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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 Stream it on the Criterion Channel<\/a> and Kanopy<\/a>.<\/p>\n The French film essayist Chris Marker<\/a> (1921-2012) likely left his biggest pop-cultural footprint with \u201cLa Jet\u00e9e,\u201d a half-hour short whose time-travel conceit inspired Terry Gilliam\u2019s \u201c12 Monkeys.\u201d \u201cBut \u201cSans Soleil,\u201d Marker\u2019s unclassifiable 1983 feature, neither fiction nor nonfiction, shows that raw documentary materials can be rendered into something as disorienting and chronologically malleable as fantasy. (Marker credits himself with \u201cconception and editing,\u201d but not direction.) The film belongs on a list of movies that ought to be seen and debated even if you don\u2019t comprehend them. Not that comprehension is the point. \u201cSans Soleil\u201d is not only unrooted in time but also in place, as a quotation from T.S. Eliot\u2019s poem \u201cAsh-Wednesday\u201d signals at the outset. The title is given in Russian, English and French. The confounding narration in the English-language version consists of the actress Alexandra Stewart reading letters from a nonexistent cinematographer named Sandor Krasna, whose images we appear to be watching.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The film begins with a shot of three children in Iceland. Soon, it travels to Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, among other locales; it is fascinated, most of all, with Japan, particularly its surreal and futuristic aspects, its television screens and its video games. Pac-Man is held up as \u201cthe most perfect graphic metaphor of man\u2019s fate.\u201d Familiar Marker totems \u2014 pictures of cats and owls \u2014 are rendered into electronically tweaked images. A clip dated as February 1980, before the coup in Guinea-Bissau that November<\/a>, can only be properly understood by moving forward in time, the narration insists.<\/p>\n Stewart describes Krasna\u2019s having taken a trip to the San Francisco area and visiting the locations from \u201cVertigo,\u201d including the tree cross-section that Kim Novak\u2019s Madeleine touches, saying, \u201cHere I was born, and there I died.\u201d Less considered, the voice-over suggests, citing another film that quotes that scene from \u201cVertigo,\u201d is the area to the side of the sequoia trunk, beyond what can be touched. What\u2019s there, in the cosmology of \u201cSans Soleil,\u201d exists outside of time.<\/p>\n Stream it on Kanopy<\/a> and Max<\/a>. Rent it on Amazon<\/a>, Apple TV<\/a>, Google Play<\/a> and Vudu<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cDe Palma\u201d opens with \u201cVertigo\u201d \u2014 more specifically, with Brian De Palma\u2019s recollection of seeing it the year it was released, 1958, at Radio City Music Hall. To him, it\u2019s a film about what a director does: conjuring romantic illusions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Brian De Palma has always been one of Hitchcock\u2019s most direct imitators, and in the documentary \u201cDe Palma,\u201d the filmmakers Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow pay tribute to him with the cinematic equivalent of Hitch\u2019s famous conversations with Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut. They are apprentices learning from a master, and helping remind viewers of what an influential figure De Palma has been. He came up at the same time as his friends Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. \u201cWhat we did in our generation will never be duplicated,\u201d De Palma says. \u201cWe were able to get into the studio system and use all that stuff in order to make some pretty incredible movies, before the businessmen took over again.\u201d<\/p>\n De Palma always divided critics; detractors variously saw him as derivative or as wasting his ingenious visual style on subpar material. In the documentary, a candid, detailed De Palma, going film by film through his career, could disabuse anyone of the notion that he isn\u2019t brilliant at his job. There are films where he felt everything clicked, like \u201cDressed to Kill\u201d (1980) and \u201cThe Untouchables\u201d (1987). He remembers watching \u201cCarlito\u2019s Way\u201d (1993) and thinking, \u201cI can\u2019t make a better picture than this.\u201d There are other times when things didn\u2019t come off as he thinks they should have. His widely panned adaptation of \u201cThe Bonfire of the Vanities\u201d (1990) needed the toughness of \u201cThe Magnificent Ambersons\u201d or \u201cSweet Smell of Success,\u201d he says. It\u2019s a relief, for those of us who find \u201cRaising Cain\u201d (1992) confusing, to hear De Palma talk about how he rearranged it in the editing process. \u201cIt has a particular oddness to it,\u201d he says, \u201c\u2019cause it\u2019s not put together the way it was conceived.\u201d<\/p>\n He laments current trends like the previsualization of action sequences, because using computers to plan things out is inevitably going to lead to visual clich\u00e9s. The special-effects work on \u201cMission to Mars\u201d didn\u2019t suit him. \u201cYou do one of those shots the first day and you\u2019re seeing it every week, as they add one incremental thing to it,\u201d he says. \u201cThat goes on for a year, basically,\u201d adding that he was always amazed at filmmakers like Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis who had the patience for that endless repetition.<\/p>\n Is he a Hitchcock imitator? He suggests, in a way, that Hitchcock wasn\u2019t enough of an influence on others, and that the visual storytelling vocabulary Hitchcock developed might die out. \u201cI\u2019ve never found too many people that followed after the Hitchcock school except for me,\u201d De Palma says.<\/p>\n Stream it on Apple TV+<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Another disarmingly candid documentary, \u201cStill: A Michael J. Fox Movie\u201d finds the \u201cBack to the Future\u201d actor (who had the main role in De Palma\u2019s \u201cCasualties of War\u201d) reflecting on his career and on his life with Parkinson\u2019s disease, a diagnosis that he revealed to the public in 1998. The director Davis Guggenheim (\u201cAn Inconvenient Truth\u201d) takes full advantage of the fact that he\u2019s working with someone who has spent a lot of time on camera. Certainly, Fox seems comfortable as an interview subject in the present day, answering questions with good humor and self-effacement. But Guggenheim also uses film clips of Fox to create a sort of visual archive of his life, so that whatever Fox is speaking about can be accompanied by footage of his younger self. The overall effect<\/a> makes it feel like Fox had always been making his documentary about his life.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Guggenheim uses the verve of \u201cBack to the Future\u201d (and Alan Silvestri\u2019s score) to help conjure the frenzy that engulfed Fox\u2019s life at the time it was made, when the actor was shuttling between the sets of that film and the sitcom \u201cFamily Ties.\u201d \u201cBright Lights, Big City\u201d (1988), in which Fox\u2019s wife, Tracy Pollan, appeared, helps tell the story of their courtship. And when Fox talks about his early years of acting with Parkinson\u2019s symptoms, and trying to time his medication so that he would peak at just the right moments, Guggenheim includes clips from \u201cFor Love or Money\u201d (1993) and \u201cLife With Mikey\u201d (1993), which illustrate one of Fox\u2019s hiding strategies: putting an object in his hand to mask its trembling.<\/p>\n While \u201cStill\u201d shows Fox poking fun at himself, as in a clip from \u201cCurb Your Enthusiasm,\u201d it is a serious movie when it ought to be. It doesn\u2019t shy away from showing the struggles that Fox faces with injuries, for instance. \u201cGravity is real, even if you\u2019re only falling from my height,\u201d he says with a laugh, after a makeup artist has been shown working to conceal bruising on his face. Yet in spite of that, \u201cStill\u201d finds a way to be an optimistic film. A time machine in its own way \u2014 one very different from \u201cSans Soleil\u201d \u2014 it brims with the wit and charisma that made Fox a star in the first place.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n\u2018Sans Soleil\u2019 (1983)<\/h2>\n
\u2018De Palma\u2019 (2016)<\/h2>\n
\u2018Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie\u2019 (2023)<\/h2>\n