Sniper: Inside the Crosshairs (2009)

Had I given this choice a little more thought, I would have saved it for Memorial Day weekend. At the time, I just picked it for the 90-minute runtime and the change in genre from what I'd seen lately.

Specifically, it's a documentary about some of the most accomplished living snipers in the U.S. Army. Some may have been the MVPs of their platoons, key to winning battles that were otherwise not in their favor. Others were impressive in breaking records. Personally, I didn't bother remembering their names, because I took more interest in the technical side: physics and other factors to consider for efficacy.

Daughters (2024)

I don't remember reading about this documentary before. Most likely, I added it to my list because it's set in my long-time hometown. And unlike most DC pics, it has nothing to do with the federal government. It's all residential Washington, albeit nowhere I recognize.

The Date With Dad program assembles girls whose fathers are all in the same jail and buses them there. Then they have something of a fancy ball for a few hours. This doc focuses on four dads and four daughters, the latter ranging from age five to the teens. We also get epilogues one and three years later.

Dick Johnson Is Dead (2020)

I chose this largely because it was the shortest movie on my Netflix list, at 89 minutes, and I got a late start that evening. But there were other good reasons to watch. For one, I hadn't seen a documentary in nearly half a year. For another, DJID sounded singular.

Seventh Day Adventist documentarian Kirsten Johnson (whom I knew best as the director of cinematography for This Film Is Not Yet Rated) believes that her father, Dick, in the early stages of dementia, is not long for this world. Her way of coping with this is to have him and a bunch of professionals fake his death by several means, stage a funeral, and depict him in heaven.

The Look of Silence (2014)

Yet again, I chose a viewing based on what was about to drop off my Netflix list. It's another documentary with more talking than anything else, but at least it's on a subject I knew almost nothing about.

This is a companion piece to 2012's The Act of Killing, similarly directed by Joshua Oppenheimer (no relation) and an anonymous partner. Here we follow optometrist Adi Rukun, sometimes providing his services or hanging with his cheerful children, but mostly interviewing older Indonesians who remember the anti-communist purge of the mid-'60s, along with younger relatives. Many of the seniors had a hand in the massacre of hundreds of thousands and were never penalized for it, because they had the government's blessing then and ever since. Adi also watches an earlier video of two men who had killed his brother.

Brothers After War (2025)

This is the first documentary sequel I've ever seen. Brothers at War (2009) escaped my notice, but this one has a much higher IMDb rating, albeit with few votes yet. When I happened to be very close to the theater, I picked this viewing partly for a convenient start time and partly because someone I trust had endorsed it.

Director Jake Rademacher has surprisingly many literal brothers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here he pays visits to them and some veteran friends, including women, to see how they're doing. (None of my sources name them all.) Some are doing quite well; others are struggling on at least one front. They all know soldiers who died either in battle or later by suicide.

My Octopus Teacher (2020)

My Netflix list has gotten too samey. I poked around for something short (85 minutes) and unlike what I'd seen lately. It occurred to me that not only had I not seen a documentary in months; I hadn't seen a nature documentary in years. Why not one with an intriguing title?

In 2018, naturalist Craig Foster goes diving near Cape Town and discovers a common octopus covered in shells for deception. He decides to watch her daily for a year. At first she shies away from him; then she sometimes clings to him in apparent playfulness. He is tempted to protect her from predation and starvation, despite the widely accepted rule against interference. Of course, a year is a long time for an octopus....

Am I Racist? (2024)

I have not seen Matt Walsh's first documentary, What Is a Woman?, partly because it requires a Daily Wire subscription and partly because I feel like I know enough from ads. Possibly everyone's opinion of it depends entirely on whether they already agreed with him on the issue. Meanwhile, his second doc, AIR?, is doing quite well at the box office for a non-Hollywood effort and has high marks on both IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, tho pro critics were slow to begin reviewing it. Since at least one theater stopped running it due to backlash, I decided not to wait long.

This time, Walsh acts like a cross between Michael Moore and Sacha Baron Cohen, only conservative. He goes on an "antiracist journey" that includes reading bestselling books on the subject, getting an online DEI certificate, meeting with self-styled experts as well as regular folk off the street, and eventually giving his own course that purports to make white people less racist -- until he "realizes" that such efforts appear to help nothing but the teachers' finances.

