\n<\/p>\n
The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we\u2019ll choose three nonfiction films \u2014 classics, overlooked recent docs and more \u2014 that will reward your time.<\/em><\/p>\n Rent it on Amazon<\/a>, Apple TV<\/a>, Google Play<\/a> and Vudu<\/a>.<\/p>\n Although the slight of Frederick Wiseman\u2019s latest<\/a> (\u201cMenus-Plaisirs \u2014 Les Troisgros\u201d) will live in lasting shame, the Oscars have, broadly speaking, made progress<\/a> in their best-documentary category, which in decades past was infamous for its omissions (\u201cHoop Dreams,\u201d \u201cThe Thin Blue Line\u201d) and aesthetic conservatism.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Still, even in recent years, few nominees have been as adventurous as Hubert Sauper\u2019s \u201cDarwin\u2019s Nightmare\u201d<\/a> (2005), a free-flowing reflection on the economic exploitation of Tanzania that used the history of an invasive fish, the Nile perch, as the ultimate metaphor for colonial plundering. (The film lost to \u201cMarch of the Penguins.\u201d) \u201cDarwin\u2019s Nightmare\u201d is not streaming, but Sauper\u2019s equally galvanizing follow-up, \u201cWe Come as Friends,\u201d is widely available.<\/p>\n In \u201cWe Come as Friends,\u201d Sauper again adopts a science-fiction conceit, casting himself as a kind of alien invader. The film follows him as he pilots a small aircraft around Sudan before and after southern Sudan\u2019s independence referendum, which was held in 2011<\/a>. At one time, Sauper says in voice-over, the British had a desire to connect Africa\u2019s north and south, and the French fantasized about possessing the continent from ocean to ocean. Now, another man says in a later audio clip, Sudan has \u201cbecome the epicenter of a collision between America and China.\u201d Sauper could hardly have asked for a more pointed scene than the one in which a group of Chinese oil workers muse on how space exploration might resemble the colonization of Africa while \u201cStar Trek,\u201d \u201cStar Wars\u201d and \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey\u201d play in the background.<\/p>\n The creation of South Sudan brings a fresh set of opportunities, although Sauper casts doubt on the idea that descending entrepreneurs have a genuine interest in ensuring prosperity for the residents, many of whom lack food and clean water. Sauper also spends time with a group of American missionaries who are partitioning the land in their own way. One says that the locals didn\u2019t like a new fence because it cut into grazing land. But, he adds, \u201cThey got over it.\u201d<\/p>\n Stream it on Metrograph<\/a> and Projectr<\/a>. Rent it on Amazon<\/a> and Apple TV<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n No, it isn\u2019t August, or hot \u2014 but Brett Story\u2019s latest documentary, \u201cUnion,\u201d directed with Stephen Maing, just premiered at Sundance<\/a>, and that makes it as good a time as any to revisit \u201cThe Hottest August,\u201d her time capsule of life in New York in 2017.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Simply described, the movie consists of Story\u2019s encounters with various people across the city that month. As in the similarly titled \u201cChronicle of a Summer,\u201d Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin\u2019s pioneering experiment in what they called \u201ccinema-v\u00e9rit\u00e9,\u201d Story asks the people she meets \u2014 beachgoers, Jazz Age cosplayers, a former cop and his buddy at a bar \u2014 about their lives, and particularly their hopes for the future. One woman doesn\u2019t want to be single anymore. A recent college valedictorian is having trouble finding a job. A woman at what appears to be a class on bystander intervention expresses regret for not having done anything after seeing a woman in a hijab harassed on the street. A man who runs a business at which people smash objects for stress relief (\u201cWe get a lot of people just coming for guys\u2019 night, girls\u2019 night, date night, corporate event, stuff like that\u201d) says that things have been busy.<\/p>\n The surface normality is suffused with anxiety. (Story gets something of a direct line to the city\u2019s neuroses when she embeds her camera in a 311 call center.) There\u2019s a sense that science fiction is turning into reality. A Staten Island resident still grappling with the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy dismisses it as a 100-year storm. The solar eclipse<\/a> adds a touch of the surreal, while the movie\u2019s metallic, \u201cSans Soleil\u201d-style voice-over<\/a>, quoting Zadie Smith, muses on climate change and the concept of a \u201cnew normal\u201d: \u201cWe can\u2019t even say the word \u2018abnormal\u2019 to each other out loud. It reminds us of what came before, the way season followed season.\u201d In a sense, this pre-Covid movie has become an artifact of the old normal. As tense as the summer of 2017 may have been, it had nothing on the summer of 2020.<\/p>\n Stream it on Hulu<\/a> and Kanopy<\/a>. Rent it on Amazon<\/a>, Apple TV<\/a>, Google Play<\/a> and Vudu<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Another bold best-documentary Oscar nominee from a few years back, \u201cCollective,\u201d from the Romanian director Alexander Nanau, presents the tragedy at its center head-on, using footage from the event. A metal band finishes a song. From the stage, the singer acknowledges something that is not yet in frame. (\u201cSomething\u2019s on fire here. That\u2019s not part of the show.\u201d) Soon concertgoers are rushing for the exits, and the Bucharest club, Colectiv, is consumed by flames.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Part of what is unsettling about the sequence is the audience\u2019s dawning realization that it\u2019s a flashback: Opening text has already informed viewers about what happened at Colectiv, and speeches by relatives of the victims have already been shown. The inferno also signals, incredibly, merely the beginning of the horrors in \u201cCollective,\u201d which is technically about the tragedy that happened after the fire. Several dozen burn patients died over the subsequent months; we are told that they \u201cwere kept in a known septic environment and exposed to some of the most resistant hospital bacteria in Europe.\u201d And the story of how diluted disinfectant came to be used exposes layers of corruption so deep that no single cleansing could wipe them away.<\/p>\n Fittingly, \u201cCollective\u201d has more than one protagonist, although its principal hero is Catalin Tolontan, a journalist at a sports newspaper who asks tough questions of bureaucrats who appear used to having their official line parroted. (That it took a reporter at a sports daily, rather than at an ostensibly more serious newspaper, to pursue the story so doggedly is held up as another example of national dysfunction.)<\/p>\n There are also haunting scenes involving Tedy Ursuleanu, a victim of the fire who is shown learning to use a prosthetic hand. And the movie cautiously, skeptically finds another possible good guy in Vlad Voiculescu, a new health minister who seems to have a genuine interest in systemic reform. But his authority is limited, and others in power put him in their sights. \u201cI am wondering if any of the measures I took will last,\u201d he says in his final scene, before the movie proceeds to an abrupt, unexpected coda.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n\u2018We Come as Friends\u2019 (2015)<\/h2>\n
\u2018The Hottest August\u2019 (2019)<\/h2>\n
\u2018Collective\u2019 (2020)<\/h2>\n