A new month begins this week, and that means we have a very full listings section, mostly thanks to The Criterion Channel, as usual. The week’s listings section also might be populated with more *Nonfics Picks* than ever. I count 16, almost half of which are new releases (or at least re-releases or recent releases hitting a new format or platform for the first time). So, let’s get right into this week’s reviews and recs.

Without further ado, below are this week’s documentary highlights, followed by daily listings for all known releases and broadcasts, along with a brief look at what’s coming soon for doc fans (including a preview for the final Jackass movie). Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to receive more in-depth highlights and reviews in the future, plus full access to special posts like our best-of lists, and to give me more time to watch more (if not everything) available. If you have a doc in need of coverage or a mention, you can reach me at christopherbartoncampbell (at) gmail.

Nonfics Picks Of The Week: American Dream (1990) & Harlan County, USA (1976)

If you’ve followed Nonfics over the years, you’ll know that we have wanted to recommend Barbara Kopple’s American Dream forever. It’s rarely been available in any format except for an old DVD, but it deserves to be as easily streamed as Kopple’s other Oscar-winning documentary about a worker’s strike, Harlan County, U.S.A. Well, the 1990 masterpiece was recently restored with a new 4K print that is heading to theaters and will likely land on a streaming platform in the future. I’m assuming American Dream will join Harlan County, U.S.A. on The Criterion Channel since Janus Films and the Criterion Collection handled the restoration.

While not quite as perfect as Harlan County, U.S.A., which is on my list of the best documentaries of all time, American Dream is pretty damn close. The film follows a strike of Hormel Foods meatpacking workers in Minnesota in the 1980s after their wages and benefits were cut. It’s a familiar yet still enraging portrait of Reagan-era America. The characters in focus here are primarily leadership figures, including the local union president, its parent union head, and a consultant hired to help with negotiations. But it’s the scenes with the regular folk, the workers who risk losing everything while simply fighting for what’s fair, that hit the hardest.

As I wrote on our list of the best Sundance documentaries of all time, Kopple “throws us right in there, enough to make us feel as cold as the workers picketing outside the factory in the dead of winter.” It’s a different kind of cultural immersion than we get with Harlan County, U.S.A. Yet it complements that earlier classic as much as they contrast. And it is just as powerful in its aim to create empathy among its viewers, especially when it puts us in the passenger seat alongside strikebreakers. We want to be mad at them, given that we’ve been otherwise placed on the side of the picketing workers, but we are led to understand. Ultimately, these people are as much at the mercy of union leaders as of the corporate suits, whose exploitation begets desperation.

American Dream will be re-released in theaters on Friday, May 1, 2026 (International Workers’ Day!). Harlan County, U.S.A. will join the film in theaters the same weekend.

Other Documentary Highlights

Caribbean Activist Cinema

One of this month’s curations on The Criterion Channel focuses on nonfiction works from the 1970s and 1980s that “spotlight vital stories of workers’ movements, decolonial struggle, and liberation from economic exploitation and violent oppression.” Six of the seven programmed documentaries are new to the streamer in May, joining West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty. The added titles in this block, titled “You Don’t Get Freedom, You Take Freedom: Caribbean Activist Cinema,” are Haiti: The Way to Freedom, Grenada: The Future Coming Towards Us, Women of Suriname, Sweet Sugar Rage, Bitter Cane, and The Terror of the Time. I’m pretty sure none of them are available, or have been, anywhere else.

Conbody Vs. Everybody (2024)

We finally get to see what Debra Granik has been doing since her 2014 documentary Stray Dog (yes, she released a fiction feature in 2018, but that was in the middle of working on this). I can say it’s worth the wait, and not just because it’s the length of around three or four features. Conbody vs. Everybody is not so much a docuseries as a five-part film. It doesn’t try to stretch a story over multiple episodes for plotting and binge-watching, as is the norm these days. It’s more akin to My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow in the way it immerses us in a character piece and plays like a chaptered cinematic novel. We follow a narrative, but more so, we experience a life.

Conbody vs. Everybody specifically depicts several years in the life of Coss Marte, a formerly incarcerated man trying to keep himself and others from a statistically expected return to prison. He starts a gym based on the exercise regimen that he followed in his tight prison cell, and he exclusively hires fellow former inmates. I recommend reading my interview with Granik about the making of the documentary and why it took so much time and needed to be. I think it works because a feature runtime might only allow for a story that ends as soon as Coss seems to be on track for success with the opening of his business. At 330 minutes, we get a clearer sense of the pace it takes to get there and beyond, with more ups and downs and milestones that follow, emphasizing the span of time in a way a feature can’t.

Conbody vs. Everybody will begin exclusively streaming on The Criterion Channel on Friday, May 1, 2026.

Frederick Wiseman’s U.S. Documentaries (Continued)

The Jacob Burns Film Center’s retrospective “Frederick Wiseman’s America” concludes this week with its final screenings of Frederick Wiseman’s U.S.-set works. Here are the documentaries to watch, whether it’s there on the big screen, at home via Kanopy, or on physical media from Zipporah Films: Ex Libris: The New York Public Library (May 1), Monrovia, Indiana (May 1 & May 3), and In Jackson Heights (May 2).

Kimi Takesue Documentaries

Another filmmaker we’re happy to spotlight this week is Kimi Takesue. Her features and shorts, most of them nonfiction works, are being showcased in The Criterion Channel’s May curation titled “Directed by Kimi Takesue: Crossings and Encounters.” The more interesting titles in the bunch concentrate on the idea of cross-cultural gazes in the form of tourism, while also being a kind of virtual tourism themselves. Through her lens, we visit New York City, Peru, Uganda, and Laos. The last of these is on display in Onlookers, her most recent film. Here’s an excerpt from my review:

“When you visit a foreign land, you should immerse yourself in the local culture, but too much of vacationing internationally turns into observation of culture instead. Then again, isn’t that also what a lot of documentaries entail? Kimi Takesue’s Onlookers combines these two considerations and takes voyeurism to a new level by showing us images of tourism in Laos. Watching the film, I never felt immersed in the scenes and instead actually felt more distanced from what I was looking at than usual. Putting tourists between the film audience and the temples, monks, landscapes, etc. reminds us that we’re just gazing at what’s in the frame, like the vacationers gazing at what’s in front of and around them.”

Kimi Takesue’s seven documentaries, including Onlookers, begin streaming on The Criterion Channel on Friday, May 1, 2026.

Life On Earth: Attenborough’s Greatest Adventure (2026)

As we approach Sir David Attenborough’s 100th birthday next week, another new documentary celebrating his life and work is being released online. Life on Earth: Attenborough’s Greatest Adventure is little more than a special about the making of his landmark 1979 nature series Life on Earth. The hour-long documentary features new interviews with Attenborough and other producers who worked on the show, as they discuss its ambitious undertaking and legacy of significance. We just recently got another documentary that revisited Life on Earth, Netflix’s A Gorilla Story: Told by David Attenborough. This one also has to acknowledge the gorilla episode. I recommend it as a lesson in documentary history, particularly for the nature genre.

Life on Earth: Attenborough’s Greatest Adventure airs on PBS on Wednesday, May 6, 2026, and afterward will be available to stream on the PBS website and app.

Lumière, Le Cinema! (2024)

We highlighted Thierry Frémaux’s Lumière, Le Cinema! a little over a month ago as our Pick of the Week when it was released in theaters. Here’s an excerpt from that review now that it’s making its streaming debut:

“At first, Lumière, Le Cinema! seems to be merely an assembly of Lumière films with commentary from Frémaux, but it’s more of an essay film. Frémaux breaks his documentary up into segments of different focus, including children, military scenes, international locations, and modes of transportation (surprisingly, he has little time for The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, which he shares is just one of many similar films). He begins with the history lesson of the Lumières, their invention, their first showings, and a good deal of attention given to the famed Leaving the Factory (the most recognizable version of which might not have been the original, apparently). Then it becomes more of a study of the films, their content (including the first “cat videos”!), and the Lumières’ recurring themes.”

Lumière, Le Cinema! will begin exclusively streaming on The Criterion Channel on Friday, May 1, 2026.

Modern Whore (2025)

Anora writer/director Sean Baker is an executive producer on this film based on the memoirs of a Toronto sex worker. Andrea Werhun is that author and now the documentary’s subject, telling her tales of being an escort and stripper, expressing her moments of professional enjoyment and bouts with shame, sharing her rape and other sexual assault experiences, and discussing the job’s pros and cons on several levels, sometimes in conversation with other sex workers or with her boyfriend or mother. She also acts in the film during occasionally humorous reenactments. What I like most about Modern Whore is that it’s serious, but it still has fun, balancing a tone and aesthetic that’s somewhere between the Drunk History model and a sociology thesis.

Modern Whore will be released on PVOD platforms on Friday, May 1, 2026.

Our Land (2025)

I’ve seen reviews of Our Land that describe it as “straightforward” and “conventional,” which makes me wonder if those critics and I saw the same film. The first documentary feature by the brilliant Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, it’s not necessarily an inventive or informal work, but it does bounce around enough in its structure, plays around enough with its style, and, like in her scripted work, mines deeper themes than we find on the surface level of the story.

I’d at least say it’s a unique nonfiction film. Particularly with some of its editing choices near its conclusion. Martel uses a case of an Indigenous leader’s killing and his alleged murderers’ trial as a centerpiece for a documentary that goes further in its considerations of Indigenous identity and community. It’s up there with Dahomey as one of the most contemplative documentaries on colonialism this decade.

Our Land will be released in theaters on Friday, May 1, 2026.

Awards Highlights

Critics Choice Real TV Awards Nominees

Nominations for this year’s Critics Choice Real TV Awards were announced last week, with many documentary titles honored alongside reality programming contenders. They include all of these Best Limited Series nominees: Boy Band Confidential (now streaming on HBO Max), Death in Apartment 603: What Happened to Ellen Greenberg? (Hulu), Mr. Scorsese (Apple TV), Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model (Netflix), Sean Combs: The Reckoning (Netflix), and Trust Me: The False Prophet (Netflix). Two documentary stars, Chris Hemsworth of Limitless: Live Better Now (Disney+ and Hulu) and Stanley Tucci of Tucci in Italy (Disney+ and Hulu), were named among the nominations for Best Male Star of the Year.

Other documentary nominees include Best Sports Show contenders 30 for 30 (ESPN), Formula 1: Drive to Survive (Netflix), Hard Knocks (HBO Max), Quarterback (Netflix), Untold (Netflix), and Welcome to Wrexham (Hulu), and all honored in the Best Animal/Nature Show: Born to Be Wild (Apple TV), Kingdom (BBC America), Prehistorical Planet: Ice Age (Apple TV), Secrets of the Bees (Disney+ and Hulu), Underdogs (Disney+ and Hulu), and The Wild Ones (Apple TV). Solo Traveling with Tracee Ellis Ross (The Roku Channel) and Tucci in Italy are up for Best Travel/Adventure Show, and The Curious Case of… (HBO Max) and Trafficked with Mariana van Zeller (Hulu) are up for Best Crime/Justice show, along with Trust Me: The False Prophet.

