Documendations 2026

Frederick Wiseman is widely acknowledged as the most important sociological documentarian ever, making legal briefs intended not to prove a case, but to provide voluminous eye-witness evidence through selective and coherent objectivity.  He died recently, just after his 96^th birthday, leaving a legacy of more than three dozen outstanding films.  They have often been hard to come by, but now Kanopy has virtually all of them readily available through its free library service, a wonderful chance to catch up with some of the greatest documentaries ever made.  That prompts me to collate a partial career summary, eventually to be posted in the right-hand column.   In this forthcoming survey, I start with his first film Titicut Follies, which I had never seen because it was banned for so long, followed by his second, High School, which made me a fan for life way back when.  Then I copy over reviews of his films that I’ve written here over the past twenty years.  And as long as Kanopy keeps offering them, I’ll visit or revisit other titles from the previous three decades.  But that’s history, so to speak, now let’s get on with a survey of recent documentaries of note. 
 
Starting with this year’s Oscar nominees, including winner Mr. Nobody Against Putin (MC-80, Kanopy), a rare ground-level inside look at increasing authoritarianism in Russia.  The title hero is events coordinator (and incidental videographer) at a high school in the hinterlands.  Always the provider of a “democracy space” in the school, he plans to resign when war propaganda is imposed upon the school, but then makes contact with a Danish filmmaker seeking footage from inside Russia.  So he remains and compiles coverage that must be sent to the government to demonstrate compliance, making copies to smuggle out.  The militarization goes so far as in-school demonstrations by the Wagner Group.  Former students go off to fight in Ukraine and come back dead. The film could do with more on-site footage and less direct-to-camera commentary by Mr. Nobody, but remains a valuable document, though nowhere near as impressive as the similarly-themed My Undesirable Friends, which I raved about in this round-up.
 
The Perfect Neighbor (MC-83, NFX) is a hard watch, for multiple reasons – it documents a horrible crime, and does so almost entirely through police bodycams and CCTV footage.  In Geeta Gandbhir’s film, that is enough to tell a tale of racism and bad policy, without narration or commentary of any kind.  A lower-middle-class neighborhood is overrun by a joyous interracial crowd of children playing in an empty lot, with a cranky old Karen continually calling the cops on them for no legitimate reason, a familiar story on several grounds, made much more dangerous by Florida’s stand-your-ground law (remember Trayvon Martin?).  There are probably a lot of reality-tv cop shows using bodycam footage like this (though I’ve never watched a single one), but this Sundance-winning and Oscar-nominated documentary is gripping and upsetting to good purpose.
 
Alabama Solution (MC-90. HBO) is similarly a hard watch, and similarly to good purpose.  It’s a new documentary from Andrew Jarecki (Capturing the Friedmans) and relies on contraband cellphone footage from inmates in a brutal Alabama prison to confirm the inhumanity that goes on behind closed doors, and reminds us of the argument of 13^th that prison as a form of involuntary servitude is just slavery by another name.
 
I reviewed fourth nominee Come See Me in the Good Light at the end of this round-up, and will keep looking for the fifth, a currently unavailable Iranian film Cutting Through Rocks.
 
Cover-Up (MC-85, NFX) is an entertaining and instructive profile of the preeminent investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, which interweaves his personal life with the major stories he broke, from My Lai to Watergate to Abu Ghraib to Gaza.  Directed by Laura Poitras (Oscar-winner for Citizenfour) and Mark Obenhaus, a pair with whom Hersh is skeptical and prickly but quite open, even about the occasions he was taken in by a source.  The film charts a history of government cover-ups that is more relevant than ever.  Hersh, approaching 90, is still an indefatigable straight shooter who admits he’s not invariably right, but keeps uncovering government and especially military deceit, even before Trump and Hegseth took that to a whole new level.
 
New Yorker at 100 (MC-tbd, NFX) may have been just a centennial celebration, basically a promo for the magazine, but as a subscriber for half of those hundred years I loved it.   Going behind the scenes and matching faces to bylines, seeing into the process behind my weekly fix, made this an engaging and informative feature.
 
Can’t recall what led me to Susan Glatzer’s 2016 documentary Alive & Kicking (MC-77, NFX), but this exploration of the subculture of swing dancing was certainly a toe-tappingly enjoyable experience, if you’re in the mood for such.
 
I went on break with Netflix before I got around to watching several other intriguing documentaries, which I may see eventually and insert comment here: Katrina: Come Hell and High Water (MC-82), Apocalypse in the Tropics (MC-82), Power (MC-72), and The White House Effect (MC-79).
 
