Movies in the Documentary genre

Mad Hot Ballroom is about ballroom dancing in the same way that Spellbound is about spelling bees and Hoop Dreams is about basketball. That is to say, tangentially. Although ballroom dancing forms the backdrop against which this uplifting documen...

Man on Wire is a fascinating time capsule: a combination of talking-head interviews, actual footage, and re-creations that evokes a kinder, gentler world and provides insight into one of the most audacious stunts of the 20th century. Pieced togeth...

March of the Penguins does what all good National Geographic documentaries do: it informs and entertains while providing interesting wildlife footage. Unfortunately, it's not cinematic. The issue isn't whether the film is worth seeing, but whethe...

Apparently, I approached this production with a misapprehension. I was under the impression that Margaret Cho: Assassin was intended to be a filmed comedic performance. What I got instead was an 85-minute political rant from a liberal Asian Ameri...

As a tale of human courage and personal triumph, Murderball works. As a sports documentary, it falls short of the mark. Fortunately, Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro's crowd-pleasing movie (it won the Audience Award for Best Documentary at ...

If one had to classify My Date with Drew, it would fall under the documentary umbrella. A more honest appraisal, however, would be to call it "reality TV" for the big screen. After all, it has the same quintessential appeal: an "everyman" as the p...

O.J.: Made in America, an epic documentary from Ezra Edelman, explores not only the rise and fall of one of football’s iconic players, but the status of race relations in America and the impact of celebrity-worship on modern culture. Althoug...

Someone once said this about the United States' justice system: "If ten guilty men must go free to prevent one innocent man from falsely going to prison, so be it." This philosophy explains why, at least in theory, every accused criminal is presu...

There are three kinds of documentaries: those that lionize their subjects, those that attack their subjects, and those that attempt to provide a balanced, objective perspective. RBG, a cinematic biography of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Gi...

Religulous is the much-anticipated collaboration between one of the guys responsible for Borat and Curb Your Enthusiasm (Larry Charles) and the Politically Incorrect stand-up comedian (Bill Maher). The problem with the movie, whose title compresse...