Latest in Best Documentary Feature

Timing is everything Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson's Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) turns back the clock to 1969 when a series of concerts by Black artists transfixed Harlem. Under different circumstances, the director thinks the film would have turned out very differently. "What if the…

After they won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2019 for their thrilling Free Solo, directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin went underground—in a manner of speaking. They tunneled into the true-life story of kids trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand for their filmmaking follow up, The Rescu…

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has lifted the curtain on its lists of movies eligible for the 94th Academy Awards in the Animated Feature Film, Documentary Feature and International Feature Film categories. The Academy lists 26 pics are eligible in the Animated Feature category and 138 for Documentary…

Netflix has dominated the Oscar documentary race in recent years, winning best feature in both 2020 and 2018. But this year it could be Amazon Studios' Time to shine. Time, directed by Garrett Bradley and produced by Amazon in partnership with Concordia Studio, enters Oscar season as a favorite, having won prizes from…

When the 2020 Oscar nominations were announced, critics immediately seized upon the glaring lack of women recognized in the Best Director competition. But on the nonfiction side, it's a completely different story. In the Best Documentary Feature category, four of the five nominated films are directed or co-directed by…

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…