Subscribe now

Documentary Release Calendar 5/1/26 - 5/7/26

Friday, May 1, 2026

95 and 6 to Go (2016) - A feature documentary directed by Kimi Takesue about her father, who decides to become a filmmaker at 90. (The Criterion Channel)

American Agitators (2024) - A documentary feature about Fred Ross, who is considered one of the inventors of modern community organizing. (In Theaters)

American Dream (1990) - A 4K restoration re-release of Barbara Kopple’s Oscar-winning documentary feature about a Hormel Foods labor strike in Minnesota. See our highlights section for more info. *NONFICS PICK* (In Theaters)

Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex, Fashion & Disco (2017) - A documentary feature about the titular fashion designer. (Mubi)

Bitter Cane (1983) - A documentary feature about the American exploitation of the Haitian people. (The Criterion Channel)

Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (2020) - A docudrama by Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross about a Las Vegas dive bar. *NONFICS PICK* (The Criterion Channel)

Blum - Masters of Their Own Destiny (2024) - A documentary about Emerik Blum and the unique European energy company he founded, Energoinvest. (OVID)

Conbody vs. Everybody (2024) - A five-part documentary directed by Debra Granik (Stray Dog) about a formerly incarcerated man who starts a gym that employs other individuals released from prison. See our highlights section for more info and a brief review. *NONFICS PICK* (The Criterion Channel)

De Palma (2015) - A documentary feature by Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow about filmmaker Brian De Palma. (Pluto TV)

Dior and I (2014) - A documentary feature by Frédéric Tcheng about the Christian Dior fashion house. Read our review of Dior and I. *NONFICS PICK* (Mubi)

E=NYC2 (2005) - A short film by Kimi Takesue that captures the dynamic energy of New York City. (The Criterion Channel)

Great Performances: Now Hear This Season 7, Episode 4: “The Iceland Sound” - The latest installment of a docuseries starring conductor and violinist Scott Yoo about the secret histories of great musical works. This episode involves Icelandic composers and musicians. (PBS, the PBS App, and the PBS Website)

Grenada: The Future Coming Towards Us (1983) - A medium-length documentary about Grenada’s history and the reasons for the U.S. military invasion of the country in 1983. (The Criterion Channel)

Haiti: The Way to Freedom (1973) - A documentary feature about the Haitian people’s struggles for their freedom. (The Criterion Channel)

Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976) - An Oscar-winning documentary by Barbara Kopple about a miner’s strike. *NONFICS PICK* (NYC Theatrical Event)

Heaven’s Crossroad (2002) - A short documentary by Kimi Takesue about what it means to look cross-culturally. (The Criterion Channel)

Hollywood Without Make-Up (1963) - A short documentary sharing home movie clips of Hollywood stars. (TCM)

House of Cardin (2019) - A documentary feature about the fashion designer Pierre Cardin. (The Criterion Channel)

An Inconvenient Truth (2006) - A two-time Oscar-winning feature documentary directed by Davis Guggenheim and starring former Vice President Al Gore about climate change. *NONFICS PICK* (Pluto TV)

Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind (2022) - A documentary feature about the titular rock and roll icon. (Pluto TV)

The Kill Team (2013) - A documentary feature about war crimes committed by the U.S. Army in Afghanistan. *NONFICS PICK* (Pluto TV)

Looking for Adventure (2013) - A short documentary by Kimi Takesue that observes group tourism in Peru. (The Criterion Channel)

Lucky Chow Season 8 - The return of a docuseries about Asian cuisine. (PBS)

Lumière, Le Cinema! (2024) - A documentary by Thierry Frémaux (Lumière!) compiling rare films by the Lumière brothers. Read our review of Lumière, Le Cinema! *NONFICS PICK* (The Criterion Channel)

Maya, Give Me a Title (2024) - An animated hybrid film directed by Michel Gondry and starring his daughter, about their nightly ritual of collaborating on short films starring her as the hero. (The Criterion Channel)

Mitski: The Land (2025) - A concert film starring the titular singer-songwriter. (Mubi)

Modern Whore (2025) - A documentary feature about a Toronto sex worker. See our highlights section for more info and a brief review. *NONFICS PICK* (VOD)

Oasis: Supersonic (2016) - A documentary feature about the early years of the titular Britpop group. (Pluto TV)

Onlookers (2023) - A documentary feature directed by Kimi Takesue on tourism in Laos. Read our review of Onlookers. (The Criterion Channel)

Our Land (2025) - A documentary feature directed by Lucretia Martel about the case of the 2009 killing of an Indigenous leader in Argentina. See our highlights section for more info and a brief review. *NONFICS PICK* (In Theaters)

Personale (2024) - A documentary feature about housekeeping workers at an Italian hotel. (OVID)

The Proof is Out There Season 6, Episode 8: “Mexican Goblin, New Mexico Classic UFO, and Half-Human Half-Goat Mystery” - The latest installment of a docuseries investigating UFOs, conspiracies, and mythical creatures. (History)

Riotsville, U.S.A. (2022) - An archival documentary feature directed by Sierra Pettengill about a fictional town created by the U.S. military for riot training. *NONFICS PICK* (The Criterion Channel)

The Shepherd and the Bear (2024) - A documentary feature about a shepherd whose flock is threatened by bears. (The Criterion Channel)

The Spirit of ‘45 (2013) - A documentary feature by Ken Loach about the unified British society after World War II. (The Criterion Channel)

Stop Making Sense (1984) - A documentary feature by Jonathan Demme and starring Talking Heads that we consider the best concert film of all time. *NONFICS PICK* (Pluto TV)

Suspended (2009) - A short documentary by Kimi Takesue that looks at suspended time. (The Criterion Channel)

Sweet Sugar Rage (1985) - A short documentary about Jamaican women sugar cane workers. (The Criterion Channel)

The Terror and the Time (1979) - A documentary about repressive violence in colonial Guyana. (The Criterion Channel)

Tokyo Trial (1983) - A 277-minute documentary about the 1946-48 Tokyo Trials after World War II. (The Criterion Channel)

Western (2015) - A documentary feature by Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross about a pair of border towns in Texas and Mexico separated by the Rio Grande. *NONFICS PICK*(The Criterion Channel)

Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist (2018) - A documentary feature about fashion designer Vivienne Westwood. (Mubi)

Where Are You Taking Me? (2010) - A documentary feature by Kimi Takesue that captures modern Uganda. (The Criterion Channel)

Women of Suriname (1978) - A medium-length documentary about colonialism, neo-colonialism, and discrimination in Suriname. (The Criterion Channel)

Saturday, May 2, 2026

Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976) - An Oscar-winning documentary by Barbara Kopple about a miner’s strike. *NONFICS PICK* (NYC Theatrical Event)

Hollywood Demons Season 2, Episodes 3 & 4: “Scarred by the Bell” & “Doctor Feelgoods” - The latest installments of a docuseries about the dark realities of various celebrities and TV shows. These episodes involve the TV show Saved by the Bell and pharmaceutical abuse, respectively. (Investigation Discovery)

Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever Episode 3: “How to Hack Loneliness” - The third installment of a six-part docuseries starring journalist Kara Swisher about the latest in longevity science. (CNN)

Philly Homicide Season 2, Episode 4: “Metal and Mayhem” - The latest installment of a docuseries following Philadelphia detectives. This episode involves the disappearance of an artist and musician. (Oxygen)

Sunday, May 3, 2026

Eva Longoria: Searching for France Episodes 5 & 6: “Burgundy” & “Alsace” - The latest installments of an eight-part docuseries in the Searching For… travelogue franchise following Eva Longoria on a culinary tour of France. (CNN)

The Food That Built America Season 7, Episode 3: “The Birth of Bubblegum” - The latest installment of a docuseries about popular American foods. This episode looks back at the accidental origin of bubble gum and the decades-long battle of its biggest brands. (History)

Hazardous History with Henry Winkler Season 2, Episode 3: “Twisted Toys” - The latest installment of a docuseries about dangerous toys and household items that used to be common. This episode involves hazardous dolls and other toys. (History)

How to Make Challah (2024) - A short film documenting three generations of women baking challah. (ChaiFlicks)

Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever Episode 3: “How to Hack Loneliness” - The third installment of a six-part docuseries starring journalist Kara Swisher about the latest in longevity science. (CNN All Access)

A Plan to Kill Season 2, Episode 9: “Pizza Bomber” - The latest installment of a true-crime docuseries on the meticulous planning conducted by serial killers. (Oxygen)

Power To The People: John & Yoko Live in NYC (2026) - A multiscreen concert film presenting John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s two Madison Square Garden shows on August 30, 1972. (Theatrical Event)

Soccer Meets America (2026) - A docuseries about how soccer finally became a part of American culture. (The Roku Channel)

This Is the Bowery (1941) - A short documentary about the titular New York City neighborhood. (TCM)

Monday, May 4, 2026

The Wedding in Monaco (1956) - A short documentary of Grace Kelly’s marriage to Prince Rainier of Monaco. (TCM)

Tuesday, May 5, 2026

André Is An Idiot (2025) - A documentary feature following a man after his cancer diagnosis. Read our review of André Is An Idiot. *NONFICS PICK* (VOD)

Betrayal: Secrets & Lies Episode 6: “Latter Day Lies” - The latest installment of a true-crime docuseries involving stories of infidelity. (ABC, Disney+, and Hulu)

The Dark Wizard Episode 4: “Transcending Human Limitations” - The final installment of a four-part docuseries about climber, base jumper, and highline walker Dean Potter. (HBO and HBO Max)

Field of Fears - The Haunting of Randolph County Asylum (2025) - A documentary feature about a haunted infirmary in Indiana. (DVD and Blu-ray)

Häxan (1922) - A hybrid film about the history of witchcraft. *NONFICS PICK* (TCM)

I Am She, She Is Her. (2025) - A documentary about the lived experiences of Black women in positions of power. (DVD)

The Kids Are Not Alright (2024) - A documentary about survivors of the troubled teen industry. (DVD)

Mistress Dispeller (2024) - A documentary feature about a woman who hired someone to stop her husband from cheating. (DVD and Blu-ray)

My Own Normal (2024) - A medium-length documentary by disabled filmmaker Alexander Freeman about him becoming a father. (DVD)

The Ozu Diaries (2025) - A documentary about the Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu. (TCM)

Secrets Declassified with David Duchovny Season 2, Episode 8: “Extraordinary Experiments” - The latest installment of a docuseries about declassified government activities. (History)

Soccer’s American Dream (2026) - A docuseries about America’s relationship with soccer. (Vice TV)

Tri Me: The Siri Lindley Story (2025) - A documentary feature about the titular Triathlon World Champion and her terminal cancer diagnosis. (DVD)