14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible (2021)

It appears that most of the features left on my Netflix list are upwards of two hours long. That's one reason I chose this, at 101 minutes. Another is that it's set in cold areas, in contrast to the present weather where I live. Finally, it seemed the closest thing to another Free Solo.

Nirmal Purja, who's also an executive producer, is a high-altitude mountaineer (HAM?). In April 2019, he launches Project Possible, which entails scaling all 14 Asian peaks that exceed 8,000 meters above sea level -- by winter, dramatically breaking several records along the way. At one point, he and his team have to rally to persuade the federal government of China to let them proceed, but that may be the least of their troubles.

Jim Henson: Idea Man (2024)

I was just short of eight years old when Jim Henson died. To me, the Muppets have never been the same since. I already knew a fair bit about him before this documentary arrived, but after seeing enough hype, I decided it would make a nice palate cleanser.

The 108 minutes consist largely of relatives and co-workers talking about the life of Henson, peppered with brief clips of his works. Like Won't You Be My Neighbor?, it has a few supplementary simple animations. Unlike WYBMN?, it holds pretty strongly to chronological order. There's little focus on Henson's later efforts such as Fraggle Rock.

They Shall Not Grow Old (2018)

A preview had intrigued me ahead of this documentary's release, but then I forgot. Seems nobody in my circles was talking about it, despite Peter Jackson directing (not that my circles frequently discuss documentaries). Only when Netflix announced that it would stop streaming did I jump at the chance. A 99-minute runtime for the theatrical cut helped.

There is no main narrator herein. Instead, we get recorded recollections from various British World War I veterans (who, ironically, sound like they did grow old) overlaying video, photos, and editorial cartoons. We don't learn any names before the end credits, so it manages to be generally anonymous yet decidedly personal.

Flee (2021)

I was not aware that a nearly fully animated feature with voice actors not all playing themselves could be called a documentary, tho some have come close. Waltz with Bashir may have been the first I saw that truly qualified. Anyway, I watched Flee partly to complete another year's worth of Academy Best Animated Feature nominees and partly because, on a flight where I had trouble hearing the dialog through earbuds, subtitles came in handy.

Amin (not his real name) lives in Denmark for quite some time without telling anyone, even his fiancé (not fiancée), what his life was like before. As the trauma interferes with his conviction to marry, he finally opens up to director Jonas Poher Rasmussen about how his family of six had to get away from the rigors of wartime Afghanistan and then Soviet Russia when he was a teen. For most of the story, they were not all together.

Born Into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids (2004)

I had seen my previous dead serious documentary feature (as opposed to kiddie fluff) more than two years ago. These viewings may not be fun, but I think they're enriching enough to be worth my unhappiness now and then.

It sounds like Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman did not set out to document the children in particular, let alone to change their lives. Zana wanted to photograph the prostitutes, who were disinclined to agree, since they feared legal trouble. To get on their good side, she launched a junior photography class. Then she realized that she might be able to help the kids have more of a choice for what to do in the future, whether that meant professional camerawork or just learning and living in a better environment.

Summer of Soul (2021)

Another unplanned first for this blog: two documentaries in a row. Of course, this one's entirely different. It's also the first Questlove-directed "jawn," because he's too Philadelphian to use "joint" like Spike Lee.

The Harlem Cultural Festival sure got overshadowed, not least because it conflicted in part with both Woodstock and the Apollo 11 mission. (Marketers called it "Black Woodstock" despite it beginning more than a month sooner.) But that's no reason the footage had to sit in storage for half a century before coming to light. It was still a significant event with a bunch of famous figures, including one band that also performed at Woodstock: Sly and the Family Stone.

Bears (2014)

My gosh. I never reviewed a nature documentary on this blog before. The only one I recall watching after 2007 was obscure and in Spanish, so I opted out of writing about it. Yet I usually enjoy the subgenre when I give it a chance. Maybe I should stock up.

