![]() (Press play on this now.) No one could have predicted that Agnes Varda and the gentleman known simply as JR would be the screen duo of 2017. She’s a 89-year-old pioneer of the French New Wave and an elder stateswoman of world cinema he’s a 34-year-old enfant terrible of the photography world that loves street art and perpetual sunglasses-wearing. In a year in which toxic masculinity finally started getting called out (even as it still infected the highest office in the land), it was remarkably profound to watch this group of hard men try to atone for past behavior, find peace and try to put an end to such socially corrosive behavior. One of the most intense documentaries of recent memory, filmmaker Jairus McLeary put you front and center as these participants cry, scream, lash out and let it all out – you will not see a more moving testament to the power of healing. And they’re determined to help their new friends from the outside world untangle their own traumas and self-destructive tendencies as well. These prisoners are doing hard time for serious crimes they’re also trying to get to the bottom of not only what landed them behind bars but what’s at the root of their issues as well. Plus you get Elvis Costello narrating a clip of his dad doing a goofy version of “If I Had a Hammer.” Essential.Īt Folsom Prison, there’s a program called “Inside Circle” that, for four days, allows select individuals to attend group therapy sessions with convicts. And most importantly, you get a slowly developing picture of how an institutions is really the sum of their working parts, especially when it’s something as significant as a place in danger of having its currencies – information and communication – devalued. ![]() can be bartered over budgetwise, or simply help somebody read up on cancer research. ![]() You see how these vast stores of books, microfiche reels, etc. You get a front row seat to intellectuals discussing history and poets and musicians entertaining audiences, as well as people arguing in back rooms over funding such endeavors. His look at the New York Public Library and its smaller borough-based branches, however, almost feels like a career summation. Like we said, it was an incredible year for docs.)įor 50 years and counting, Frederick Wiseman has been taking his cameras into army barracks, insane asylums, community-council meetings, department stores, slaughterhouses, high schools, hospitals, you name it – places where people do a job and play and learn how to live in a society. You should hunt all of these down as well. (Honorable mentions also go out to: Casting JonBenet, The Challenge, Contemporary Color, Dawson City: Frozen Time, I Called Him Morgan, Jane, Last Men in Aleppo, May It Last, Oklahoma City, Rat Film, 78/52 and Turn It Around: The Story of East Bay Punk. All of them, however, are not only worth your time but make for vital viewing – snapshots and state-of-the-nation addresses that reflect on the here and now, even when the events portrayed happened decades ago. Some may be tough to track down, while others are merely a Netflix click away. ![]() And that was just the tip of the great-vérité iceberg.īelow are the 10 best documentaries we caught in 2017. Don’t even get us started on the unclassifiable docu-hybrid on drunk Polish millennials that blew our mind. If there are indeed precious few positive things to say about 2017, you can at least declare that it was a strong year for docs – the last 12 months gave us marathon-length looks at musical legends and actors going off the deep end, stories of working-class families in Philly and woke convicts in Folsom Prison, portraits of anger on the streets of Ferguson and the City of Angels on fire. Man can not live on fiction alone, of course – and in an era when “fake news” has become a catch-all battle cry, the need for capturing and chronicling the world around us has only made documentary filmmaking that much more necessary.
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