and shocking end have long circulated among jazz…

Arthur Miller's relevance as a playwright appears in no danger of diminishing. Only two years ago, for instance, an innovative production of his A View From the Bridge won a Tony Award for Best Revival of a play. If his reputation as an artist, thinker and person needed any further burnishing, it is amply supplied in…