Reality doesn’t bite. Well, okay, at times it does. A number of our choices for the best documentaries of the year capture turbulent realities, ominous politics, and, on occasion, stark tragedy. That’s one of the missions of nonfiction film: to put us in touch with dark things that are too often hidden away. But our list casts a wider net than that. It includes tales of hope and daring, of fighting back, of art and inspiration, of the heroism of ordinary people…and extraordinary people. What the best documentaries of 2024 add up to is nothing less than a feast of reality.
The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem
An indispensible lesson in digital history that tracks the creation and rise of 4Chan — the online universe where outrageous satires, the bro anarchy of “Jackass” stunts, and a free-floating impotent political rage fused into an “outlaw” stance of permanent rebellion. But the movie also captures how 4Chan spawned QAnon, and considering the significance of QAnon (i.e., the fact that half the country now thinks batshit psychotic fantasy scenarios are the essence of reality), it’s shocking to see that its creation was essentially a fluke. The conspiracy theory that became Pizzagate was created as a goof; then people started to believe it. “The Antisocial Network” captures how the hackers and programmers of 4Chan wanted eyeballs and would do anything to get them. QAnon brainwashed the nation, but in its way it was the fulfillment of their viral dream. —Owen Gleiberman
Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy
The scariest and most penetrating political documentary of the year, though the media mostly ignored it. It captures how Donald Trump, in the time he has spent setting himself up to be an authoritarian leader, fashioned himself into a president who could mesh perfectly with the goals of Christian nationalism, a movement built around the dream of transforming America into a theocracy. The film’s directors, Stephen Uljaki and Chris Jones, go deep into the roots of this crusade, which believes not only in trashing democracy but in undermining the very concept of free will that’s at the heart of Christian theology. The movement’s goal is a nation ruled by a higher power than the Constitution — ruled by the will of God, as interpreted by His white Christian followers. —OG
The Bibi Files
An extraordinary exposé of how Benjamin Netanyahu has prolonged the war in Gaza to escape his own corruption scandal. Alexis Bloom’s riveting film is built around leaked tapes of the interrogation of Netanyahu by police. He’s as sly an actor as he is ruthless an autocrat. The movie is about how the accusations Netanyahu has been trying to squirm out from under since 2019, when he was first indicted on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, have changed his identity as a politician. Bloom makes a powerful case that Netanyahu’s alliance with the far-right fringe of Israeli politics, which has culminated in his grotesque compulsion to prolong the massacre in Gaza with no end in sight, has been driven almost entirely by his fear of being toppled and imprisoned, to the point that he’s willing to rip a hole in Israeli society to avoid it. —OG
Black Box Diaries
Shiori Ito’s tightly wound, heart-on-the-sleeve procedural documentary takes place over the course of five years, during which Ito, a Japanese journalist, tracks her arduous struggle to bring to justice the older, more powerful man who sexually assaulted her — the renowned TV reporter Noriyuki Yamaguchi, whose friends in high places included the prime minister. The film switches between modes of formal investigation and first-hand confessional, as archival footage blends into candid conversational iPhone videos and audio recordings. Without undue manipulation or sentimentality, the film pulls our emotions in sharp extremes that mirror the peaks and valleys of this hard-fought case. —Guy Lodge
Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg
It’s a portrait of the legendary rock ‘n’ roll scenester that captures her glamour and artistry. Svetlana Zill and Alexis Bloom’s film is most indelible, though, in laying bare the destructive underbelly of the rock counterculture. The filmmakers celebrate everything that made Anita Pallenberg a feminine force ahead of her time — one of those Olympian women of the ’60s who strode into a room and commanded it. But they also show you that she and Keith Richards had a complex relationship that was a crazy doom spiral. In addition to Pallenberg’s unpublished memoir, the film is built around a towering archive of home-movie footage, so that we feel we’re right there with Anita and Keith. We experience the sweet tranquility of lives being lived, but also the trail of wreckage they left. One of the darkest portraits of the rock world ever made, the movie captures how Pallenberg’s willingness to push everything to the edge and over it was inextricable from her cracked glamour. —OG
Dahomey
Mati Diop’s exquisitely strange film is a meditation on the return of looted artifacts to Benin. Diop, the director of “Atlantics,” has made a dreamlike, discursive, fantasy-inflected foray into the wildly contested issues surrounding the restitution of treasures stolen by colonial powers. The film starts in the basement level of the Parisian Musée du Quai Branly, where several of the artifacts, including a wooden statue of King Gezo, who ruled the kingdom of Dahomey in the mid-1800s, and whose pose looks irresistibly like he’s giving a Black Power salute, are being packed up ready for transportation. Then, suddenly, we’re hearing the thoughts of statue-Gezo himself, as he contemplates his long years of captivity. His words flavor the film with a mysterious unease, as every celebratory impulse about the artifacts’ return is complicated by a far greater ambivalence about whether actual redress can ever be made. —Jessica Kiang
Daughters
