\n<\/p>\n
The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we select three nonfiction films \u2014 classics, overlooked recent docs and more \u2014 that will reward your time.<\/em><\/p>\n Stream it on Mubi<\/a>. Rent it on Amazon<\/a>.<\/p>\n The cowboys in \u201cSweetgrass\u201d have access to walkie-talkies, radio and phone, but for the most part, watching this documentary from Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor is as close as you can get to unplugging from the 21st century during a contemporary movie. Shot from 2001 to 2003, \u201cSweetgrass\u201d follows a group of men as they prepare sheep and then guide them over a 150-mile summer journey through a mountainous region of Montana. The film eschews contextual information in favor of simply watching events unfold, but the closing title cards explain that ranchers and hired hands have shepherded animals across this land since the late 1800s. The filmmakers (who don\u2019t credit themselves as \u201cdirectors\u201d here) aim to capture a vanishing way of life.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n At Harvard, Castaing-Taylor \u2014 who would go on to make \u201cLeviathan\u201d<\/a> (2013) and \u201cDe Humani Corporis Fabrica\u201d<\/a> (2023) with V\u00e9r\u00e9na Paravel \u2014 directs the Sensory Ethnography Lab<\/a>, which brings together artists and writers from different backgrounds with the hope that their collaborations will reinvent the discipline of ethnography. But humans are only part of the story in \u201cSweetgrass,\u201d which makes at least equal stars of the sheep. Stream it somewhere with good sound so that you can attune yourself to their ceaseless bleats, and even more so, to the whoosh of the pervasive wind. Shot on digital video before the high-definition variety became standard, \u201cSweetgrass\u201d makes a virtue of the old format\u2019s ruggedness, and there\u2019s an uncommon poetry to the way it captures morning sunlight and mist.<\/p>\n Not that the journey is peaceful, exactly. A shot of the animals running down a town street (past a Radio Shack) is one of the last signs of civilization as the lambs head toward the wilderness. The landscape, which the sheep aren\u2019t always inclined to traverse, isn\u2019t the only challenge. Drama arrives when it becomes clear that a predator \u2014 a wolverine? A bear? \u2014 is out there, too, eager for a meal. The sheep in some ways seem more suited to the trudge. The men live like real-life Anthony Mann characters, pitching their tents with branches. Late in the film, one is shown on a mountaintop phone call with his mother \u2014 and almost crying. \u201cI\u2019m running my guts out,\u201d he says. \u201cMy dog\u2019s so sore-footed he can\u2019t walk. My knee\u2019s all screwed up.\u201d How many movie cowboys would admit that?<\/p>\n Stream it on Netflix.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In 1992, on summer break from living in Britain, the Singapore-born filmmaker Sandi Tan and her friends shot a road movie that she wrote and acted in, starring as a 16-year-old killer named \u201cS.\u201d The film was called \u201cShirkers,\u201d and in this documentary of the same title, Tan describes it as \u201ca time capsule of a Singapore that was both real and imaginary.\u201d It was a rare independent film shot in a country so censorious that Tan had to resort to complicated workarounds to satisfy her viewing habits.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But while we see plenty of footage from that \u201cShirkers\u201d (which looks amazing), it was never completed. The strange story of what happened to it \u2014 and how Tan and her friends Jasmine and Sophie look back on it \u2014 forms the spine of this inventive and disarming memoir, which is simultaneously a reminiscence of a rebellious youth, a chronicle of a seat-of-the-pants D.I.Y. film production and a mystery.<\/p>\n The mystery mainly concerns the director of the original \u201cShirkers,\u201d Georges Cardona, whom Tan and her friends first encountered when he was teaching them filmmaking at an arts center. Cardona was \u201ca man of unplaceable age and origin,\u201d Tan says. Multiple interviewees testify to his charisma. Whether he knew what he was doing as a filmmaker, and whether he was committed to the project, is a different matter, and it\u2019s probably best to leave the twists of this documentary unspoiled.<\/p>\n But the outcome left Tan \u201cdoing things backwards,\u201d as she puts it: She shot her debut movie, then became a film critic (for The Straits Times in Singapore), then went to film school in the United States, in that order. (She is also \u2014 disclosure \u2014 married to the critic John Powers, with whom I\u2019m on friendly terms.) For most of the story, she is haunted by what \u201cShirkers\u201d might have been; she recalls watching \u201cRushmore\u201d (1998) and \u201cGhost World\u201d (2001) and seeing affinities with the film she never got to finish. But as much as it\u2019s heartbreaking not to be able to know how the original \u201cShirkers\u201d might have contributed to that lineage, the tale in this \u201cShirkers\u201d is pretty crazy too.<\/p>\n Stream it on Kino Film Collection<\/a>. Rent it on Amazon<\/a>, Apple TV<\/a>, Fandango at Home<\/a> and Google Play<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Exploring the cultural and political currents of the 1950s and early \u201960s without ever stating an overt thesis, the recent Oscar nominee<\/a> \u201cSoundtrack to a Coup d\u2019Etat\u201d subtly draws a line that connects American jazz, Cold War skulduggery and the revolutionary fervor in Africa. Built entirely from archival sources \u2014 news clips; performance excerpts; quotations detailed and even footnoted onscreen \u2014 this documentary, directed by Johan Grimonprez, is filled with unlikely parallels, while the music, from Nina Simone, Miriam Makeba, Duke Ellington and many others, gives it a catchy, driving beat.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The film suggests that art is a function of politics and that politics is often a function of theater. The movie shows Khrushchev pounding his fists at the United Nations as if he were improvising a percussive riff. It recalls the time Dizzy Gillespie ran something like a campaign for president<\/a> (\u201cpledging to change the White House into the Blues House,\u201d per the text in the film). And according to the movie, the C.I.A. used a Louis Armstrong concert in Africa as a cover for its own operations. The film builds to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the independent Congo\u2019s first prime minister, in January 1961.<\/p>\n Can sights and sounds be trusted? At one point, Grimonprez cuts from an interview in which Ren\u00e9 Magritte explains his famous assertion \u201cceci n\u2019est pas une pipe\u201d (\u201cthis is not a pipe\u201d)<\/a> to footage of a pipe-smoking Allen Dulles, then the head of the C.I.A., projecting questionable seriousness. \u201cSoundtrack to a Coup d\u2019Etat\u201d is densely packed and, in some respects, more intuitive than rhetorical in its approach. But it offers a tremendous amount to tune into.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n\u2018Sweetgrass\u2019 (2010)<\/h2>\n
\u2018Shirkers\u2019 (2018)<\/h2>\n
\u2018Soundtrack to a Coup d\u2019Etat\u2019 (2024)<\/h2>\n