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The Best Documentaries of 2017

These films offer viewers incisive windows into other lives and worlds, as well
as complex issues both big and small.

Cohen Media Group/Netflix/FilmRise 

BY NICK SCHAGER DEC 20, 2017

1.8K   

Alongside the standout dramas, comedies and action-adventure blockbusters,

a crop of superlative non-fiction films have helped turn 2017 into an
exceptional cinematic year. Whether focusing on everyday citizens struggling
with universal dilemmas, brave exiles battling injustice, or unique artists
grappling with mortality, these features afford viewers incisive windows into
other lives and worlds, as well as complex issues both big and small. Marked
by formal daring, they’re not only notable for their captivating tales, but also
for their novel ways of recounting them. In doing so, they prove as
adventurous and engaging as their subjects, and once again demonstrate that
there’s nothing quite as transfixing, or illuminating, as a well-told true story.

10
RAT FILM
RAT FILM a lm by Theo Anthony • Theatrical Trailer

Baltimore has long had a serious problem with rats. Despite its title, however,
Rat Film is not merely an up-close-and-personal examination of those
 it’s an inquiry into their
rodents; rather, thorny relationship with
their
environment. Comprised of archival photos and documents, news clippings
and maps, 3D video game sequences, shots from rats’ POVs, scenes involving
amateur urban rat killers, and panoramic vistas of Maryland’s most famous
city, director Theo Anthony’s film employs a thoroughly idiosyncratic style in
order to link Baltimore’s long-running rat infestation with its geographic and
socio-cultural development—a process that routinely involved segregating its
black and white populations. Scored to an eclectic electronica soundtrack, and
narrated by Maureen Jones in an eerily dispassionate voice, Anthony’s non-
fiction essay refuses to hold its viewers’ hands, instead content to use shrewd
juxtapositions of varied materials to present a damning indictment of how
systems institutionalize oppression of the “undesirable.” Rent/buy on
Amazon.

9
SPETTACOLO
SPETTACOLO O cial Trailer

In Italy’s tiny Tuscany region lies Monticchiello, whose residents have a most
unusual annual ritual: they stage a play about their own lives, starring
themselves. Directors Jeff Malmberg and Chris Shellen’s Spettacolo (its title
translated as “performance”) is a mesmerizing account of that yearly project,
tracing not only the logistical toil entailed by that endeavor (writing scripts,
building sets, casting and rehearsing), but also the tenuousness of the
tradition itself, thanks to a younger generation less interested than their elders
in maintaining it. Born from WWII trauma, and functioning as a way to
analyze and voice their contemporary concerns and grievances, the play
operates as an inimitable form of “auto-drama.” That the current show’s focus
on economic anxieties is paralleled with a local-bank benefactor’s scandalous
collapse only further underlines the intricate links here between fiction and
non-fiction

8
ONE OF US
One of Us | O cial Trailer [HD] | Net ix
The difficult of escaping religious fundamentalism is depicted in harrowing
first-person detail by One of Us, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s sterling
documentary about three young individuals trying to leave their NYC Hasidic
Jewish community. For Lazer, who’s already abandoned his wife and children
for the West Coast where he wants to make it as an actor, that means living in
a parking-lot trailer. For teenage Ari, who’s only just learning about the
Internet (thanks to a sheltered upbringing), it entails coping with childhood
abuse via excessive drug use. And for Etty, a mother of seven, it necessitates
dealing with attempts on her life by her husband and his cohorts, who object
to her wish to retain custody of her children while living a more secular life. In
their heartbreaking stories of suffering and survival, Ewing and Grady (Jesus
Camp) pinpoint the way religious organizations institutionalize loyalty,
obedience and abuse—and how breaking free from such a milieu requires
equal measures of courage and sacrifice. Available to stream on Netflix.

7
THE DEATH AND LIFE OF MARSHA P. JOHNSON
The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson | O cial Trailer [HD] | Net ix
Dubbed “the Rosa Parks of the LGBT movement,” trans icon Marsha P.
Johnson was a New York City fixture whose life was cut tragically short in
1992 when her body was discovered in the Hudson River. Though police
deemed her death a suicide, director David France’s (How to Survive a
Plague) outstanding documentary argues otherwise, following Anti-Violence
Project activist Victoria Cruz as she reopens Johnson’s cold case. More than
just another true-crime thriller, France’s non-fiction film uses Johnson’s
unjust fate to highlight the historic persecution and marginalization of
transgender men and women, including a detour into a modern headline-
making trial that underlines how such discrimination continues to exist today.
Enhanced by a wealth of old photos and film clips, not to mention interviews
with Johnson and some of her closest friends and comrades, it’s a stirring
snapshot of the arduous path traversed by many in the trans community—and,
also, a hopeful plea for a better tomorrow. Available to stream on Netflix.

6
FACES PLACES
Faces Places Trailer #1 (2017) | Movieclips Indie
A deceptively profound travelogue-cum-artistic treatise, Faces Places allows
its themes to emerge naturally from its free-flowing action, which concerns
New Wave pioneer Agnès Varda and photographer JR traveling around the
French countryside taking snapshots of local citizens and then blowing those
portraits up to titanic size and placing them on local structures. Along their
way, they discuss the 89-year-old Varda’s failing eyesight, JR’s habit of never
removing his trademark sunglasses and hat, and how their new works remind
them of their old ones. With a breezy, convivial air, the film captures the
infectious spirit of its subjects, whose collaborative mission—whether taking
them to a farm, a shipyard, or the home of Jean-Luc Godard—suggests the
many ways in which issues of photography, memory, and environment
intersect. Moreover, be it in scenes of JR snapping pictures of Varda’s feet, or
of Varda badgering her younger partner to show the camera his face, it proves
an evocative rumination on the act of seeing and being seen, as well as the
universal desire to preserve that which has come before.