Natalie Rae and Angela Patton’s moving film follows four girls — Aubrey Smith, 5, Santana Stewart, 10, Ja’Ana Crudup, 11, and Raziah Lewis, 15 — as they head toward an encounter with their imprisoned fathers. Patton is the founder of Girls for Change, the organization that launched its Date with Dad program 12 years earlier. As the day nears when the men will attend a dance and luncheon in the repurposed prison gymnasium, reunited with the daughters they’ve been separated from, the film creates visually lyrical moments that connect viewers with the young ones’ sorrows, fears, insights, and hopes. And when the dance arrives, it does not disappoint. The filmmakers suture wounds, but they also make the familial and cultural scars apparent. The movie adds depth and dimension to stories of incarceration, even as it remains both the daughters’ story and their keepsake. —Lisa Kennedy
Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes
There’s now a whole genre of celebrity documentary built around the playing of old analog tape recordings. Nanette Burstein’s luscious and enveloping portrait is based on interviews that Elizabeth Taylor did with the journalist Richard Meryman, starting in 1964, for a book he was researching, and Taylor’s voice is singular in its expressiveness — she is insolent, mournful, sexy, outraged, dripping with debauched delight, and always casually candid. Her words invest even the most familiar events with a revealing intimacy. “The Lost Tapes” shows us how Taylor’s life became a mythology, especially when her romance with Richard Burton got elevated into a global love story, as the two became the first celebrities to see their private lives played out in the new international mass media (the idea of “paparazzi” literally came into being around them). The film is filled with astonishing clips of the private and public Liz, which cue you to see how expressive her beauty was, and what an array of moods she possessed. —OG
Ennio
Ennio Morricone, the maestro of the movie soundtrack, gets the entrancing documentary he deserves. It’s a 156-minute portrait built around an extensive interview with Morricone, conducted when he was in his late 80s (it also includes comments from a murderers’ row of filmmakers and artists). The film captures how he scaled his own wild peak, inventing his own kind of beauty, his own transcendent cacophony. Yet you would never have guessed it to look at him. He had the aura of a young professor, or maybe a tax accountant. And the more we hear his music, in all its fabulous and voluptuous eclecticism (the swooning pop songs; the spaghetti Western scores that sounded like ghostly Mexican rock ‘n’ roll frontier acid trips; the political-drama soundtracks for films like “The Battle of Algiers” that were as charged-up as the revolutions they were about; the transcendent romanticism that infused his beloved later work), the more we have the same thought: Where did it come from? “Ennio” devotes itself to Morricone’s music, but it’s also a study of his mischievously self-serious personality. He was channeling something, maybe nothing less than the mystery of cinema. —OG
Eno
Gary Hustwit’s groundbreaking film uses generative software to reorder itself with each viewing. Hustwit fills in the legend of Brian Eno, the ambient-music-innovator-turned-producer, by echoing the spirit of his art in the film’s very form. Eno started out, in Roxy Music, as a delicate sci-fi gamine, a glam geek in thrift-shop drag. As he began to create his solo albums, he held onto his image as pop’s harlequin eccentric, a mystique that carried over to his fabled work as a producer with Davie Bowie, Talking Heads, Devo, U2, and Coldplay. As a documentary, “Eno” is sleek, seamless, and compelling, though one of the reasons it feels that way is that Hustwit, drawing on 500 hours of film and video from Eno’s personal archives, has made a movie that’s all Brian Eno. As a talking head, he turns out to be a brainy but also funny and grounded middle-class British chap with great stories to tell. The film uses his observations to fuse his present and past in a way that accentuates their musical and spiritual continuity. —OG
Ernest Cole: Lost and Found
Raoul Peck’s haunting film rediscovers the fearless South African photographer who showed the world what apartheid looked like — what it was — in his 1967 book “House of Bondage.” But after moving to New York City, he became a ghost. Cole’s photographs take up the entire film, and they’re a revelation to revel in. His street scenes are vérité dioramas, psychological portraits of life inside a caste system. He caught the underlying violence of apartheid, and that made him a celebrated figure. But wandering through New York with his camera, chronicling a freedom unlike anything he’d ever known, it wasn’t a freedom he felt he could totally join. The movie chronicles his descent, but it also turns into a detective thriller, as it follows the process of discovery when negatives of 60,000 of his photographs that had never been seen were found in three safety-deposit boxes in a bank vault in Stockholm. (No one knows how they go there.) Watching “Lost and Found,” you’re moved by a life that veered into tragedy, but by the end you feel the ghost is speaking to you. —OG
The Greatest Night in Pop
A documentary for anyone who loves “We Are the World,” or even for those of us who look at that legendary charity single with some serious questions but are fascinated by the phenomenon of it. The movie puts us backstage at the into-the-night session that took place at A&M Recording Studios in Los Angeles immediately after the American Music Awards on January 28, 1985. In a sense, “We Are the World” always was a documentary — the famous music video that captured the song as it was being recorded, and was also a kind of pop-stars-reveal-themselves psychodrama in miniature. And Bao Nguyen’s film allows us to revel in that vibe and extend it. With Lionel Richie as its chief nostalgist and tour guide, the film is certainly “celebratory,” but it’s also honestly assembled and intensely pleasurable. It pulls back the curtain on the perpetual smoke screen of music-god fame. —OG
