Wha? How so?
Fabulous movie, but intensely visual. Not something ideally suited for watching on a portable MP3 player.
Another vote for “Capturing The Freidmans”, and also “Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.”, about an execution device designer that becomes a holocaust denier.
Dark Days, about homeless people living underground in the Penn Station tunnels.
**New York Doll ** - An interesting look at the New York Dolls and a brief reunion they had.
**Southern Comfort ** - This is about a female-to-male transgendered guy who lives in the sticks in Georgia (?). Very moving.
Tarnation - a filmmaker’s account of his mother’s mental illness. Fucking heartbreaking.
**Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession ** - This is about the coolest cable movie channel that ever was. I know…how could it be any good? Well, it IS. Thoroughly enjoyable!
An hour each way? Looks like PBS’s “The American Experience” could be up your alley.
http://www.shoppbs.org/sm-pbs-american-experience--fi-1412580.html
I really enjoyed A League of Ordinary Gentlemen. A look behind the scenes of the Professional Bowlers Association and the quest to succeed and stay on top on the bowling tour. Even if you’re not a big bowling fan (which I am), it’s a very interesting character study.
A couple of Errol Morris’ films have been mentioned, but IMO his best haven’t been:
The Gates of Heaven
The Thin Blue Line
Vernon, Florida
He also did A Brief History of Time (w/ Stephen Hawking) and Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control.
All of these are currently available from Netflix.
I also liked the previously-mentioned American Movie and Dark Days. Wait, not American Movie. Home Movie. By the same director.
PBS’s Nova is a good source of documentaries on various topics. The science/astronomy ones are usually particularly good. I’d recommend “Mars: Dead or Alive” and the followup “Welcome to Mars.” “The Elegant Universe” is also pretty decent, but they simplify a lot of stuff and you might as well read the book.
I don’t know if you can get it on DVD (I have this recorded onto my hard drive) but I saw a great PBS documentary a while ago called Story of 1. It’s an hour long documentary hosted by Monty Python’s Terry Jones explaining the history of numbers and the invention of arabic numerals. It’s pretty interesting.
Scientific American Frontiers is also a great documentary series, but again, I don’t know if they have it on DVD. You can watch episodes online, though (although the website seems to have been totally stagnant since 2005.)
Crumb
Vietnam: A Television History
Murderball
Dialogues with Madwomen
Grizzly Man
I teach with all of these.
Edit: And Powers of 10, which I used to watch over and over at the Air & Space Museum as a kid.
And Rivers and Tides.
Since Crumb has been mentioned, American Splendor–though not a documentary–makes a good double-bill with Crumb.
I’ll second *Roger & Me * as Michael Moore’s best documentary, and still very relevant.
Spellbound is very good, about the annual national spelling bee. It was much more interesting and exciting than I was expecting.
I love documentaries! Many of my favorites are already listed (Spellbound, Grizzly Man, Roger & Me), but I would add:
Mad Hot Ballroom
Wordplay
Enron: Smartest Guys in the Room
Stevie
Touching The Void
March of the Penguins
Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
Super Size Me
Word Wars
Paradise Lost
The Staircase
Inside Deep Throat
Touching the Void is really good. It’s about some British mountain climbers who nearly die in attempting to climb a peak in the Andes. Here’s the summary from IMDB:
It’s an amazing story.
And this isn’t really a documentary, but told in a sort of mockumentary style. A Day Without a Mexican is both hilarious and will make you think about the role that Mexicans play in American society.
Two people have mentioned it already, but I want to third the recommendation of Dark Days as an absolutely fascinating look at the lives of a group of “homeless” people who had set up makeshift homes in an abandoned NYC subway tunnel.
The filmmaker, Marc Singer, got some incredible footage down there, using the indigents themselves as his crew, and the “Making Of” featurette is as fascinating as the film itself.
One thing that really strikes me about the characters he interviewed was that, although many of them admitted to getting into their current situation in no small part due to substance abuse (especially crack), they were all very fully and painfully aware of the problems it had caused them, and spoke of it in a remarkably mature and insightful way. All of them were really much brighter individuals than I ever would have expected.
My favorite recent one is little man.
My personal top three documentaries:
A few stunning documentaries that haven’t been mentioned yet:
Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey
Radio Bikini (first-hand accounts of US atomic tests at Bikini Atoll)
Fastpitch
The Cruise
Hearts of Darkness
I’d provide IMDb links and synopses, but I’ve burned my hand and typing is a little slow tonight.
One I saw last Saturday :- Sisters in Law .
This is a fascinating documentary about a group of women lawyers and judges in a small town in the Cameroon, and their efforts to bring to justice wife-beaters and child molesters. The film has won over a dozen awards in in various international film festivals.