Movies in the Documentary genre

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...

Upon viewing the completed version of this film, cartoonist Robert Crumb, whose story it tells, informed director Terry Zwigoff, "After I saw it I had to go for a walk in the woods, just to clear my head. I took my favorite hat off, this hat that ...

"Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man." Michael Apted's The Up Series is not only documentary filmmaking at its finest, but it is an important sociological study. How many movies can make that claim? Starting in 1964,...

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 no guarantees. But there is also nothing to fear. We come from oblivion when we are born. We return to oblivion when we die. The astonishing thing is this period of in-between." -- Roger Ebert When Steve James, the acclaimed director ...

Spoiler warning: Although this is a documentary chronicling an historically-established event, I am aware that some potential viewers may not be aware of how things turned out. This review candidly discusses the results so those who wish to pr...

“Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.” This Jesuit motto became the driving force behind The Up Series, a nine-volume (thus far) documentary that has spanned fifty-six years. Begun in 1964 under the direction of P...

Deep Water is a documentary, but it's also one part adventure film, one part Greek tragedy, and one part meditation on the role of the "hero" in modern society. The movie starts out with a seemingly simple premise: chronicle the first nonstop roun...

Robert S. McNamara, the Secretary of Defense for John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, was an observer of and participant in many of the key events of the 20th century. History has not been more kind to him than his critics have been, so McNamar...

If one was to clump together all the movies – both narrative and documentary – made about the Vietnam War (or, as it’s called in Asia, the American War), the number would be in the three-digit range. I have seen many of those (although b...