While shooting Winter’s Bone, director Debra Granik met Ron “Stray Dog” Hall and began shooting a portrait of his life. Her doc about him is at least five films in one.

A thrilling documentary explores the borderland where those on both sides of the drug war end up with dirty hands.

Senna director Asif Kapadia unpacks the mysteries of Amy Winehouse’s tragic life with a heartbreaking documentary that exposes the toxic influences around her, and the mysteries at the core of her music. 

Dan Sickles and Antonio Santini’s ambitious documentary surveys nine people in Puerto Rico at unique points on the spectrum of transgender and transexual experience.

Long considered the great lost Les Blank documentary, this digressive portrait of rootsy rock star Leon Russell, now restored and released after four decades, finds poetic ways around its surly subject.

This documentary tracking a viral-phenomenon Make-A-Wish Foundation project is the feel-good documentary of the year, but there are niggling doubts under all those good feelings.

Journalist Sacha Jenkins looks at how hip-hop has inspired fashion and vice versa, but despite some great footage and a battery of rap superstars, his documentary has a once-over-lightly superficiality. 

A documentary reinvestigating a reinvestigation that led to the exoneration of an Illinois death-row inmate finds some troubling conclusions.

During the First Intifada, Palestinian villagers started a dairy farm on the sly to wean themselves from dependence on the Israeli government. Unfortunately, Amer Shomali and Paul Cowan’s documentary spoils this strange true story by animating the cows. 

Marc Silver’s innovative documentary about the death of a black teenager at the hands of a middle-aged white software engineer explores the same Florida “stand your ground” law that figured into the Trayvon Martin case. 

Given how much our knowledge of 1970s New York City gang culture is informed by The Warriors, Shan Nicholson’s documentary history seems like a much-needed corrective. But it’s lacking in depth and memorable detail. 

Named one of the top 10 movies of all time in the most recent Sight And Sound poll, a restored version of The Man With The Movie Camera joins three lesser-known Dziga Vertov efforts on Blu-ray. 

Named one of the top 10 movies of all time in the most recent Sight And Sound poll, a restored version of The Man With The Movie Camera joins three lesser-known Dziga Vertov efforts on Blu-ray. 

Named one of the top 10 movies of all time in the most recent Sight And Sound poll, a restored version of The Man With The Movie Camera joins three lesser-known Dziga Vertov efforts on Blu-ray. 

On the heels of Saturday Night Live’s bland 40th-anniversary show comes this equally bland and superficial account of its history, which yields almost nothing in the way of revelation or insight. 

Between when Kurt Cobain went missing and when he was found dead, Courtney Love hired a private investigator. Benjamin Statler’s queasy mix of documentary and docudrama examines the revelatory audio files that resulted. 

Jon Long’s damningly slight documentary about surfers, snowboarders, and skateboarders reveals the immense disparity in excitement between experiencing extreme sports and hearing that experience articulated in an interview. 

While isolated and home-schooled in their Lower East Side apartment, six teenage brothers processed American culture through movies and moviemaking. Crystal Moselle’s raw but intimate documentary explores their obsession.

In their third documentary, the progressive pranksters take a self-congratulatory victory lap with no victory in sight, and offer a paucity of the hilarious stunts on which they gained notoriety. 

The new documentary from the director of the Shining crackpot-theory exploration Room 237 takes a similarly moderator-free look at the terrors of sleep paralysis.