The 166 Documentaries Competing for Oscar's Love

Yesterday AMPAS released the list of the documentaries that are eligible for this year's Oscar. The list is always crazy long (even longer than the other top 'specialty' prize -foreign language film). Members of the doc branch have 166 films to sift through from which they will draw a final 15 and then vote from those 15 for the 5 nominees. We wish the Foreign Film committee would do the same since it strikes us as odd that they only get 9 finalists. But we digress.

Because Glenn Dunks does such fine work for us here in his series Doc Corner, we've already written up 24 of these contenders. If the title is linked below it goes to our review. The complete list of eligible documentaries follows after the jump...

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Doc Corner: DOC NYC - Michael Moore's 'Fahrenheit 11/9'

DOC NYC is currently underway in New York and one of the great things is that alongside all the world, American, and New York premieres, the festival includes significant documentary titles from throughout the year. We’re using this opportunity to catch up with the latest from Michael Moore, Fahrenheit 11/9, which screened at the fest and is still in limited release across America.

Love him or loathe him – or probably more likely, sit somewhere in the middle of the two emotions – it’s hard to overstate Michael Moore’s importance to American documentary filmmaking. It’s not often that documentaries become pop culture touchstones and he has several that have become just that. The film that this new title is theoretically a sequel to will likely remain the highest grossing documentary of all time for the foreseeable future of cinema. It is interesting to note, however, that the two biggest zeitgeist-hitting political documentaries of the new century – that would be Fahrenheit 9/11 and An Inconvenient Truth – have floundered at the box office with much-belated sequels. Are audiences simply too bombarded by news that the thought of going to see a two-hour movie about the horrors of modern politics is just too much to bear?

Moore's decision to make a sequel to Fahrenheit 9/11 makes a lot of sense in theory, although watching the final product is a curious experience.

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Doc Corner: Memories of the past in four new films at DOC NYC

By Glenn Dunks

DOC NYC starts today in New York where something like 100 films will screen. Of the 300+ screenings and events, there are 135 features and 43 world premieres including the just announced screening of the once-thought-lost Aretha Franklin concert doc Amazing Grace. We will be looking at a just a small slice of the selections based loosely around themes. Part one is focused on memories of the past returning to the surface and involves four films which are about grieving families, the NYC art scene of the 1960s, an underappreciated photographer, and the rise of the Nickelodeon network.

EVELYN
Despite his familiarity with war zones in the Oscar-nominated Virunga from the frontlines of Congo’s bloody poaching crisis and Oscar-winning short The White Helmets from the Syrian civil war, director Orlando von Einsiedel has apparently been less well-equipped to deal with the wars of his own family’s anguish. His latest film, recently nominated for the BIFA Best Documentary prize, is an examination of his own family following the suicide of his brother many years ago. Sending himself out into the Scottish highlands alongside various family members and childhood friends for a series of memorial treks, he hopes the wintry walks will allow his family a chance to talk and confront their pain head-on like they have never done before...

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Doc Corner: Frederick Wiseman's 'Monrovia, Indiana'

By Glenn Dunks

Depending on your point of few, Frederick Wiseman films exist in a realm of apoliticicm or are stealth political missiles. I believe it’s a little bit somewhere in between. It is easy of course to see the markings of a political filmmaker in his works if you know where to look, and can be done so in essentially all of his works from his debut with Titicut Follies in 1967 right up to his most recent works In Jackson Heights and Ex Libris: The New York Public Library.

And yet he’s obviously no Michael Moore or Alex Gibney, and the way his camera silent observes with little regard for constructed narrative (at least in any traditional sense, although his films all tell a story) means that it is easy for his films to feel as if any political ideology that rises to the form of text is purely accidental.

With a film such as Wiseman’s latest – his 42^nd and his seventh this decade – it is once again a little from column a and a little from column b. How much you’re willing to indulge, however, may vary considering the topic of his patiently attentive eye is the town of Monrovia, Indiana, a god-fearing, gun-loving town in America’s rust belt that it’s all too easy to assign the moniker of “T***p Country”.

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Doc Corner (Surprise Weekend Edition!): 'The Price of Everything'

By Glenn Dunks

We took a week off recently due to office job duties so as a means of not getting behind in the schedule, we're posting a (for now) one-off weekend documentary review for your Sunday reading.

The world is a distressing place right now where seemingly everything is terrible. It’s only natural that documentary filmmaking would reflect this global tussle for law and democracy. If these films aren’t telling us something frightening and new then they at least usually these films at least attempt to show us something familiarly awful from a new angle or with an unfamiliar point of view. I’m here to tell you, however, that one of 2018’s most miserable moviegoing experiences isn’t about war or famine, disease or political unrest. Rather, it’s about the art world. A ghastly portrait of some of society’s worst impulses of greed and capitalist grotesquery.

The world of Nathaniel Kahn’s slickly polished and glossy yet hollow documentary The Price of Everything is one ripe for interrogation. And yet this film doesn’t take advantage of the uniquely wide-net of talent and personalities that it has access to. Among others, there’s the delightful yet sad parallels in name and career of Jeff Koons and Larry Poons, there’s Gerhard Richter albeit briefly, and there’s the back rooms of Sotheby’s of New York with Executive Vice President Amy Cappallazzo as she prepares for an auction worth obscene amounts of money including one painting by Henri Matisse that she ballparks at around a couple of hundred million dollars. Far out.

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