We complete this round-up with documentaries appearing on PBS, starting with Remake (MC-93) on POV, new from one of my very favorite filmmakers, Ross McElwee.  Partly because we are exact contemporaries, I have followed and relished his very personal films from Sherman’s March through Bright Leaves (my review here) and beyond.  So I watched this heralded return with great anticipation and attention – fully rewarded.  All of Ross’s films are of a piece, one long multi-chapter visual essay, a song of himself through portraits of his kith and kin.  More interrogations than celebrations, wittily edited and penetratingly narrated, dense with humor and heartbreak, his films are well thought out and honestly expressed.  I hope this won’t be his last film, but it feels like a summa.  All of Ross’s virtues are apparent here, along with anguished self-questioning as he tries to come to terms with the death of his 29-year-old son, from an overdose of fentanyl.  The film becomes a memorial to Aidan, incorporating the son’s own films along with his appearances in McElwee films over the years.  It’s also a memorial to memory itself, how to live with it and without it.  Charleen, who has been a fixture from the beginning, now has no recollection of making films with Ross, but she’s still that character.  As usual the title is a sly misdirection, which runs like a thread through the film, as Hollywood puts a remake of Sherman’s March through development hell (to be feature film or tv series or sitcom?), in counterpoint to the real hell of not being able to save your own child.  This is a noble effort to remake the past through filmic remembering.
 
Like Sara Dosa’s Oscar-nominated Fire of Love (reviewed here), her latest film Time and Water (MC-76, Hulu) melds archival footage with a personal dimension and a spirit of natural wonder.  Formerly the subject was volcanoes, now it’s glaciers – complementary places of fire and ice.  And now the focus is on the Icelandic writer and archivist Andri Snær Magnason, whose grandparents were among the first to do photographic treks deep into the glacial wilderness.  When a small nearby glacier starts to “die” (i.e. shrink and stop moving), he starts filming his family compulsively, as a means to arrest time. The theme of his ruminative narration is just what the title announces, with an ecological warning attached, wonderfully enhanced by nature footage old and new, along with history, myth, and folklore.  Near the end, Magnason has his 96-year-old grandmother Hulda sit face-to-face with his teen daughter Hulda and they calculate that the girl will be 96 in the year 2104.  Will there be any glaciers in Iceland by then?  Viewed right after the McElwee, this movie reminded me of his highly personal but widely ramifying approach, and also of a similar Norwegian film called Songs of Earth (which I raved about here).
 
Back to PBS, The Librarians (MC-83) has a much tighter focus than the recent (and excellent!) Free for All: The Public Library (IMDB, PBS), speaking more to the moment than the illustrious past.  As school librarians in Texas are targeted by the so-called “Moms for Liberty”, they emerge from the shadows as front line defenders of freedom of thought and expression.  Outraging and inspiring at the same time.
 
The same might be said about Natchez (MC-80), where a Mississippi town revived itself by becoming a sentimental showcase for antebellum society, and then had to come to terms with the historical truth that the elegant lifestyle was built on the backs of slaves, who needed to be introduced into the sanitized narrative.  Makes for an involving chorus of voices from both sides of America’s great divide.
 
Besides Independent Lens and POV, another worthy PBS documentary series is American Masters, and the latest is Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World (MC-82).  Sasha Waters’ film beautifully details how a solitary queer girl suffered familial abuse and came out of my neck of the woods, the eastern suburbs of Cleveland, to find herself with Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sister at Steepletop (just over the mountain from the Berkshires), then to discover a creative community in NYC, including the Village Voice photographer with whom she would spend decades together in Provincetown.  In which time Mary Oliver went from mostly ignored to widely adored as a poet, as recounted here by a dazzling array of talking heads.  With an enticing combination of simplicity and depth, an eye for the lessons of nature, and keen perception of the linkage between attention and love, Mary Oliver returned the beauty of the world by which she’d been saved.  And this film works as both celebration and introduction.
 
Becoming Katharine Graham (IMDB, PBS) shows how this shy debutante became one of the most powerful women in America at a time when such was decidedly not a thing, as shown in many photographs where she was the only woman in the room.  One of the most interesting interviewees is Warren Buffett, a friend who schooled her in business after her bipolar husband committed suicide and she had to take over running the Washington Post.  Also notable that it was actually her father who bought the paper in the first place, and subsequently installed her husband as publisher.  The Pentagon Papers and Watergate, and labor problems in the printing trades, are all subjects of enduring interest to me, as is the women’s lib movement, with Gloria Steinem another prominent interviewee.  Directed by George and Teddy Kunhardt, the scions of a family dynasty of documentarians, this film is solid and involving, if not especially revealing, and the constant music is intrusive.  It’s a long way downhill from Katie to Jeffy – R.I.P WaPo.  So much for The Post and All the President’s Men, two of my all-time favorite films.
 
Some Ken Burns collaborators made the worthy three-part documentary series Henry David Thoreau (MC-tbd).  Anyone who watches will have the key to my other blog, “Thoreauly Yours,” once you know the proper Concordian pronunciation of our hero’s name.  I had no quibbles with the accuracy of the series, except that the first episode used a lot of photography from much later in the 19^th century to illustrate relevant themes.  They would have been well-advised to use period appropriate paintings or illustrations.  Subsequent episodes are more scrupulous in pictorial representation, and offer a fair if familiar portrait of one of my guiding lights.  I didn’t learn anything new, but you might, and the show is nice to look at.
 
For more documentaries (if you can stand it), see my upcoming round-up of Criterion Channel offerings.  And I may soon have some exciting news about a documentary in the making, or “donkeymentary” as the working title has it.