Wednesday, May 6, 2026

The Bad Foot Clinic Season 1, Episode 8: “Knock Your Socks Off” - The latest installment of a docuseries following a podiatrist couple in their work. (TLC)

Conspiracies & Coverups Episode 6: “Invisible Weapon of War” - The latest installment of a docuseries starring ex-CIA officer Andrew Bustamente about the biggest conspiracies in pop culture today. (Discovery Channel)

Life on Earth: Attenborough’s Greatest Adventure (2026) - A medium-length documentary about David Attenborough’s groundbreaking series Life on Earth. See our highlights section for more info and a brief review. *NONFICS PICK* (PBS)

On the Case with Paula Zahn Season 29, Episode 4: “Unseen Danger” - The latest installment of a true-crime docuseries starring journalist Paula Zahn. This episode involves the disappearance of a gas station worker. (Investigation Discovery)

The Ozu Diaries (2025) - A documentary about the Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu. (TCM)

That’s Dancing! (1985) - A documentary about dancing in the movies. (TCM)

Worst Ex Ever Season 2 - The return of a docuseries about terrible past relationships. (Netflix)

Thursday, May 7, 2026

American Delivery (2024) - A documentary about the U.S. maternal mortality crisis. (Kino Film Collection)

Food Roots (2023) - A medium-length documentary starring actor and restaurateur Billy Dec as he learns about traditional Filipino recipes. (PBS)

The Great Heart (1938) - An Oscar-nominated short about Father Damien and his work with lepers on Molokai Island. (TCM)

Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition (2026) - A documentary feature about the titular heavy metal band. (In Theaters)

Monk in Pieces (2025) - A documentary feature about composer and performer Meredith Monk. (Kino Film Collection)

Mysteries Unearthed with Danny Trejo Season 2, Episode 20: “Most Valuable Finds” - The latest installment of a docuseries exploring hidden worlds. (History)

Predator Hunters Episode 10: “Caught in a Web of Lies” - The latest installment of a docuseries produced by Louis Theroux following the work of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. (A&E)

Share Nonfics

Sneak Peek At What’s Coming Soon

5/8 - Linda Perry: Let it Die Here - A documentary feature about the titular singer-songwriter. (In Theaters)

5/12 - Janis: Little Girl Blue - A 2015 documentary feature by Amy Berg about Janis Joplin. (VOD)

5/13 - The A List: 15 Stories from Asian and Pacific Diasporas - A feature-length anthology directed by Eugene Yi that presents vignettes representing Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities in the U.S. Watch the new trailer for the film below. (HBO and HBO Max)

5/19 - W.E.B. Du Bois: Rebel With a Cause - A documentary installment of American Masters narrated by Viola Davis about the titular writer and civil rights activist. (PBS)

5/22 - Ask E. Jean - A documentary feature about the advice columnist E. Jean Carroll. Watch the new trailer for the film below. (In Theaters)

5/22 - The Yogurt Shop Murders Episode 5: “The End of Wondering” - A new feature-length bonus episode of a true-crime docuseries by Margaret Brown about the killing of four girls at a frozen yogurt shop in 1991. (HBO Max)

5/29 - Rafa - A four-part docuseries about tennis star Rafael Nadal. (Netflix)

5/30 - Craig Ferguson: American on Purpose - A docuseries on what it means to be American. Watch the new trailer for the series below. (CNN)

6/16 - Eno - A feature documentary directed by Gary Hustwit (Helvetica) about the music artist Brian Eno. (The Criterion Channel)

6/26 - Jackass: Best and Last - The fifth and final feature-length installment of the Jackass franchise, which looks back at classic stunts and presents new ones. Watch the new trailer for the film below. (In Theaters)

Debra Granik is best known for directing Jennifer Lawrence to her first Oscar nomination in Winter’s Bone, a drama that also earned the filmmaker recognition as a screenwriter. In addition to writing and directing two other acclaimed fiction features, Down to the Bone and Leave No Trace, she helmed one of the best documentaries of 2015, Stray Dog. Now she’s back to nonfiction with Conbody vs. Everybody, a five-part film she worked on for about a decade. The documentary follows a formerly incarcerated man who starts a fitness gym based on the exercise regimen he developed behind bars. This business also only employs other former inmates.

Almost 12 years since Granik gave then-fledgling Nonfics a shoutout in the New York Times, I finally made her acquaintance. We got on a Zoom call to talk about Conbody vs. Everybody ahead of its streaming debut on The Criterion Channel on May 1, 2026. We discussed the fiction script that led to the documentary, her initial expectations for the project, and why she finally had to stop filming her subjects. She also broadened my perspective on what the true crime genre should focus on, while confirming what we all know are the mainstream media’s definitions and interests. Below is a transcript of our entire 30-minute conversation, edited for clarity.

Warning: Spoilers for the finale of Conbody vs. Everybody are discussed.

When Nonfics last interviewed you in 2015, you mentioned that you were working on a documentary about reentry after incarceration. But I understand the initial idea was different from what the project became. How and when did you meet Coss Marte and then decide to make the film about him and his entrepreneurial efforts?

We were thinking about a project that was actually a fiction, about the revolving door of the carceral system of the U.S. In 2014, this concept was getting a lot of attention. It was blown up as a public phrase that we all were interrogating: mass incarceration. So it was not compelling to receive a fiction script idea about this. The research led really quickly. For me, the suspense and intensity were all with firsthand experience. It wasn’t really, for this film, going to be with fiction, the way I was seeing it and touching base with it at that time. It was going to be a person actually coming home, performing this intense process that we call reentry, which is reintegration into civilian society from your pariah status as a person behind bars.

When you find someone interested in trying to explore that — not explore; he’s going to live it. But he wants to implicate other people. He’s so savvy. He’s like, “This has to implicate people who are not just as involved too. We won’t make so much headway if people who haven’t been in the criminal justice system don’t care at all. They have to know what’s happening. They have to want to understand this other part of American life.” This is kind of how he pitched it back to me. There was a really positive, I don’t want to say serendipity, but a strong… You know, two trains are going to find each other on parallel tracks and say, “Let’s travel together.” That I feel was Coss and me and my team.

And then he built a team pretty quickly. He wasn’t doing this alone. He started building out a narrative, if you will. This is where nonfiction gets so scintillating and conflating. He’s creating this scrappy urban novel in front of my eyes. He’s saying, “I’m not going to go through reentry by myself. I’m going to build a family around me. This is how we survived on the streets. This is how we’re going to do this part of our life.” He proceeds to do that. The odds are against him. It’s New York at its cinematic height. It’s having contact with life on the streets. It’s architecture, its infrastructure, its vicissitudes. It’s all that made Coss and his brother and his peers, and it’s a pretty large set of vital, high-stakes life issues. Can I make it? I don’t have money in my pocket. Am I going to jump this turnstile? Am I going to risk getting re-ensnared in the criminal justice system?

You can see that, in front of me, maybe at times in a very hectic way, it was like the cards were being dealt to me really quickly. Here’s a set of compelling individuals, New Yorkers who are going to do their damnedest to survive. Here’s a neighborhood that’s rich as heck to photograph. And here is an American set of themes that you can’t walk away from. What are you going to do? Film for a lot of years, I guess.

From what I read of the fiction project, the film’s ending would have been tragic, with the main character back in prison. I’m glad that with the documentary, we instead get a positive story of people succeeding after reentry, defying not just the odds but the stereotypes. Was this something you were consciously rooting for?

It’s not conscious, but it does it to me. Without sounding like this is hooey, people who defy stereotypes basically — this is graphic — they smash all my ribs and enter my internal cavity where my heart is. It hurts because you’ve lived with expectations for a long time of who someone might be. We, as a society, Americans, prefer “or.” This is just a hallmark of our culture. We prefer clarity or black-and-whiteness. Or, if you want to call it “or” or binariness instead of “and.” The exact definition of defying the stereotype is “and.” Someone is very intrepid, and they care a whole heck of a lot about this aspect of their neighborhood, this aspect of their family, this aspect of sharing profound emotions with other men, whether they’re inside the prison system or outside. And they whack you upside the head.

They are problematic because they are usually complex to portray. It’s easier to portray black and white, “or.” Stray Dog did the same thing to me. That sounds passive. I had a very parallel and intense response to encountering someone like Ron Hall, “Stray Dog.” There was north/south. There was red/blue. There were a lot of encampments that he and I stood in that were not opposing but quite separate. For two people to walk from their camp and find all the ways that theirs aren’t separate is messy, but it’s worth it.

This happens in class. I am a person who comes from a middle-class background. The number of times you step out of your social class is limited. Your class background, your class socialization, what people normally do within the confines of your class, the education you’ve received, the types of work you try to do in your life, when you meet people who have come up differently or been dealt a very different hand, there are a lot of reasons to have a very intense conversation over many years.

I think documentary filmmakers are built with a very intense tic in their brain, and the tic is often a set of questions. How have you navigated? What’s it been like? What do you need the most in this life? How are you going to get it? I’ve said this a lot of times because it feels very true: on a bad day, it feels like a really weird voyeuristic approach to living your life. Like my life doesn’t seem parsable enough, so I have to go running to someone else’s life. The voyeurism feels like, god, why do I have so many questions about everyone else’s life? But I do.

On a good day, it feels like, oh my god, we’re born into a very limited path, and it’s very enriching, and it’s a draw that doesn’t go away, to say, oh, you are empirically my neighbor. I live 11 blocks from you. The only way I’m ever going to get to know you is if we have this conversation. Otherwise, we will remain in separate spheres. Even though it is less than one mile as the crow flies from where you dwell and where I dwell.

That reminds me of the scene late in the film when Coss’s brother talks about bringing the neighborhoods together as one community.

Christopher is pretty magnificent at trying to bring that idea up to a whole variety of people across a lot of lines. Not just linguistic and ethnic, but a lot of lines. I appreciate that you saw that in the film.

Read more

We’re entering the final week of April, which means we’re already about a third of the way through the year. It’s clearly time for a look at the best documentaries of 2026 (so far), and I plan to send that to our paid subscribers in a few days. Of course, you can get a tease of the ranking and continue to follow the list through the year via the Nonfics Letterboxd. I can assure you that nothing officially coming out this week will be on the initial top 10 list. It’s a weak week for documentaries. That’s why the Pick of the Week is an old film, as are some of the highlights. Next week’s edition is where it’s at, so don’t dare unsubscribe now just because of a disappointing release calendar.

Without further ado, below are this week’s documentary highlights, followed by daily listings for all known releases and broadcasts, along with a brief look at what’s coming soon for doc fans (including the return of Stanley Tucci returning to Italy!). Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to receive more in-depth highlights and reviews in the future, plus full access to special posts like our best-of lists, and to give me more time to watch more (if not everything) available. If you have a doc in need of coverage or a mention, you can reach me at christopherbartoncampbell (at) gmail.