How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer is the kind of writer people now tend to look at and appraise by saying, “He could never get away with that today.” He was feeding the fire of controversy and provocation 50 and 60 years ago, yet it was all part of his mission to make a difference in his time, to wake us all up. Jeff Zimbalist’s film captures the majesty of the Mailer experience, and its dark side too. It channels Mailer the writer, the celebrity, the failure, the boozing-and-drugging underworld-of-the-’50s searcher, the culture warrior, the literary comingler of fiction and reality, the filmmaker, the serial husband and paterfamilias, the talk-show firebrand, the self-dramatizing hoodlum who stabbed his wife…and the obsessive artist who wrote sentences so lyrical in their perception that they could change your imagination. The film looks at Mailer with a supreme fusion of understanding and critical wisdom. —OG
Look Into My Eyes
Director Lana Wilson meets a diverse group of New York City psychics and clairvoyants, perceiving them closely enough that believing them is beside the point. The result is a funny, compassionate portrait that’s most interested in how these allegedly second-sighted folk function on an everyday basis, and what drives ordinary people of different persuasions to seek out their services. The seven psychics Wilson has assembled to interview and observe are a diverse group — four of them women, three men; four people of color, three white — with an equally varied range of approaches to their calling, from New Age-y solemnity to fairground-style showmanship and sparkle. The film walks a deft line between the ironic and the honestly receptive: Hardline skeptics will be entertained, others peculiarly affected. Yet you needn’t have a firm stance on the afterlife and its accessibility to be tickled by a pet medium bragging that she could diagnose a cat’s urinary tract infection through sheer telepathy. Wilson’s film suggests that communing with the dead may just be a roundabout way of reaching the living. —GL
Martha
R.J. Cutler’s terrific film taps into everything we love, and don’t, about Martha Stewart. It takes us through her rise and fall and rise, a transfixing saga enhanced by Cutler’s ongoing meditation on The Meaning of Martha. The film captures how Stewart’s penetration into American culture seems, in hindsight, as inevitable as it was unlikely. It traces how she started off as a model, then became a New York stockbroker, then moved with her publishing-magnate husband to Westport, Conn., where they bought a fixer-upper, Turkey Hill Farm, whose fixing up, by Martha (she hand-painted the entire house while listening to the Watergate hearings), became the prototype for her brand of obsessively tasteful “perfection.” The movie shows us that Stewart had a vision, which turned her into the first self-made woman billionaire in America. Yet what she created and marketed was the idea of a high-powered homemaker for women who no longer wanted to be homemakers. She showed you all the good things you could aspire to, but she helped establish the aspirational culture of the 21st century as a certain unattainable proxy dream thing. In a way, she put a turkey in puff pastry so you didn’t have to. —OG
Nocturnes
A hypnotic documentary about moths, one that unfolds to reveal vital climate-change concerns. In northeastern India, scientist Mangi Mungee and her indigenous assistant partake in the nightly ritual of suspending a cloth sheet and illuminating it with the bright lights in the middle of a forest. Slowly but surely, hundreds of moths flock to this makeshift station, so that Mansi can observe, photograph, and eventually measure them. Fluttering wings and the echoes of trilling insects make up much of the serene soundscape, as the movie observes the moths from a distance but also creates aesthetic connections between their lives and ours, in ways we need to lean forward to observe and understand. —Siddhant Adlakha
No Other Land
A frank, devastating protest against Israel’s West Bank occupation. The young Palestinian lawyer and activist Basel Adra is a resident of Masafer Yatta, a network of Palestinian villages in the Southern Hebron Hills, recently subject to an aggressive campaign of demolition and forced transfer by the Israeli army. As his community is literally bulldozed before his eyes, Adra has little scope to do anything but keep his camera on. “I have nothing else, only my phone,” he despairs. That, thankfully, is not nothing. In this shattering documentary, Adra’s witnessing becomes ours. The film presents horrifying footage with candid sangfroid, contributing little commentary where the images speak for themselves. “No Other Land” might be called timely, though through its years-spanning depiction of both the mortal danger and mental strain of living under occupation, it underlines a situation that has been at crisis point for a long time. The filmmaking is tight and considered, with nimble editing (by Adra and his co-directors, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor) that captures the sense of time at once passing and looping back on itself. —GL
Plastic People
An essential examination of how plastic is literally invading us all. We’ve long known that it’s bad for the environment, but Ben Addelman and Ziya Tong’s movie documents what it’s doing to our bodies. The film focuses in on the issue of how microplastics — plastic particles that are less than 5mm in length, though the key ones may be microscopic — have invaded our food, our water, our air, and ourselves, toxifying us from within. (It presents powerful evidence that plastic is a major contributor to rising infertility levels.) It also offers a fascinating history of how plastic evolved in the 20th century and gradually took over, with Big Oil and Big Plastic now joined at the hip. In its way, “Plastic People” is a cautionary horror movie. It could have been called “Attack of the Killer Polymers.” —OG
Source : https://variety.com/lists/best-documentaries-of-2024/the-bibi-files/