Nonfics

More documentaries need soundtrack album releases. I’m mostly talking about their original music scores. You can tell a studio knows it's got a great documentary score because it releases the album commercially. Looking at the winners of the Critics Choice Documentary Award for Best Score since its inception, all but (ironically) Jon Batiste’s American Symphony music can be found on their own.

I needed a positive documentary after a week of watching 9/11 commemorations, depressing political films on the current state of the world, and a handful of disappointments, and The Cycle of Love arrived just in time. It still brought me to tears, but out of joy.

With the Marines at Tarawa Once the Oscars began awarding two documentary-specific categories, the honored features and shorts could represent contrasting approaches to nonfiction cinema. There’s a big difference between telling a true story in a film lasting more than an hour versus doing so in less than 40 minutes (sometimes, as in the case of the 1944 winner December 7th, the disparity between a feature and short version of the same film is night and day).

If you have a documentary coming out, I’m happy to include a mention in this weekly column’s daily listings. If you would like it reviewed or considered for review, email me a screener link. Maybe I’ll have the time and space and desire. If you have a documentary not coming out but want me to give it a look and tell you what I think, unfortunately that’s not something I can do for free.

Matthew Hamachek returns with a follow-up to his riveting 2024 docuseries The Dynasty: New England Patriots, this time continuing the fledgling franchise (with Erica Sashin now joining him at the helm) with a much shorter but still highly engaging look at the record-holding reign of a women’s college basketball team.

Researching old documentaries can be a confusing but enlightening endeavor. Take the Best Documentary Feature category, for instance. Many sources point to the 15th Academy Awards as the first year of that category and four films as its inaugural winners.

Maite Alberdi, who has already had two documentary features nominated for Academy Awards this decade, is back with another unique nonfiction film. A Child of My Own tells the story of a hospital worker who faked her pregnancy and stole a newborn from the maternity ward to pass off as her own. This woman, Eleonor “Ale” Alejandra Marín Mendoza, gives her side of the case in voiceover as her account is depicted in dramatized fashion with actors and a candy-colored visual scheme.

The titular coroner, Dr. Thomas Noguchi, is currently 99 years old. I don’t know how old he was when he was interviewed for Coroner to the Stars, but he was old enough to be thankful he was still alive and able to tell his own story. I prefer having biographical documentary subjects tell their own stories, or at least as much as firsthand familiarity be…

In 1982, Robb Moss released Riverdogs, a short documentary about his friends whom he lived and worked with as part of a naturalist community of Grand Canyon adventurers and guides. Twenty years later, he revisited the subjects of Riverdogs for the feature-length film The Same River Twice. Now he’s back with them for The Bend in the River, as he and his characters enter their golden years. I had not seen the first two films, but that wasn’t a problem.

The opening scene of American Doctor involves a debate between the filmmaker (Poh Si Teng) and one of the documentary’s participants (Dr. Mark Perlmutter) over whether or not to show uncensored images of dead children. It’s the most interesting part of the film and reminded me of so many documentaries in the past that have featured children’s bodies being dug out of rubble, dead babies in hospital rooms, and small caskets being made for the youngest civilian casualties of war.