Nonfics Pick Of The Week: Jesus Camp (2006)

This week marks the 20th anniversary of Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s Jesus Camp. The documentary premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 27, 2006, and received a Special Jury Prize. That fall, Magnolia Pictures gave it a decent limited release, grossing close to a million dollars domestically (with international grosses added, the film topped a million). Come January, Jesus Camp earned an Oscar nomination, going up against two Iraq War documentaries and another religion-targeting film, but despite its popularity, it was no match for An Inconvenient Truth.

Watching Jesus Camp today, the subject matter is less shocking. I might even go so far as to say that the evangelical indoctrination of children portrayed here is tame and maybe even normal. Perhaps it just seems that way to me now that I live in Georgia instead of New York City, and I encounter kids filled with faith regularly. Still, while the country isn’t more evangelical today (it’s actually less), that segment of the population has become more prevalent and vocal. They succeeded in overturning Roe v. Wade and found a new president to canonize (Jesus Camp reminds us that George W. Bush was considered a holy savior by evangelicals long before Donald Trump). But they couldn’t cancel Harry Potter, whose upcoming TV show will further push alleged anti-Christian themes to America’s youth.

The legacy of Jesus Camp provides additional context for the film when watching it 20 years later. Outraged viewers managed to get the camp closed down through violent means. Some of the now-adult subjects left the evangelical side of Christianity. The kid preacher became a grown-up preacher. Two months after the release of the documentary, in which Ted Haggard spouts anti-gay rhetoric, the self-righteous evangelical leader was revealed to have homosexual relations and a drug problem. The present state of the U.S. Supreme Court is also relevant. Maybe audiences back then should have been more concerned than astonished. Perhaps the depiction of indoctrination in Jesus Camp should have felt similar to that of this year’s Oscar-winner, Mr. Nobody Against Putin, and been viewed less as a disturbing oddity, more as a frightening forecast of what’s to come.

Jesus Camp is currently available to stream for free on Kanopy and Hoopla through your library or with ads on Tubi, The Roku Channel, and Fandango at Home.

Other Documentary Highlights

Eraserheads: Combo On The Run (2025) & Pretty Ugly: The Story Of The Lunachicks (2026)

The two new releases I watched this week have a few similarities. Both documentaries are about bands that formed in the late ‘80s, gained popularity in the ‘90s, broke up soon after, and have been pushed to reunite a few times since. Both bands are also portrayed as “punk rock” in some way, whether through political context or sound and aesthetic. Eraserheads: Combo on the Run follows the titular Filipino band, while Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks chronicles the story of the titular feminist group from New York City. Where they were from is also significant in their respective stories.

The two documentaries are pretty basic, and I wouldn’t recommend either for their filmmaking. But if you’re a fan, you might appreciate the interviews with the band members, who mostly tell their tales event-by-event without much deeper reflection. Being more familiar with the American group of the two and the times and places of their underground success, I at least had nostalgic interest in sticking with Pretty Ugly. But it’s worth noting that the “new” footage in that film was not captured very recently. Eraserheads, I couldn’t get into at all, mainly due to its slow pace rather than because I didn’t know or care about its subject.

Eraserheads: Combo on the Run and Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks both open in theaters on Friday, April 24, 2026, with the latter film also being released on VOD on the same day.

Frederick Wiseman’s U.S. Documentaries (Continued)

The Jacob Burns Film Center’s ongoing retrospective “Frederick Wiseman’s America” continues this week, showcasing more of Frederick Wiseman’s U.S.-set documentaries. Here are the films to watch, whether it’s there on the big screen, at home via Kanopy, or on physical media from Zipporah Films: Belfast, Maine (April 24), Public Housing (April 25), Domestic Violence (April 26), In Jackson Heights (April 29), and Ex Libris: The New York Public Library (April 30). We’ll highlight the rest of the program as it continues into early May.

Leaving Neverland (2019)

As a Doc Option™ for this week’s biopic release, Michael, there are plenty of documentaries on the same era depicted in the film. You’ve got Michael Jackson: The Legend Continues, Thriller 40, Spike Lee’s two features, Michael Jackson’s Journey from Motown to Off the Wall and Bad 25, and to some extent, Quincy. Considering the backlash to the new movie, though, I figured it was more fitting to suggest Leaving Neverland, the most famous of the films examining Michael Jackson’s sexual abuse allegations. The pop icon’s estate has tried to erase it from existence, but you can easily find it online.

You can more easily find the sequel, Leaving Neverland 2: Surviving Michael Jackson, and the counterpoint documentary, Neverland Firsthand: Investigating the Michael Jackson Documentary, as they’re both publicly and legally on YouTube. I’m not saying he was guilty or not, but it’s worth looking at one or both sides to know why so many critics are disappointed in Michael ending the story before the first accusations were made.

Power To The People (2026)

I haven’t seen Power to the People, but this new multiscreen documentary presents footage shot during John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s two-night One to One benefit in 1972. The reason I’m highlighting it sight unseen is that it functions as a supplement to one of the best documentaries of 2025, One to One: John & Yoko, which chronicles the lead-up to the event. This should be especially of interest to those who were disappointed that One to One wasn’t more of a concert film.

Power to the People: John & Yoko Live in NYC will screen in theaters on April 29, 2026, and May 3, 2026.

The Up Documentaries (1964, 1970, 1977, 1984, 1991, 1998, 2005, 2012, 2019, 2026)

The next installment of the Up series of documentaries is due to premiere in the UK later this year, and last week, we learned this would be the last. While we wait for 70 Up, helmed by replacement director Asif Kapadia, I recommend binging the first nine films, Seven Up!, 7 Plus Seven, 21 Up, 28 Up, 35 Up, 42 Up, 49 Up, 56 Up, and 63 Up, which follow a scattered group of people in England through their lives, revisiting them every seven years from the time they were seven years old. You can see why we named one of them among the most memorable documentary characters of all time. You should also read our interview with Paul Almond about starting the project and our interview with Michael Apted about continuing the series.

The Up documentaries are available together in a box set from First Run Features.

Awards Highlights

Peabody Winners

The winners of the 2026 Peabody Awards were revealed last week, with several documentaries among the honorees. Last year’s and this year’s Oscar winners, No Other Land (currently available to rent digially) and Mr. Nobody Against Putin (streaming on Kino Film Collection), plus Oscar nominees The Alabama Solution (HBO Max) and Come See Me in the Good Light (Apple TV) joined Pee-wee as Himself (HBO Max), Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk (Kanopy), Thoughts & Prayers (HBO Max), and Southpaw: The Life and Legacy of Jim Abbott (Disney+) were all named in the Documentary category.

Sly Lives! (a.k.a. The Burden of Black Genius) (Hulu) was one of the two winners in the Arts category, while the hybrid series The Rehearsal (HBO Max) was one of the winners in the Entertainment category. News winners include the Fault Lines episodes “Kids Under Fire” and “The Disappearance of Dr. Abu Safiya,” and the Interactive winners include the documentary Investigating War Crimes in Gaza. All three of those can be viewed via Al Jazeera English. Winners will be celebrated in a ceremony held in Beverly Hills on May 31, 2026.

Subscribe now

Documentary Release Calendar 4/24/26 - 4/30/26

Friday, April 24, 2026

Bernstein’s Wall (2021) - A documentary about Leonard Bernstein. (In Theaters)

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) - A re-release, newly restored in 6K, of a 3D documentary directed by Werner Herzog about the primitive paintings found in France’s Chauvet Cave. *NONFICS PICK* (In Theaters)

Eraserheads: Combo on the Run (2025) - A documentary about the titular Filipino rock band. See our highlights section for more info and a brief review. (In Theaters)

Great Performances: Now Hear This Season 7, Episode 3: “The Call of Istanbul” - The latest installment of a docuseries starring conductor and violinist Scott Yoo about the secret histories of great musical works. This installment focuses on Turkish pianist Fazil Say, conductor Çem Mansur, and Anatolian folk and Turkish jazz musicians. (PBS, the PBS App, and the PBS Website)

Just Sing (2025) - A documentary feature that follows the SoCal VoCals as they compete in the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella. (In Theaters)

Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks (2026) - A documentary about the titular band. See our highlights section for more info and a brief review. (In Theaters and VOD)

The Proof is Out There Season 6, Episode 7: “Chattanooga UFO, Ark of the Covenant, and Vanishing Time Mystery” - The latest installment of a docuseries investigating UFOs, conspiracies, and mythical creatures. (History)

Saturday, April 25, 2026

The Blue Angels 3D (2024) - A documentary feature about the titular flight squadron. Presented as part of AMC’s IMAX Documentary Showcase. (AMC’s IMAX Theaters)

Building Back America’s Trades Episode 3: “Building the Future” - The latest installment of a docuseries about the trades industry. (Magnolia)

Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger (2024) - A feature documentary about the filmmaking collaborations of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Read our review of Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger. *NONFICS PICK*(TCM)

Philly Homicide Season 2, Episode 3: “Nightmare in North Wales” - The latest installment of a docuseries following Philadelphia detectives. This episode involves the killing of a Korean-American business owner. (Oxygen)

Roger Corman: The Pope of Pop Cinema (2021) - A medium-length documentary about film producer Roger Corman. (TCM)

Sunday, April 26, 2026

Betrayal: Secrets & Lies Episode 5: “The Kentucky Conman” - The latest installment of a true-crime docuseries involving stories of infidelity. (ABC, Disney+, and Hulu)

Conbody vs. Everybody (2024) - A five-part docuseries directed by Debra Granik (Stray Dog) about a formerly incarcerated man who starts a gym that employs others released from prison. *NONFICS PICK* (NYC Theatrical Event)

Cruise of the Zaca (1952) - A short documentary following Errol Flynn on his schooner with a group of oceanic scientists. (TCM)

Eva Longoria: Searching for France Episodes 5 & 6: “Burgundy” & “Alsace” - The latest installments of an eight-part docuseries in the Searching For… travelogue franchise following Eva Longoria on a culinary tour of France. (CNN)

The Food That Built America Season 7, Episode 2: “Cereal Killers” - The latest installment of a docuseries about popular American foods. This episode involves the cereal brands that battled to top the market. (History)

Hazardous History with Henry Winkler Season 2, Episode 2: “Looks That Kill” - The latest installment of a docuseries about dangerous toys and household items that used to be common. This episode involves deadly dentures, hair implants, and shirt collars. (History)

A Plan to Kill Season 2, Episode 8: “Silenced to Death” - The latest installment of a true-crime docuseries on the meticulous planning conducted by serial killers. (Oxygen)

Monday, April 27, 2026

Hollywood Demons Season 2, Episode 2: “Child Stars Gone Wrong” - The latest installment of a docuseries about the dark realities of various celebrities and TV shows. This episode involves child actors. (Investigation Discovery)

Tuesday, April 28, 2026

Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse (2024) - A biographical documentary about the titular cartoonist. (Blu-ray)

Come What May (2026) - A documentary feature about comedian Ralphie May. (Theatrical Roadshow)

