Nonfics

Have you seen the documentary Black Woodstock? How about Exposing the Myth of Southern Charm? Chances are, if you follow our recommendations, you have. But not under those titles. Their real names are Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) and Natchez, respectively. The former is an Oscar winner, yet that may not have been enough to appeal to audiences since IMDb, TV Guide, and Plex all list Questlove’s debut feature as Black Woodstock.

Six months into the year, do we know what will rank as the best documentary of 2026? By the halfway point of 2025, I’d seen most of my end-of-year top 10, though some weren’t released until later. This year, at the midway point, a few of my favorites (including Nuisance Bear, Soul Patrol, and One in a Million) are still to come, but I think my number one is a lock. The funny thing is that the two additions to the current top five were released right after I published the initial list back in May.

I have no interest in or understanding of tennis (despite taking lessons as a little kid and playing it in P.E. in middle school), so most documentaries about the sport and its players don’t appeal to me. They need a great story where the tennis clips are merely obligatory set dressing, like this year’s Billie Jean King biography, Give Me the Ball!, or they need exceptional cinematic form, à la John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection.

Thank you all for your patience this week, as I’ve been working on some side hustles to keep this newsletter going with limited paid subscribers and, for the moment, very rarely any sponsored posts or email blasts.

For the second week in a row, our Pick is a documentary about a fairly successful pop artist who became a legendary record producer. Unlike Eno, however, Peter Asher: Everywhere Man is not very notable for its construction. It’s a relatively conventional music documentary. Still, the feature similarly centers on its very present subject, who guides the storytelling through newly captured interviews.

This interview was originally published on the now-defunct Documentary Channel Blog on September 12, 2011. One of the best documentary films I’ve seen so far at the Toronto International Film Festival is Last Call at the Oasis,a big-issue doc from the producers of An Inconvenient Truthand Food, Inc.,and from the Oscar-winning director of less conventional nonfiction works such as Protagonist. Filmmaker Jessica Yu’s last feature was a fictional sports comedy called Ping Pong Playa.

Father’s Day is this week, and I’ve somehow never recognized the holiday in this newsletter in the past. It is a special occasion for me. I became a father the morning after Father’s Day 2012 (my wife went into labor nearly 24 hours earlier, ruining our BBQ brunch plans), so I am usually thinking more about my oldest child rather than myself. Nonfics came about a year later, so I’ve been the father of this site for nearly as long as I’ve been an actual dad.

Earlier this month, a handful of Gary Hustwit documentaries hit The Criterion Channel, including his Design Trilogy and the feature Rams, which is about an industrial designer. Until finally seeing Hustwit’s latest, Eno, I didn’t know how the documentary fit into the filmmaker’s area of focus. Now I can appreciate that the subject, Brian Eno, is something of a designer himself.

By the 14th Academy Awards, there was still no Oscar designated for documentary features. One such film had won an Academy Award, but that was in the Best Cinematography category. Meanwhile, short documentaries were honored throughout the 1930s. There was even a category meant specifically for nonfiction shorts, Best Live Action Short Subject (Novelty), from the 5th to the 8th Academy Awards. At the 14th ceremony, held in February 1942, the Best Documentary (Short Subject) category was introduced.

When we think of the term “cult film,” we’re usually thinking of underground movies with devoted fanbases. Or, maybe we’re thinking of movies (including documentaries) about cults. Welcome to Space Brothers reminds us that we could also think of cult films as movies produced by cults.