Best Documentaries 2020 Rotten Tomatoes

The first film to take full advantage of this change was Martin Kunert and Eric Manes’ Voices of Iraq, where 150 DV cameras were sent to Iraq during the war and passed out to Iraqis to record themselves. In Britain, a number of different filmmakers came together under John Grierson. Grierson, Alberto Cavalcanti, Harry Watt, Basil Wright, and Humphrey Jennings amongst others succeeded in blending propaganda, information, and education with a more poetic aesthetic approach to documentary.

Animal (TV series)

Some examples are explicitly educational, while others serve as observational works; docufiction movies notably include aspects of dramatic storytelling that are clearly fictional. Documentaries are informative at times, and certain types are often used within schools as a resource to teach various principles. Documentary filmmakers have a responsibility to be truthful to their vision of the world without intentionally misrepresenting a topic. The team behind The Tinder Swindler (which is also worth checking out on Netflix!) returned in 2024 with American Nightmare, a look into what was, at first, dubbed the ‘real-life Gone Girl’ case.

• Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk’s distressing but powerful documentary follows The Star’s team of journalists as they uncover the abuse and corruption as well as the courageous world-class athletes who suffered from it.
• Outside of the journalism realm, you can find him writing angular riffs in progressive metal band, Prognosis, in which he slings an 8-string Strandberg Boden Original, churning that low string through a variety of tunings.
• Nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar, the film discusses the economic trap of the prison-industrial complex and illustrates how America’s shameful racial history has by no means ended, but only evolved.
• Kopple and Pennebaker, for instance, choose non-involvement (or at least no overt involvement), and Perrault, Rouch, Koenig, and Kroitor favor direct involvement or even provocation when they deem it necessary.

While your enjoyment may vary depending on your tolerance for experimentation, EW’s critic writes, “The Rolling Thunder Revue was Dylan’s personal magical mystery tour — and in Scorsese’s hands, there’s no shortage of magic or mystery.” —K.J. EW’s critic calls the film “an enthralling look at the artistic process,” especially in its depiction of an A-lister at the height of his box-office powers who’s able to get away with anything and everything. A film that put event organizer Andy King on the map as the poster boy for hard-working employees, Fyre is fascinating, exasperating, and one of the ultimate tales of scamming gone wrong.

Taylor opens up about her struggles with feuds and fame, her issues with disordered eating, her political frustrations, and ultimately, the responsibility she feels towards her fans, her music, and her legacy. A film for Swifties, music lovers, and anyone interested in learning more about one of the most successful artists working today, Miss Americana will, as EW’s reviewer writes, make “you wish you’d seen more of this Taylor a long time ago.” —I.G. While Living Without Money the footage often speaks for itself, the value of this documentary comes from real-life actors and artists discussing how those cultural depictions shaped not only the societal perception of trans people but also how they view themselves.

Documentaries to Stream, from Deep Dives to Celebrity Spotlights

Nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar, the film discusses the economic trap of the prison-industrial complex and illustrates how America’s shameful racial history has by no means ended, but only evolved. Filmed in the late 1980’s Paris is Burning offers us a completely one-of-a-kind glimpse into the world of drag and ballroom culture at a time just before its ‘golden age’ was considered over. Paris is Burning does what all great documentaries of its kind should, which is to teach us about a subculture know little about while also humanizing the people who inhabit it.

Research into information gathering, as a behavior, and the sharing of knowledge, as a concept, has noted how documentary movies were preceded by the notable practice of documentary photography. This has involved the use of singular photographs to detail the complex attributes of historical events and continues to a certain degree to this day, with an example being the conflict-related photography achieved by popular figures such as Mathew Brady during the American Civil War. Documentary movies evolved from the creation of singular images in order to convey particular types of information in depth, using film as a medium. Performers stand in for the two eldest siblings, and Tunisian and Egyptian actress Hend Sabry plays Olfa, but interviews with the real-life Olfa and her two youngest daughters are also heavily featured.