Conbody vs. Everybody (2024) - A five-part docuseries directed by Debra Granik (Stray Dog) about a formerly incarcerated man who starts a gym that employs others released from prison. *NONFICS PICK* (NYC Theatrical Event)

The Dark Wizard Episode 3: “This is Art, This is Spirituality” - The third installment of a four-part docuseries about climber, base jumper, and highline walker Dean Potter. (HBO and HBO Max)

Eight Postcards from Utopia (2024) - An archival documentary directed by Radu Jude and Christian Ferencz-Flatz consisting of vintage Romanian TV ads. (Blu-ray)

The Exit of the Trains (2021) - An archival essay film directed by Radu Jude and Adrian Cioflâncã about the first big massacre of the Jews in Romania, in 1941. (Blu-ray)

George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey (1984) - A documentary by George Stevens Jr. about the life and work of his father, the titular Hollywood director. (4K Blu-ray)

High Strangeness in the Bennington Triangle (2026) - A documentary feature about an area of Vermont known for UFO and Bigfoot sightings. (VOD)

Long Live Chainsaw (2021) - A documentary feature about downhill mountain bike legend Stevie Smith. (4K UHD)

My Killer Father: The Green Hollow Murders (2026) - A three-part docuseries about the serial killer known as the Monster of Green Hollow. (Paramount+)

Secrets Declassified with David Duchovny Season 2, Episode 7: “Secret Unit” - The latest installment of a docuseries about declassified government activities. (History)

Shared Planet (2025) - A docuseries about the relationship between people and wildlife. (PBS)

Should I Marry a Murderer? (2026) - A three-part true-crime docuseries about a woman gathering evidence on her fiancé, who is accused of murder. (Netflix)

Vinyl (2000) - A documentary directed by Alan Zweig (When Jews Were Funny) about record collecting. (Blu-ray)

Wildwood, NJ (1994) - A medium-length documentary about women and girls living in Wildwood, New Jersey. (Blu-ray)

Wednesday, April 29, 2026

The Bad Foot Clinic Season 1, Episode 7: “It’s In My Sole” - The latest installment of a docuseries following a podiatrist couple in their work. (TLC)

Conbody vs. Everybody (2024) - A five-part docuseries directed by Debra Granik (Stray Dog) about a formerly incarcerated man who starts a gym that employs others released from prison. *NONFICS PICK* (NYC Theatrical Event)

Conspiracies & Coverups Episode 5: “105” - The latest installment of a docuseries starring ex-CIA officer Andrew Bustamente about the biggest conspiracies in pop culture today. (Discovery)

Nova Season 53, Episode 8: “Athens: Birth of Democracy” - The latest installment of an educational anthology docuseries. This episode involves an archaeological investigation into the origins of democracy in Greece. (PBS)

On the Case with Paula Zahn Season 29, Episode 3: “Caught in a Trap” - The latest installment of a true-crime docuseries starring journalist Paula Zahn. This episode involves the death of a female naval veteran. (Investigation Discovery)

A Poem for Little People (2023) - A documentary feature about a volunteer evacuation team in Ukraine. (OVID)

Power To The People: John & Yoko Live in NYC (2026) - A multiscreen concert film presenting John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s two Madison Square Garden shows on August 30, 1972. (Theatrical Event)

Rule of Two Walls (2023) - A feature documentary about the war in Ukraine through the lens of its artists. Read our review of Rule of Two Walls. (OVID)

Thursday, April 30, 2026

Destination World Cup 2026 - A docuseries that follows players in the lead-up to the World Cup. (Tubi)

It Looks Like Rain (1945) - A short film about the tools used to forecast the weather. (TCM)

Mysteries Unearthed with Danny Trejo Season 2, Episode 19: “Strange Finds” - The latest installment of a docuseries exploring hidden worlds. (History)

ONE OK ROCK Detox Japan Tour 2025 at Nissan Stadium in Cinemas (2026) - A concert film starring One OK Rock. (In Theaters)

Predator Hunters Episode 9: “Huge Red Flag” - The latest installment of a docuseries produced by Louis Theroux following the work of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. (A&E)

Storm (1943) - A short documentary that looks at how the weather bureau warns farmers and businessmen about approaching storms. (TCM)

The Story of Everything (2026) - A documentary about the origins of humanity and the cosmos. (In Theaters)

This Is Not a Drill (2025) - A documentary about three grassroots leaders going up against Big Oil. (YouTube)

Weather Wizards (1939) - A short documentary showcasing the advances of meteorology at the time. (TCM)

Share Nonfics

Sneak Peek At What’s Coming Soon

5/5 - The Ozu Diaries - A documentary about the Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu. (TCM)

5/6 - Worst Ex Ever Season 2 - The return of a docuseries about terrible past relationships. (Netflix)

5/8 - The Python Hunt - A documentary feature about an annual public python hunt in the Everglades. Watch the new trailer for the film below. (In Theaters)

5/11 - 96 Pounds of Dynamite - A documentary about a genetically diminutive billiards celebrity. (VOD)

5/12 - Tucci in Italy Season 2 - The return of a docuseries starring actor Stanley Tucci as he explores Italy through its cuisine. Watch the new trailer for the series below. (National Geographic)

5/13 - The A List: 15 Stories from Asian and Pacific Diasporas (2025) - A documentary on Asian-American identity. (HBO)

5/15 - Been Here Stay Here - A documentary about a Christian community on Tangier Island, which is threatened by rising sea levels. (In Theaters)

5/22 - Ask E. Jean - A documentary feature about the advice columnist E. Jean Carroll. (In Theaters)

5/25 - The Many Lives of Benjaman Kyle - A two-part true-crime documentary about a man claiming to suffer from a rare form of amnesia who may have a shady past. Watch the new trailer for the film below. (Investigation Discovery)

6/16 - Eno - A feature documentary directed by Gary Hustwit (Helvetica) about the music artist Brian Eno. (The Criterion Channel)

6/17 - Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul - A documentary about the titular musician, singer, and songwriter. (In Theaters)

6/30 - Michalopoulos: The Art of Celebration - A documentary about New Orleans artist James Michalopoulos. Watch the trailer for the film below. (PBS)

I expected to like Lorne. The director is Morgan Neville. The subject’s usual elusivity would seem to make him intriguing. And all of last year’s plethora of Saturday Night Live documentaries and specials were better than they needed to be. But Lorne is probably my least favorite Neville documentary besides the second half of Steve! (Martin): A Document…

Read more

If this newsletter is late this week, we can thank Focus Features for releasing another documentary in theaters and not allowing critics to see it via screener link. On the one hand, I’m happy that some companies still see box office viability of nonfiction films, even after their previous wide-release documentary wasn’t a big hit. On the other hand, I …

Read more

My first takeaway after watching this 41-year-old documentary is that Robert Wilson is a terribly bland screen personality. That may be a surprise to anyone familiar with his wildly out-there work as an avant-garde theatre artist. For anyone not familiar with his work, Howard Brookner’s Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars spends half its runtime tracking W…

Read more

If you wrote an original romantic screenplay called The Loving Story and the main characters were named Mildred and Richard Loving, that’d seem pretty cheesy. But there’s nothing bogus about the “epunymous” title of an incredibly essential documentary focused on the story of the Lovings, an interracial couple whose union in 1958 led to their arrest, con…

Read more

Just when you thought awards season was over, it’s started back up again. For nonfiction, the season is year-round because of the blurring of film and television that allows certain titles to compete for Oscars and Emmys and everything in between. For the most part, though, the two awards highlighted this week honor the same documentaries we’ve been tal…

Read more

It was only a matter of time before I’d cross paths with Julia Loktev. I’ve been a fan of her lengthy film My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow for a while, even naming it one of the best documentaries of 2025. And we were in the same room at least once last fall when the film was nominated for Best Political Documentary at the 10th annua…

Read more

The more successful Nonfics gets (in its Substack era), the more we get requests for reviews, especially of documentaries not yet available to the public. Many of these are film festival premieres. Would our readers be interested in that kind of coverage? I’m not convinced. In my 26 years as a critic, I’ve rarely found much personal benefit in reviewing…

Read more

When someone in The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist says that any examples put in the film are going to seem clumsy by the time it’s released, they’re not kidding. Artificial intelligence is moving so fast that the documentary could’ve easily been dated by the time it premiered at Sundance, let alone three months later. Fortunately, this isn’t…

Read more

At least three documentaries hitting theaters this month and next are denying requests for screeners. Instead, they’re insisting critics see these films on the big screen. I appreciate that, and I’m happy to see more documentaries getting not just theatrical distribution but theatrical press screenings in my area. Sadly, my busy work and family schedule…

Read more

Short films were first officially recognized at the Oscars in 1932 when the 5th Academy Awards introduced two categories honoring live-action “short subject” motion pictures and one honoring cartoons. The Academy would take almost a decade to add a category specifically devoted to documentary shorts, but nonfiction films were represented in this area of the Oscars from the start. In fact, all three of the nominees for Best Live Action Short Subject (Novelty) were documentaries, and one of them was named the winner at the ceremony that November.

In all, seven documentary shorts won Oscars during that time before they received their own category. Following the first documentary to win an Oscar, these shorts proved the need for exclusive awards for nonfiction cinema. While the Academy didn’t honor a documentary at every one of their first 13 ceremonies, they at least nominated nonfiction films for Oscars every year of their awards during that period. Most were shorts recognized in the Novelty category, which was intended, in part, for newsreels, travelogues, and other types of nonfiction works.

What constitutes a documentary is up for discussion, but I’m only considering films that don’t consist solely of scripted reenactments of events performed by professional actors. Give Me Liberty, which won the Oscar for Best Short Subject (Color) in 1937, is technically listed as a documentary on IMDb, but it’s a wholly dramatized, narration-free account of Patrick Henry’s famous “Give me liberty, or give me death” speech in 1775. Similar winners in later years, such as Declaration of Independence, Sons of Liberty, and Teddy the Rough Rider, lack this label, and none of them qualify for this focus.

Excluding those history films, here’s a breakdown of the first seven short documentaries to win Oscars:

Wrestling Swordfish (1931)

Mack Sennett’s eight-minute documentary Wrestling Swordfish officially won the inaugural Oscar certificate for Best Live Action Short Subject (Novelty), though some historians might add an asterisk to its victory. According to the November 8, 1932, edition of Variety, this now-lost record of one of Sennett’s own deep-sea fishing trips originally came in second place during the nominating committee’s vote. The Pete Smith production Swing High, which showcases the trapeze artist family The Flying Codonas, received 133 points, while Wrestling Swordfish earned 128 points. Yet, the 15-person committee reportedly picked the latter as the winner, causing some confusion.

