The 100 Best Documentaries of All Time
By Elizabeth Jackson, Stacker News
AND Nicole Johnson, Stacker News
On 5/5/21 at 8:00 PM EDT
Great documentaries often give access and illumination to stories that would otherwise go untold. The subject of a great documentary can be anything from a single individual s life to a broader political event, and the effect of the films can be anything from uplifting to devastating.
To celebrate the genre, Stacker created a ranking of the top 100 documentaries of all time by leveraging data on all documentary movies to create a Stacker score that serves as a weighted index split evenly between IMDb and Metacritic scores. To qualify, the film had to be listed as a documentary on IMDb, have a Metascore, and have at least 1,000 IMDb user votes. Ties were broken by Metascore and further ties were broken by votes. Documentary TV series were not included.
Andreas Fontana,
Azor, 2021, DCP, sound, color, 100 minutes. Yvan De Wiel (Fabrizio Rongione).
IN THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION of New Directors/New Films, the hippies pull more weight than the politicos, to borrow a ’60s dichotomy. There is a lot of journeying in these films too much of it for my taste couched as quests for spiritual enlightenment, or undertaken to discover the unity in all things, or to let go of the traumas of the past by, well, I’m not sure what means. ND/NF, which is jointly curated by programmers from the Museum of Modern Art and Film at Lincoln Center, is devoted to first and second independently produced features by directors from an ever-expanding world cinema. Because this is a major anniversary, this year’s ND/NF also includes a retrospective of eleven films from its rich history. Seize the opportunity to view early work, now digitized, from such acclaimed directors as Charles Burnett, Humberto Solás, Christopher Nolan, Chantal Akerman, and L
Reviewed at the 2021Â Berlinale.
Before the word âincelâ was coined and the danger of domestic terrorism fully realised, Ted Kaczynski was sitting in his cabin in the woods writing reams of eco-fascist musings and building bombs. The maths genius turned murderer better known as the Unabomber is the subject of Tony Stoneâs new film, an intimate portrait of a man whose frustrations turn to murderous violence.
We first spy Ted in the distance through the trees, while in the foreground snowmobiles tear through the landscape. The noise of the snowmobiles and the heavy doom-filled drone of the Blanck Mass score portends something bad brewing. Sure enough, Ted breaks into the home of the offending snowmobilers and vandalises the vehicles.
Ana Katz,
The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet, 2021, DCP, black-and-white, sound, 73 minutes.
THE PRIZES WERE AWARDED a month ago, some very big deals have closed in recent weeks, and the Sundance Film Festival has closed its streaming platform, hopefully never to be used again at least not as the primary means of connecting Sundance’s chosen movies to Sundance audiences. Having covered the festival for thirty-two years, the place Park City, Utah and my ten-day routine there is stamped into my neurological pathways, so it’s no wonder that I had flashes of
déjà vu while sitting at home watching four or five movies a day on my desktop. One evening, checking in by phone with my Sundance housemate of many years, he mentioned that he had found time earlier to attend his book group, and for a second I thought he meant he had flown to L.A. and back to Park City without my noticing. The festival itself amplified this dreamlike displacement, surrounding the films with as much of the Su