He is also a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and Critics Choice Association. You can also find his byline at RogerEbert.com, Vulture, The Companion, FOX Digital, and elsewhere. As a music-tech nerd, there’s a lot to like in “Resynator”; watching Tavel and her cohorts pick away at the device, marveling at it, unearthing new things about its infancy and the marketing, is downright infectious for gearheads who’ve salivated over Minimoogs in the past. As Tavel gets the device working again, we’re treated to a bevy of cameos from artists ranging from Gotye to Fred Armisen trying it out, building to a beautiful montage as a whole generation of artists discover and re-discover this novel new way to make music. The order reflects Tomatometer scores (as of December 31, 2021) after adjustment from our ranking formula, which compensates for variation in the number of reviews when comparing movies or TV shows. In this style, there is a host who appears on camera, conducts interviews, and who also does voice-overs.

Her tears of sadness before the camera show how blind allegiance online — often posted for laughs — can wound real people. It was announced the feature-length film would be released by the streaming giant last week but no release date was slated. Now it’s been confirmed that the film, five years in the making, is set to be available to watch from December 31. The heroes of Orlando von Einsiedel’s compelling documentary are the park rangers at the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Virunga National Park, who risk their lives to conserve the beautiful environment and endangered mountain gorillas that live there. The richly layered, Oscar-nominated film illustrates how the animals and their home are endangered by poaching, oil exploration and political violence, documenting the rangers’ conservation work during 2012’s M23 rebellion. This astonishing, Oscar-winning documentary begins as a fairly straightforward investigation into a sports phenomenon, but unexpectedly balloons into something with greater global implications.

The world is a weird and wonderful place full of weird and wonderful people, stories and things. And, thanks to some of the best documentaries out there, we get a chance to grab a peek at them all. The directors of the movement take different viewpoints on their degree of involvement with their subjects. Kopple and Pennebaker, for instance, choose non-involvement (or at least no overt involvement), and Perrault, Rouch, Koenig, and Kroitor favor direct involvement or even provocation when they deem it necessary. In Canada, the Film Board, set up by John Grierson, was set up for the same propaganda reasons. It also created newsreels that were seen by their national governments as legitimate counter-propaganda to the psychological warfare of Nazi Germany orchestrated by Joseph Goebbels.

Seeing her from a distance, we viewers speculate about how Xavier Babudar’s upbringing with her might have led to his federal jail cell. The swirl of people surrounding Babudar further enriches the documentary. We meet Michael Lloyd, the mercurial and indefatigable bondsman who is on the hook for $80,000 if he can’t track down the suspect. The woman who stood at the end of Babudar’s fake pistol during his final bank robbery in Oklahoma, Payton Garcia, is a vulnerable and moral counterweight to the sports-fueled bravado of Chiefsaholic and his fellow self-proclaimed superfans. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Spool, as well as a Senior Staff Writer for Consequence.

All her life, she’s wondered about her late father, Don Tavel, who died when she was ten weeks old in a car accident; she’d grown up being told that he invented the synthesizer, only to learn that that wasn’t strictly true. However, he did invent something called the Resynator, a synth-like prototype that converts organic sounds into electronic ones. While he poured lots of time and money into hype and marketing for it (even earning the attention of Peter Gabriel at one point), the device ended up dead in the water. Long thought lost, the device ends up in Ali’s hands when she finds it in an attic. And so it goes, as Tavel attempts to piece the Resynator back together, just as she does her understanding of her father.

This documentary provides a revealing look at Abercrombie & Fitch’s glory days and the eventual fallout when people realized the company was openly discriminatory. What’s even more interesting are the interviews with customers who, at the time, never even gave it a second thought. Netflix is home to numerous documentaries about celebrities and artists, but few have led a life as fascinating as Nina Simone’s. Life and death are inexorably linked in this unique film by celebrated documentary cinematographer Kirsten Johnson (Cameraperson). As her father lives with dementia, Johnson stages various fictional scenarios in which he accidentally dies — from tripping down the stairs to getting hit by a falling air conditioner — which he charmingly acts out for the camera.