To settle the “mix-up,” the Academy reportedly was to hold a run-off for the new category, with voting opened up to all members following a screening of the two documentary shorts on November 9. According to the following week’s edition of Variety, however, the decision was still being determined by the nominating committee at a meeting held on November 14, with a revote needed because some of its members weren’t present at the final voting. Wrestling Swordfish was again deemed the winner, as acknowledged at the ceremony on November 18 and in the November 22 edition of Variety, but the trade gave no further details on the process.

Some accounts claim that Sennett bullied for the result. IMDb’s trivia notes for both films paint him as a villain in the matter. This also probably could have just ended with a compromise of a tie (after all, Fredric March and Wallace Beery tied for the Oscar for Best Actor that same year due to a rule involving any tally where the outcome has two top choices separated by three or fewer votes). In his 1993 book Behind the Oscar: The Secret History of the Academy Awards, Anthony Holden implies that the Academy Executive Secretary was at fault in the scenario for avoiding his responsibility to cast a tie-breaking vote. We may never know the whole truth.

We also may never know which film deserved the Oscar more. Wrestling Swordfish appears to be lost, with only its positive reviews remaining to indicate its worth. Swing High is a decent spotlight of an impressive act that might not otherwise be seen by its audience without this cinematic record. Its narration is overdone. Its slow-motion sequences are appreciated, adding an element that even those seeing The Flying Codonas live wouldn’t get. I actually might have preferred the mostly lost third nominee, Screen Souvenirs, an archival compilation that treats cinema as a kind of time machine where we can revisit people and events of the past through old film footage.

The big irony of the Wrestling Swordfish win is that Sennett was and remains best known as an icon of slapstick comedy films, yet he received his only competitive Oscar for a work of relatively serious nonfiction. The Keystone Studios founder and former Charlie Chaplin boss was only nominated for one other film. The same year that Wrestling Swordfish won, the Sennett-produced short The Loud Mouth was up for the inaugural Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film (Comedy). That lost to the Hal Roach-produced Laurel and Hardy short The Music Box. Presumably, the results in that race weren’t even close, as there was no dispute or run-off there.

Krakatoa (1933)

Another documentary that’s hard to find today, the 26-minute film Krakatoa won the second Oscar for Best Live Action Short Subject (Novelty). It’s an educational production depicting the 1883 eruption of the titular volcanic island, and its sound design was apparently as significant as its visual spectacle. I wouldn’t know, unfortunately, but reports of its impact on theatrical exhibition make it seem to have been for sound systems what James Cameron’s Avatar was for digital 3D projection. The film was originally narrated by play-by-play sports broadcasting pioneer Graham McNamee, though a 1965 re-release replaced him with actor Joseph Cotten.

City Of Wax (1934)

The nine-minute nature documentary City of Wax won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short Subject (Novelty) the next year, at the 7th Academy Awards. It’s such an emblematic educational film, with its close-up look at honey bees and its droning narration (by actor Gayne Whitman), that you can easily picture it running through a rickety high school projector. But it gets dark at the end, almost seeming to have a political message about the uniformity and disposability of workers in such a system. That probably wasn’t intended.

City of Wax was produced and directed by brothers Horace Woodard and Stacy Woodard, the latter of whom also worked on The Sea, a short documentary nominated in the same category the previous year. They made other nature documentaries together, but later they separately went into business with the U.S. government. Horace Woodard went on to shoot part of the important World War II propaganda film The Negro Soldier, and Stacy Woodard shot part of Pare Lorentz’s classic New Deal propaganda film The River.

Wings Over Everest (1934)

At the 8th Academy Awards, three more documentaries were nominated in the Live Action Short Subject (Novelty) category, while one of the first films we’d classify as a mockumentary, How to Sleep, was nominated and won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short Subject (Comedy). The Novelty winner was the 22-minute film Wings Over Everest, which reminded me of the first documentary Oscar winner, With Byrd at the South Pole, because it similarly presents views of a cold, rough, as-yet inaccessible place that were unavailable to audiences before film cameras could be taken up in airplanes. In this case, that location was the peaks of Mount Everest.

While the film highlights exclusive footage of a historical expedition, and it is part of that era when cinema was commonly a part of scientific exploration, not just a representation, Wings Over Everest is nowhere near an achievement on the level of With Byrd at the South Pole. Most of the film consists of the real people, including pilots Lord Clydesdale and David McIntyre and financial benefactor Lady Houston, in staged reenactments of the lead-up to the flight. And they are as lifeless as you might dread with a documentary. The footage taken from the planes is important, but also not the most exciting, plus the clearer shots are apparently from a later flight.

The Private Life Of The Gannets (1934)

The Novelty category went away after the 8th Academy Awards (as did Comedy shorts), but that didn’t stop nonfiction from being nominated. The Oscars changed its live-action shorts categories to award the best one-reel, two-reel, and color films. An installment of Paramount’s educational Popular Science series (“J-5-1”) was nominated for Best Short Subject (Color), while the music film Moscow Moods was up for Best Short Subject (One-Reel). No documentary won at the 9th Academy Awards. However, as already mentioned, the completely dramatized Short Subject (Color) winner, Give Me Liberty, is labeled as a documentary on IMDb. Also, the significant nonfiction film series The March of Time received a Special Award for revolutionizing the newsreel.

One year later, at the 10th Academy Awards, The Private Life of the Gannets won the Oscar for Best Short Subject (One-Reel). The 10-minute film is another old-fashioned educational nature documentary focused on a single animal, and even compared to the fantastically shot City of Wax, it’s pretty simple. It takes us to the island of Grassholm, off the coast of Wales, to observe the titular seabirds. The one notable thing about the film is that famed documentarian, critic, and theorist John Grierson was one of its cinematographers. And he specifically shot the short’s best footage, a slow-motion sequence of gannets diving into the ocean to catch fish.

Non-winning documentaries nominated that year include another installment of Popular Science (“J-7-1”) and the Pete Smith short Romance of Radium, a fully narrated, acted-out history of the titular element that was helmed by future horror and film noir auteur Jacques Tourneur. The former was up for Best Short Subject (Color) but lost to another Pete Smith production, Penny Wisdom, which is a comedy but also served to promote the newspaper advice columnist Prudence Penny. The latter lost to The Private Life of the Gannets, which was a more unique achievement at the time.

Read more

Welcome to my annual birthday edition of This Week In Documentary. It’s not any different from the other newsletters I put out throughout the year, except that I feel okay making a heavier push (that is, begging) for paid subscriptions in the intro. Actually, for my birthday this year (it’s on Friday, March 20), I’d like you to donate to a documentary f…

Read more

With this year’s Oscars behind us, we are already looking ahead to the 100th Academy Awards in 2028. That milestone event is two years away, which will hopefully give us plenty of time to achieve our own feat: watching and reviewing every Oscar-winning documentary. Or, at least all the ones that are available. According to IMDb, 208 documentaries have won Academy Awards in some category or another, not just in the two that have recognized nonfiction films competitively since the early 1940s. With only around 100 weeks until our deadline, we may need to double up on some. We begin with this Documentary Classics column on With Byrd at the South Pole.

The very first documentary nominee was recognized at the very first Academy Awards. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s 1927 ethno-tainment film Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness became one of the inaugural contenders in the Unique and Artistic Picture category, which was immediately discontinued (the category was essentially the same as the other top award, Outstanding Picture, which went through a series of name changes before taking its current designation of Best Picture in 1962 — meaning Chang was basically the first and only documentary to come close to being nominated for the Academy’s highest honor).

Two ceremonies later, and more than a decade before the mode would receive its first exclusive category, With Byrd at the South Pole became the second documentary nominated for an Oscar. Less remembered today, the 1930 feature was then recognized in the Best Cinematography category, competing against four dramas that remain well-known nearly a century later: Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Howard Hughes’s Hell’s Angels, Ernst Lubitsch’s The Love Parade, and the famous “Garbo Talks!” cinematic event, Anna Christie. At the 3rd Academy Awards held on November 5, 1930, the documentary won the Oscar, with cinematographers Joseph T. Rucker and Willard Van der Veer receiving statuettes.

Both men shot footage for the film while accompanying Richard E. Byrd on his first Antarctic expedition from 1928 to 1930, a trip that included the first flight over the South Pole. While I can’t confirm details of the production history, the release date credited to With Byrd at the South Pole is June 19, 1930, just one day after the expedition’s return to the U.S. (perhaps the film deserved a special Oscar for editor Emanuel Cohen for such a swift job?). While Rucker and Van der Veer’s visuals are noteworthy for how they were captured, through harsh conditions across land, sea, and air, many of their shots are also quite artistic. When possible, light, shadow, and framing are given serious consideration. This isn’t just plain documentation.

The most memorable moments of aesthetic intent bookend the film. Shadows of men seem to climb the sails of Byrd’s flagship, City of New York, in the opening sequence. In the end, Byrd and his dog, Igloo, sit on the ship in silhouette, finally at rest. Right before that conclusion, the documentary shows the City of New York ascending from a fog, initially looking like a ghostly mirage. I also really like the shots from Byrd’s plane as it’s flying over Antarctica, particularly those featuring propellers in motion on the edge of the screen. The framing might not have been a creative decision so much as a practical vantage, but the result either way underscores its significance.

With Byrd at the South Pole was hardly the first documentary film of an Antarctic expedition, nor even the first to be filmed on location on the continent. One of the first known feature-length documentaries, 1919’s In the Grip of the Polar Pack Ice (since retitled South: Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Glorious Epic of the Antarctic), was made by Frank Hurley as he traveled with Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Before that, short documentaries exhibited footage from expeditions led by Nobu Shirase and Douglas Mawson. Still, this feature’s mixing of cinema, airplane travel, and Antarctic exploration, all of which are peaking at this time after really coming into being around the turn of the century, is just so perfect.

As a record of events, With Byrd at the South Pole appears comprehensive. While it includes many intertitles telling the audience about the expedition, the film also shows everything. Rucker and Van der Veer captured the arrival, the building of Little America, travels by dogsled and plane, multiple blizzards, including the one that destroyed Byrd’s initial aircraft, incredible visits with penguins, whales, and seals, and plenty of scenes depicting the team’s daily work. We see a lot of manual labor tasks and little recreation. Even the scene of two men sitting down, enjoying a pipe and casual conversation, is not necessarily relaxing, as the topic of discussion is how much they miss their families, including a newborn baby not yet seen.

Read more

I don’t have much to discuss this week. A lot of documentaries are on the calendar, including a massive surplus of overpriced DVD titles for fans of art and history, but very few are recommended. At least we finally get to find out what the best documentaries of 2025 were, according to the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. Other …

Read more

Werner Herzog is a name well known in the cinemasphere. From Aguirre, the Wrath of God to Nosferatu the Vampyre, his fictional films are critically acclaimed and original in nearly every aspect. But it’s with his documentaries that Herzog truly earns most of his acclaim. As an artist, he is a man of many talents, but his tenacity for capturing the human experience at the farthest reaches of the known world is second to none.

