​Students at San Francisco’s top-ranked Lowell High School are struggling with an amount of academic stress that looks cruel and unrecognizable.  At this viewer’s Catholic high school in southern Indiana, upperclassmen competed for parking spots, not high-stakes entry into elite universities.  In Try Harder, Debbie Lum follows several seniors as they polish their resumes and their interview skills, all while considering the elephant in the room of how their race is helping or hurting their chances for something they aren’t sure they even want.  This is a fascinating look at the next generation’s world-beaters, unless they burn out in their 20’s under 6 figures of student debt.

​With Morgan Neville’s previous documentary on the life of Fred Rogers, Won’t You Be My Neighbor, I hadn’t been watching Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood on and off over the previous months, so all the clips of the show Neville used in his film didn’t seem repetitive or overdone.  There aren’t small children in my home who need the comfort of factory tours and Daniel Tiger that I’m overhearing in the background.  Thanks to the pandemic and a never-ending need for more content, that’s not the case with Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, currently available in its entirety on HBO Max.  This was a series I was actively revisiting in the wake of Neville’s newest documentary, Roadrunner, a biopic about Bourdain’s life that used many of the same clips from episodes I had just watched at home.  This is the most personal and happenstance of all the flaws in Neville’s film, his first miss since winning an Oscar for 20 Feet From Stardom.  Roadrunner provides little insight into Bourdain that he didn’t freely offer up himself, while also serving as an offensive hit piece and a speculative attempt into Bourdain’s suicide.  It seems impossible that a subject of such introspection could be dissected in this thin of a manner, but that’s what Roadrunner serves up to its audience.

​The second of Joshua Oppenheimer’s landmark documentary duo on the 1965 Indonesia leftist purge, The Look of Silence flips the perspective from those who did the killing to the relatives of those who were killed.  In Oppenheimer’s earlier Act of Killing, he gets some of the perpetrators, responsible for the deaths of somewhere between 500,000 to a million Indonesians and presently celebrated as national heroes, to recreate their deeds under the guise of a mythic film.  Bragging to a foreigner about what they did in that very strange and chilling film is one thing.  There’s a level of distance that Oppenheimer creates that allows the killers to be completely free in what they say.  With Look of Silence, Oppenheimer brings along a man whose brother was killed and lets him do the talking.  These two films, each inseparable from the other, are required viewing for any thinking citizen.  Darkly compelling and deeply human, Look of Silence is the antithesis to the hellish upside-down world of Act of Killing, a world that dominates Indonesia but festers with barely-contained rot and resentment.

For Sama stands alongside documentaries like Citizenfour in depicting the first draft of history.  The best of breed of the several Syrian Civil War docs that have chronicled a brutal and bloody period of the 21st century, Waad al-Kateab’s first-person film tracks the initial ecstatic hopes of revolutionary optimism through its fatalistic destruction in the bombed-out husk of Aleppo.  For an extra dose of you-are-there urgency, al-Kateab’s husband is a doctor drowning in emergency triage and surgery at one of Aleppo’s last working hospitals, providing plenty of opportunities for all the air to be sucked out of the screening room as he holds the life of one small child after another in his hands.  Al-Kateab narrates throughout, and the grief that undergirds her every sentence is less for her neighbors, because with so many of the randomly killed surrounding her, she would be unable to function if she mourned each loss.  Rather, the grief is for the lost opportunity of the Arab Spring which kicked off when she was a college student and an active participant when it spread to Syria.  Where once she planted gardens and laid down roots for a hopeful future, now she tunes out the constant thrum of Russian fighter jets and wonders where the next barrel bomb is going to indiscriminately land.  

Documentaries are rarely served by the documentarians themselves appearing in front of the camera.  Overheated navel-gazing ensues, or less irritatingly, they fail by being less interesting than the subject they’re filming.  The exception to this is Agnes Varda, a distinctive and unique presence who is welcome to talk about herself onscreen for as long as she wants.  In her beautiful Faces Places, the iconic French director teams up with youthful photographer JR for a trip through a lesser-seen France, far away from the streets of Paris.  The unlikely duo bring joy wherever they go, both to the blue-collar inhabitants of the countryside and to the viewer.

​Skateboarding experienced a cinematic moment in 2018, as three movies that heavily featured the sport and the ‘wayward’ teens who engage in it were released within months of each other.  The nonfiction one, Minding the Gap, was universally recognized as the best of the three, the other two being Mid90’s and Skate Kitchen.  Bing Liu’s debut documentary, sprung from his compulsion to shoot skate videos of himself and his friends from his teenage years, starts as a carefree exploration of several young men as they tear around Rockford, IL, but as Liu identifies the unspoken similarities in his and fellow principals Keire’s and Zack’s lives, the film escapes the gravity of their degraded post-industrial town and turns into something profound.  

​As far as physical human accomplishments go, the climbing of El Capitan, Yosemite Park’s 3000-foot monolith, without the aid of ropes or hooks or anything beyond calloused fingers is considerable.  The act signifies a kind of schoolyard one-upmanship when the peak of Everest is clogged with tourists who risk death, not so much from climbing the mountain but from freezing in long lines as they wait to take their picture at the top.  Climber Alex Honnold literally takes his life into his own hands as he thumbs his nose at these poseur-adventurers, and, in an incredible feat of filmmaking, directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin are right there with him as claws his way to the top.  Free Solo chronicles the how of this outlandish feat in spectacular, vertigo-inducing fashion, but it also captures the why.  The camera is not only in Honnold’s face during his climb, but it also interrogates the specific kind of person who would do something like this, refusing to be satisfied with stock ‘because it’s there’ shorthand.

Some stories are so gripping and dramatic that a newly-graduated film student could capably shape them into a watchable documentary.  Three Identical Strangers is one of these stories. Directed by Tim Wardle, this retelling of an 80’s afternoon talk show staple is fascinating enough on its surface.  The joy and charisma of the subjects further elevates it, and where the story ultimately goes elevates it further still. Wardle gets the maximum amount of access, but he doesn’t fully trust the story, spiking it with needle drops and unnecessary flashbacks to scenes that occurred shortly before, as if any of this was forgettable.  ​