Speaking of stocking up, that's largely the focus herein. A brown bear, whom the makers dub Sky, takes her two new cubs on a long trek across Alaskan wilderness to find enough food to get them all through hibernation. Obstacles include an avalanche, a flood, a tenaciously prowling wolf, and even adult male brown bears who don't have a code against cannibalism. Can the whole family beat 50% odds?

For Sama (2019)

It's not often that I watch inherently tragic documentaries, no matter how honored they are. In this case, I accepted a Meetup invitation to see it in a theater. That meant more immersion, but at least I wouldn't feel alone in bearing it.

Made with a home movie camera and a few clips apparently from surveillance cameras, FS begins its story in 2011, when the then-18-year-old videographer, going by Waad Al-Kateab (her real name is not public information), attended the University of Aleppo. If that city name rings a bell, you should have a good idea what the focal conflict is. Waad's narration partly addresses her toddler daughter, Sama, to whom she wants to explain why their family didn't escape sooner and why they had a baby at all in a setting like that.

Apollo 11 (2019)

I have not seen First Man, partly because of how I feel about previous Damien Chazelle hits and partly because I don't trust its accuracy. But this year marks the 50th anniversary of the first human lunar landing, so I felt like honoring the event somehow. Besides, an esteemed documentary was bound to teach me something.

Unlike most docs, this one has no narrator, unless you count contemporary audio clips from Walter Cronkite among others. Nor do we have anyone speaking directly to the camera, as in a portion of an interview. It's all old, sometimes previously unpublicized footage. The only additions are periods of dramatic, often bass-heavy music, using only '60s instruments.

Free Solo (2018)

You may think, "Aw, man, you're breaking up the pattern of Halloween movies for the month." But if one genre ever gets scarier than horrors and thrillers, it's documentaries. After all, they tend to depict real dangers. Not that I've seen many such.

The title refers to the practice of climbing a rock face without ropes or other assistance. The focal figure is Alex Honnold, 33, who does it as a career, not a hobby. Oh, he gets into safer forms of climbing now and then, especially at super-hard locations like El Capitan. But he keeps hoping to be the first to free-solo up "El Cap" (which I heard as "Al Capp") someday. Naturally, this feature builds up to that day.

Won't You Be My Neighbor? (2018)

Like so many in my generation and, well, neighboring ones, I had Mister Rogers' Neighborhood as part of my childhood. I was never more than a casual fan, and I don't remember nearly as much of it as I do of, say, Sesame Street. What little I saw of MRN in later years mainly just struck me as boring. But between the trailer and director Morgan Neville's 20 Feet from Stardom cred, I decided this documentary was my best bet for getting my money's worth on MoviePass this month.

The telling of Fred Rogers' story is not entirely linear, nor is the footage all chronologically presented. It basically starts with him just discovering television as an adult, right before he had planned to go to seminary. Children's programming at that time was less than wholesome, and he sought to change that pattern, among others. Initially, he remained behind the scenes of The Children's Corner, until he felt the need for a more direct approach.

Shalom Bollywood: The Untold Story of Indian Cinema (2017)

This may be the most obscure film I've ever reviewed. It presently has no Wikipedia entry and only seven votes on IMDb. But since I usually like documentaries about the industry, I gave it higher priority than other entries in the local Jewish film festival that had my dad interested. (The few docs directed by Danny Ben-Moshe that don't have a Jewish focus are even more obscure.)

As you probably knew, Jews make up such a small percentage of the Indian population that most lists of religions in India lump them under "other." But in the second most populous nation, that still allows several thousand -- more than enough to leave a significant impact on Bollywood. In particular, they've had the advantage of a relatively permissive faith with regard to depictions on screen. Here's a hint: The poster shows dancing cartoon women.

F for Fake (1974)

It makes sense to me that the last movie to be directed by Orson Welles would be quite different. Not just from his other works but from pretty much any other. Some reviewers have reservations about calling it a documentary, tho I don't know how else to classify it unless "essay" counts as a genre.

The project had begun as a doc on Elmyr de Hory, possibly the world's most successful art forger. (Of course, a more successful one might never get caught.) It still focuses on him in large part, but Welles expanded it to liars in general, including Clifford Irving, phony biographer of both de Hory and Howard Hughes; Oja Kodar, Croatian actress and muse of sorts; and...Welles himself.