Herzog is a filmmaker obsessed with experience — if he films in the jungle, then he truly films in the jungle. Brilliance or hubris, it is hard to decide, but his filmmaking struggles are the stuff of legend. Just read his journal Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo or watch Les Blank‘s brilliant Burden of Dreams, in which we see Herzog at his most broken on the notoriously grueling location shoot for Fitzcarraldo. Experience and tangibility are everything to Herzog; he is as obsessed with the image as with the intangible essence of the image.

From loneliness in the Antarctic to finding kinship among grizzly bears, here are all of Werner Herzog’s documentaries* ranked (*presently Herzog’s Theatre of Thought is unavailable to us and therefore not yet included in this list):

42. Nomad: In The Footsteps Of Bruce Chatwin (2019)

Perhaps Herzog's becoming such an institution has hurt his ability to make objective biographical documentaries. Interestingly, Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin is technically a very personal film for the director. It’s about his old friend, the writer Bruce Chatwin, who died 30 years before the making of the documentary, but it’s as different as can be from his more notable feature on his relationship with Klaus Kinski, My Best Fiend. It also, despite Herzog’s narration and his appearances on screen in some rather clumsily shot scenes, feels made at a distance from the subject. He’s maybe too close to the subject to properly acquaint the audience with him. Nomad is disappointingly Herzog’s least memorable documentary. - CC

41. La Soufrière (1977)

In the short documentary La Soufrière, Herzog visits the island of Guadeloupe, which has just been evacuated due to an imminent volcanic eruption. He finds three men remaining on the island, and in his interactions with them, the sublime quality that Herzog always seeks to conjure uncomfortably comes to life. The three men are content with death by immolation from the volcano, and Herzog seeks to understand their perspective. Their stories, along with the looming disaster, ground the film in a steep melancholy, and Herzog’s imagery highlights the sheer force of nature and just how unimportant humankind is at the whims of higher powers. - CH

40. Lo And Behold, Reveries Of The Connected World (2016)

Ah yes, the documentary in which Herzog meets the internet — let the memes begin. Levity aside, Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World is a somber and introspective look at the interconnective nature of the global digital sprawl. Herzog narrates the film with his usual melancholic eloquence, and learning about the history of the internet is pretty compelling. The interviews with modern tech giants and other creators are less interesting. Of course, Herzog finds his way to artificial intelligence and eventually asks, “Can the internet dream of itself?” - CH

39. Handicapped Future (1971)

This documentary sees Herzog turning his existential gaze on physically disabled children in Munich, Germany. Handicapped Future was made in order to raise awareness throughout the country at the behest of one of Herzog’s disabled friends. For a Werner Herzog documentary, it is shockingly conventional and handles the subject with genuine sensitivity. It never feels exploitative, just shows life for what it is: sometimes unfair, sometimes joyous. And it highlights the fact that empathy is necessary in order to fulfill every condition of the human experience. - CH

38. The Flying Doctors Of East Africa (1969)

The Flying Doctors of East Africa is also quite conventional in both structure and execution. It is wholly unstylistic, and this works well for the type of film that Herzog has made. It is a dense and informative documentary that recounts, through interviews, the stories of many in the “flying doctor” arm of the African Medical and Research Foundation. Herzog has even gone on record saying that it is more of a report than it is a film, and that rings fairly true. The stories themselves, ranging from locations in Nairobi, Kenya, and Tanzania, are told with little flair — these stories do not require it. They are grueling at times and hopeful on occasion. - CH

Subscribe now

37. Christ And Demons In New Spain (1999)

Sparse is a term I often use when describing this short documentary to friends. Visually, it is far from desolate. Every frame is packed to the brim with subtext, but as an entire work, it is thin. Christ and Demons in New Spain is the most televisual of all of Herzog’s documentaries, as it was co-opted into the German TV series 2000 Years of Christianity. Thus, it is quite jarring. Herzog’s visuals tell the story of Christian expansion and conversion, colonialism, post-colonial structures, and the ethics of the church. But the narration is done by a third party to tie the piece into the other program. So, as Herzog’s imagery tells its own tale, his meaning becomes obfuscated by a drab and tedious voiceover that feels akin to a third-rate History Channel special. - CH

36. How Much Wood Would A Woodchuck Chuck (1976)

Here we have Herzog once again traversing into the realm of the abstract. This film sees him defining the career of auctioneering as the creation of a new language. He sees the work akin to a form of poetry. How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck is a delightfully odd little film, but it asks some truly captivating questions. From the day-to-day life of auctioneering to the life of the Pennsylvania Amish, the doc wrestles with some interesting themes. But unlike some of Herzog’s later works, this one only feels skin-deep. - CH

35. The Fire Within: A Requiem For Katia And Maurice Krafft (2022)

Herzog had the bad luck of having the second documentary about Katia and Maurice Krafft to debut in 2022, following the much better, eventually Oscar-nominated Fire of Love. That film was more biographical and more focused on the romantic aspect of the Kraffts’ story. The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft is primarily interested in the ultimately tragic daredevil element, almost aligning the titular couple’s demise at the hands of the very thing they passionately studied with Timothy Treadwell’s notorious death at the center of Herzog’s Grizzly Man. This is also kind of a spinoff of Into the Inferno (itself kind of a spinoff of Encounters at the End of the World), which highlighted the Kraffts’ work — and their death — as part of a broader yet more direct and intimate exploration of volcanoes. The Fire Within celebrates and largely consists of the Kraffts’ incredible footage. Herzog narrates a bit too heavily, taking occasional breaks to let the increasingly clichéd Herzogian score by Ernst Reijseger erupt over the archival clips. When Herzog admits that he wishes he could have been the Kraffts’ companion and been there in and as part of their film, he acknowledges why this is more their achievement than his. - CC

34. The Great Ecstasy Of Woodcarver Steiner (1974)

The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner is a fascinating entry in the nonfiction filmography of Werner Herzog. It is both wholly Herzogian but also quite commercial— made-for-television, even. The film is focused on Walter Steiner, a trophy-winning ski jumper who just so happens to do carpentry as his full-time job. The footage of the German towns that serve as a backdrop for Steiner and his life is quite picturesque. He is an interesting character, and Herzog studies the man with a sense of reverie. Like Steiner, The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner exists in a state of flux — the push and pull between normalcy and ecstasy. - CH

33. Ode To The Dawn Of Man (2011)

Ode to the Dawn of Man serves as a bite-sized companion piece to one of Herzog’s best documentaries, Cave of Forgotten Dreams. This short film focuses on the making of the soundtrack for that feature and how music can give texture and language to a time long past. Personal interviews with the composer Ernst Reijseger and pianist Harmen Fraanje help to highlight the creative process that comes with working with Herzog and such an odd concept. It is nothing short of pure magic. - CH

32. Huie’s Sermon (1981)

It is hard to classify this film as a documentary because, through its structure, it seems that Herzog set his camera up in a church and just started filming. For a Herzog documentary, it is disorientingly objective. Huie’s Sermon consists of an uncut sermon given by Reverend Huie L. Rogers in a Brooklyn church. Herzog never gives the film a purpose or reason to exist beyond the sermon itself. If anything, it is a genuinely fascinating look at religious fervor and the uncomfortable power of inflection. - CH

31. Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds (2020)

After showcasing the volcanologist in Encounters at the End of the World and Into the Inferno, Herzog teamed up again with Clive Oppenheimer for Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds, for which they share directorial credit. The film would seem to have a sci-fi-tinged premise, as it’s about extraterrestrial entities, namely meteorites as large as the one that likely killed the dinosaurs and as small as rocks you could hold in the palm of your hand. It’s well-guided by Herzog and very informative and concentrated, but it’s not as personally philosophical or spiritual as you’d expect from the filmmaker. Even though it’s far from his best, though, it’s still Herzog narrating about space and religion, so it’s still better than most things. - CC

30. Bells From The Deep: Faith And Superstition In Russia (1993)

Bells from the Deep: Faith and Superstition in Russia is where Herzog and the practice of mysticism collide. Comprised mainly of interviews and scenes from religious services, the documentary oscillates between being utterly confounding and bizarre. The first half or so focuses mainly on a man who sees himself as the reincarnation of God. His self-appointed name is Vissarion, and he teaches his ways to a devout, near-cult-like group of followers. Later, we are introduced to the story of the lost city of Kitzeh. It is a myth about a city that God, to ensure the town’s safety from Mongol marauders, placed at the bottom of a lake. The hearsay is that one can still hear the city’s church bells, as they ring ominously from the depths. Local pilgrims and priests recount this story with an air of ominous fervor. Devotion has many faces, and in Bells from the Deep, devotion wears the face of a mythmaker. - CH

29. God’s Angry Man (1981)

Gene Scott, a televisual pastor, serves as the subject in Herzog’s often uncomfortable look at the intersection between religion and capitalism. God’s Angry Man consists mainly of Herzog’s interviews with Scott and his family. These are fascinating and often infuriating conversations that make obvious the many problems of the “salvation-for-profit” business. Most interestingly, the film also spends a lot of time with Scott and his associates on the set of his television show, Festival of Faith. We see Scott, akin to a snake oil salesman, urge viewers to donate money to his holy cause, and at the film’s peak, we see Scott unleash a tirade of a rant against the F.C.C. The parallels between Scott and the television pastors of today are all too obvious and alarming. - CH

28. Wheel Of Time (2003)

Tibetan Buddhism is a religion deeply concerned with the soul and its essence, much like Herzog’s films. In Wheel of Time, Herzog documents two Kalachakra initiations and interviews the 14th Dalai Lama. The initiations, one of which is interrupted by the Dalai Lama’s health, are sumptuous to watch — beautiful and deeply serious. Wheel of Time is at its most fascinating when Herzog interviews Jigme Zangpo, the longest-serving political prisoner from Tibet. He spent 37 years locked up in China due to his devout and outspoken support of the International Tibet Independence Movement. The words he and Herzog share with one another are reason enough to seek out this wonderful piece of cinema. - CH

27. Pilgrimage (2001)

Herzog, always one to embellish, opens this documentary with a quote that Herzog came up with, but he credits it to Thomas à Kempis. Beyond that, Pilgrimage has a tangible feeling of natural, waking life. Shots are only accompanied by music, and the imagery therein fluctuates between pilgrims by the tomb of Saint Sergei in Sergiyev Posad, Russia, and pilgrims who have flocked to the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico. As an entire work, Pilgrimage is deceptively simple. What it lacks in urtext, it makes up for in a subtext that is so rich and overflowing with human emotion. - CH

26. From One Second To The Next (2013)

Well, this is a weird one. Like, weird even by the standards of Werner Herzog. In 2013, he teamed up with — you’ll never guess it — AT&T to make a short documentary about the harms of texting and driving. Honestly, it is a rather cut-and-dry work, but I put it somewhat far down this list because, when one watches it, they are filled with mental images of Herzog and some AT&T marketing executives workshopping ideas together. If that doesn’t sell you on From One Second to the Next, then Herzog’s ever-humanist interviews will. - CH