5
EX LIBRIS: THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
EX LIBRIS - The New York Public Library
At 87-years-old, Frederick Wiseman continues to be one of cinema’s most vital
documentarians, as evidenced by his latest opus, Ex Libris, which presents a
wide-ranging view of the New York Public Library. As with so many of his
prior works, Wiseman’s newest offering is devoid of narration or other hand-
holding gestures; instead, it segues smoothly between protracted scenes of
people going about their work at the venerable establishment. Boardroom
business conversations, fundraising get-togethers, educational and vocational
seminars and more fill out this expansive portrait, which also includes trips to
numerous five-borough library branches to convey the way in which the
library functions as a universal organization—available and useful to all—that
helps bind together New York City’s diverse neighborhoods and cultures. At
197 minutes, it’s an engrossing non-fiction experience that imparts its lessons
through its choice of material and shrewd juxtapositions, all while immersing
one in the atmosphere of curiosity, investigation and preservation that defines
the still-relevant-in-the-digital-age institution.

4
CITY OF GHOSTS
City of Ghosts – O cial US Trailer | Amazon Studios
For his last documentary, 2015’s Cartel Land, Matthew Heineman visited the
perilous Mexican-American border to provide an intimate look at the battle
against the region’s drug kingpins. He again puts himself directly in harms
way with City of Ghosts, an equally riveting study of courage under immense
fire, which concentrates on Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS), a
group of “citizen journalists” committed to documenting ISIS’ reign of terror
in their Syrian hometown of Raqqa. Now forced into exile, these brave
individuals use embedded sources to obtain damning evidence of ISIS’ crimes,
and then disseminate them online—a plan of attack that’s resulted in
persistent death threats and the murder of some of their compatriots. Replete
with ghastly footage of ISIS atrocities, such as the execution of one RBSS
member’s father (shot with Hollywood-grade productions), Heineman’s doc is
a tribute to these dissidents’ valor, as well as an insightful portrait of modern
media’s role in our ongoing war on terror. Rent/buy on Amazon.

3
DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME
Dawson City: Frozen Time – O cial Trailer
A work of resurrected living history, Dawson City: Frozen Time is
transportive in a manner few films—non-fiction or otherwise—achieve.
Director Bill Morrison uses clips from hundreds of highly combustible nitrate
silent-movie reels that were unearthed in the Yukon River outpost of Dawson
City in 1978, as well as archival photos and on-screen text, to present a ghostly
history lesson about northern Canada’s turn-of-the-century gold rush, and of
Dawson City itself. From the fires that frequently burned it to the ground, to
the indigenous populations that were pushed aside by settlers, to the
Hollywood and business luminaries that once lived there (including Donald’s
Trump’s grandfather, who began his fortune with a brothel), it’s an awe-
inspiringly sweeping study. Morrison further conjures a sense of the past—and
of life’s impermanence—through expert montages of long-forgotten silent
dramas and comedies. Set to Alex Somers’ gorgeous, melancholy score, those
faded, corrupted black-and-white images feel like echoes from a distant era,
here lovingly resurrected so that they might live again. Rent/buy on
Amazon and iTunes.

2
I CALLED HIM MORGAN
I Called Him Morgan | Trailer | New Release
In a year of great documentaries, the most unshakeable one is I Called Him
Morgan, a haunting account of the life, and untimely demise, of promising
jazz superstar Lee Morgan. With a fluid style that’s in tune with its subject’s
music, director Kasper Collin’s masterwork serves as not only the life story of
Lee but also of his wife Helen, a fiercely independent older woman who
travelled her own rocky road before meeting the trumpeter. Their up-and-
down relationship came to involve heroin addiction, adultery, and a fatal
gunshot fired by Helen on February 18, 1972, a saga that Collin recounts
through concurrent twin narratives (bolstered by a tape recording made by
Helen a mere month before her death) and a syncopated editorial style that’s
as sharp as it is evocative. An air of fatalistic doom hangs over these
proceedings, but what’s so amazing about Collin’s film is that such
inevitability is married to a bracing sense of life’s inherent, inescapable
disarray. Rent/buy on Amazon and iTunes.

1
WORMWOOD
Wormwood | O cial Trailer [HD] | Net ix
No matter the Academy’s refusal to let it compete in this year’s non-fiction
category (because it marries dramatized sequences to its more straightforward
verité segments), Errol Morris’s Wormwood is a masterful documentary.
What Morris creates with his opus, about the CIA nefariousness that led to
government biochemist Frank Olson’s death in 1953, is something wholly
new: a hybrid in which staged material (all set in the past, and starring a
standout cast led by Peter Sarsgaard and Molly Parker) and eclectic montages
are used to capture a deeper truth about real-life events, as well as the
psychological dynamics that begat them. As a true-crime saga, it’s a
suspenseful return to the genre that Morris first elevated to prominence with
1988’s The Thin Blue Line. Even more than its straightforward thrills,
however, Wormwood is a formally breathtaking inquiry into individual
obsession and powers-that-be treachery, employing deft filmmaking
techniques to burrow deeply into personal tragedy and national trauma. Seen
in either its 241-minute theatrical iteration or its simultaneously-debuted-on-
Netflix six-part mini-series, it’s as good as movies got in 2017. Available to
stream on Netflix.

Honorable mention: The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography,

Trophy, Icarus, Obit, All This Panic, The Rape of Recy Taylor, The Work,
Oklahoma City, A Gray State, A River Belo

W A T CH NE X T
RE-Fashioned: Episode 4 - Turtlenecks | Esquire
 

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