25. Ghost Elephants (2025)

Starring naturalist Steve Boyes and focused on his pursuit of an elusive herd (if not species) of gigantic pachyderms, Ghost Elephants finds Herzog too old to physically accompany his subject on the documented adventure. He’s also at peak contemplation of not his own mortality but the impending demise of all of humanity. The surface narrative is not the clearest, but this film’s thematic storytelling is as deep as anything Herzog has dwelt on. The visual and scientific tri-level contrast between Boyes and the Indigenous tracker companions joining his quest, and Boyes and the lab scientists he encounters later, proves a poignant display of cultural evolutionary distinction, especially in relation to the biological evolutionary distinction of the elephant species being sought. It’s a reminder that Herzog can make any film better by taking the helm. - CC

24. The Dark Glow Of The Mountains (1984)

Subverting audience expectations, The Dark Glow of the Mountains is sold as a mountain-climbing documentary when, in fact, it is about the internal motivations and desires of those who seek to risk their lives endeavoring on dangerous mountaineering expeditions. Reinhold Messner and Hans Kammerlander are freestyle mountaineers whose collective goal is to climb two peaks (Gasherbrum 1 and 2) without returning to basecamp. Yet, we rarely see the climb itself. Instead, Herzog peels back the layers of these men and studies them at their metaphysical core. - CH

23. The White Diamond (2004)

The history of aviation is rife with struggles and eventual triumphs, and Herzog uses a modern-day example of aviation exploration to recount the history of aviation itself. The White Diamond follows an aeronautical engineer named Graham Dorrington, who has designed a white, teardrop-shaped airship that he wants to test out over the forests of Guyana. By focusing on the man behind the airship’s creation, Herzog gets to delve into the struggles of the creative process. Furthermore, Herzog turns his lens from the skies of Guyana to the forest floor, where we see the life of a local diamond farmer named Marc Anthony Yhap. A lot is going on in The White Diamond, and it is a testament to Herzog’s skills as a filmmaker that the film ends up flying rather than crashing to the forest floor. - CH

22. Ten Thousand Years Older (2002)

Only Werner Herzog could pack so much thematic density into just 10 minutes. Ten Thousand Years Older is a documentary short that is part of the Ten Minutes Older Project and focuses on the Amondauas people of Brazil. The film begins with archival footage of the Amondauas’s first contact with the modernized world. Before that meeting, they lived a life akin to a “Stone Age existence.” But after being found by the modern world, the majority of the tribe died — most were killed by the common cold and chicken pox. Herzog visits the tribe 20 years after they were initially discovered and speaks to village elders who long for the life before their discovery. Yet, the children are embarrassed by their elders’ adherence to old ways and overall reluctance to modernize. It is gut-wrenching stuff that Herzog handles with a grace that stands in stark contrast to his immensely serious and emotionally distant voice. - CH

21. Jag Mandir (1991)

A lot of Werner Herzog’s films have a subtext that is concerned with performance, or what it means to be performative in a documentary sense. Jag Mandir is wholly concerned with performance and the many aspects that make up theatre, on both a large and small scale. The majority of the film is focused on a bombastic theatrical performance, helmed by André Heller, for the Maharana Arvind Singh Mewar at the City Palace in Rajasthan. Two thousand performers take part in an elaborate theatrical performance that spans many hours in a single day, and Herzog’s documentary splits up a lot of this with rehearsals that took place over several days before the stage performance. It is colorfully bombastic and texturally rich. - CH

20. La Bohème (2009)

Commissioned for Sky Arts and the English Opera, La Bohème is a four-minute documentary that focuses on the harsh realities of life in Ethiopia. The confrontational imagery is set to the operatic duet “O soave fanciulla” from the opera La Bohème. It is a deeply expressionistic work that showcases Herzog’s documentary form stripped down to its very essence. It captures a specific feeling of a harsh place that is often neglected by the Western world. - CH

19. Happy People: A Year In The Taiga (2010)

Sharing directorial duties with Dmitry Vasyukov, in Happy People: A Year in the Taiga, Herzog showcases the life of people in the village of Bakhtia beside the Yenisei River in the Siberian taiga. Harsh, desolate, and existential — this is Herzog where he is most comfortable (and relatable). It focuses on many fur trappers and hunters, as well as the life of the native Ket people. Herzog’s voiceovers are poetic, and he tries to unpack the specific form of the human experience that could keep people happy and content at the farthest reaches of the habitable world. Ever the humanist, Herzog finds his answer among many other answers, as everyone shown in the film has a different idea of what it means to live in the Siberian taiga. - CH

18. The Transformation Of The World Into Music (1994)

Opera is an often daunting form of art — it is at times confusing, and one often needs a bevy of external knowledge to understand and enjoy the insular world of the artform. But Herzog’s The Transformation of the World into Music invites all types of viewers into the fascinating world of opera. Focused on bringing the operas and music of Richard Wagner to life, this film shows all of the behind-the-scenes machinations that go into staging an opera specifically for the Bayreuth Festival. Herzog focuses on every aspect of opera, from specific music sheets to the finding of the right performers. Furthermore, he does not shy away from the complicated history of Wagner, one of Germany’s most well-known composers. His ties to Nazism and Adolf Hitler are broached and confronted in both a humanistic and damning way. Wagner’s legacy is eternally tarnished, but Herzog argues that his music rises above such controversies. Yet, he also leaves it to the viewer to come to their own conclusions on such a touchy matter. - CH

17. Gesualdo: Death For Five Voices (1995)

Werner Herzog’s stoic face may lead one to believe that his heart is as cold as ice, but if one watches any of his works, then they will come to the inevitable conclusion that Mr. Herzog’s heart is as big as a mountain. That is why it is surprising that he calls Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices “one of the films closest to my heart.” He focuses on the music and life of Carlo Gesualdo, a musician with an endlessly fascinating and unsettling life story. Intercut with scenes of Gesualdo’s madrigals being performed, Herzog’s camera studies Gesualdo’s supposedly cursed castle, the legends of his personality, and the eventual murder of his wife and her lover by his very hand. This is undoubtedly one of Herzog’s oddest documentaries in that a surprising amount of it is staged, which subverts the very idea of what it means to document reality. One of the most memorable segments sees Herzog walking through Gesualdo’s castle and coming upon a man who plays music into the castle’s cracked walls in order to keep the demons therein at bay. - CH

16. Wings Of Hope (1998)

Julian Koepcke is a German-Peruvian woman who happens to be the sole survivor of the fated LANSA Flight 508. Herzog’s Wings of Hope explores her story and recounts the crash and her escape from the jungle. He has a deeply personal connection to Flight 508, as he almost took the flight when getting ready to location scout for Aguirre, the Wrath of God. His flight ticket was canceled at the last minute due to an eternally lucky scheduling error. Herzog and Koepcke fly from Lima to Pucallpa, and they sit in the same seats she was in when her flight crashed. Later, they visit the crash site in the jungle and unearth fragments of the plane, and they then trace the path of her escape from the jungle along specific river routes. Herzog has a sixth sense that allows him to unearth the deepest, most complicated emotions of individuals who have suffered not of their own accord. Better yet, he knows how to handle these emotions in a confrontational manner that is both uncomfortable and somehow deeply moving. - CH

Read more

Last week, Deadline reported on the development of a dramatic remake of Armed Only with a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud. The current Oscar nominee in the documentary short category will be adapted by its co-director, Craig Renaud, and helmed by Jay Russell (Ladder 49). I used to keep a running list of documentary remakes in the works until …

Read more

Steve Boyes is such a perfect participant for a Werner Herzog documentary that he could have been created in a lab. For many years, the South African conservation biologist has been seeking evidence of an elusive herd of elephants located in a difficult-to-reach part of Angola. It’s another impossible dream, but Boyes believes, as he states in Herzog’s film Ghost Elephants, it doesn’t matter if they’re real or a dream. The future of all animals is to be in a dream anyway, as in, they’ll be just a memory.

Compared to other Herzogian subjects, particularly the adventurer-scientist type, Boyes is passionate and determined, yet not overly obsessed. He says in the film that it doesn’t even matter if he finds these elephants, and ultimately, it might be better not to encounter them at all. Herzog’s documentary follows Boyes on an expedition traveling with three KhoiSan trackers from an indigenous group representing our oldest ancestral origins and a spiritual connection man has to elephants.

Ahead of the release of Ghost Elephants, I talked to Herzog, producer Ariel Leon Isacovitch, and Boyes via Zoom. Below is a transcript of our conversation in full, including the moment I embarrassed myself trying to get Herzog to comment on the similarities between this documentary and the fake one he’s supposed to be directing in a silly fictional mockumentary he starred in 22 years ago. Apologies for not sharing the audio, but you can easily hear Herzog’s iconic voice in your head while reading.

Nonfics: What came first, the idea to do this film or plans for the specific expedition that it’s documenting?

Steve Boyes: Ten years of expeditions in the Angolan Highlands, a place that was locked away from the world for generations, for over 40 years, 27 years of civil war. In 2015, we get in there, or 2014, as tourists, secretly meet the governor, get a letter from the president, and, in armored vehicles try to get access to this completely undocumented, unknown landscape the size of England, and begin this journey. We find these extraordinary source lakes, launch into them, explore all the rivers, and start to find signs of elephants.

For these 10 years, elephants have been an underlying theme. Where are these giants, the biggest animals, when we’re finding everything else, hundreds of new species to science, new populations of cheetahs, wild dogs, and lions, all not known to be there? Twenty-six source lakes in the end. I found signs of elephants before we found and met people. There are so few people up there. That was a ghost, the first one, 10 years ago. We’ve been going up there pretty much throughout — except it gets tricky with the end of the rainy season, as you saw in the film — for 10 years.

How did you meet or hear about each other and decide to work together on the film?

Steve Boyes: A mutual friend said to come to dinner in Beverly Hills, of all places, and you must meet Werner. And we did. I think the restaurant closed on us. We were just talking about everything in the universe. And we spoke about the ghost elephants, about the link to the Smithsonian, and that was the beginning. 

Werner Herzog: I personally knew right away that this was big. As a storyteller, you know that. I was invited originally just to be an advisor. Steve invited me to come to Namibia to the northern Kalahari Desert, and when I arrived there, there was already a South African team working on this search, this quest, for a long time. But they had no real clear idea how to shape it into a story, into a movie. So after that, it was almost instantly clear I should do the conversations. The next day, everybody was clear: “Oh, please, step in completely.” And I said I don’t want to take the job of anyone. But everybody pushed me: “Please take over. Do it. Do it.” So overnight, I find myself with a film in my lap. 

Read more

While looking up documentaries celebrating big anniversaries in March, I saw that the video of the Rodney King beating turns 35 on Tuesday. The video has its own IMDb listing, which made me wonder about other singular recordings that are so momentous that they’re considered documentaries on their own. The Zapruder film of the John F. Kennedy assassinati…

Read more