Source:  The New Yorker A crucial and often overlooked element of documentary filmmaking is standpoint: not the filmmaker’s abstractly intellectual point of view but her physical and visual one—her personal, experiential relationship to her subject. Mila Turajlić’s...

Source:  Variety In France, a man known as Dieudonné appears before crowds who shout out their approval when he claims that the Holocaust has become an engine of “profit.” He then brings an actor onstage in ragged clothes who pretends to be a Jew being deported....

Source:  IndieWire The clock tracking the timeline of the events depicted in the new Netflix documentary series, “November 13: Attack on Paris,” takes up nearly the entire screen. The coordinated terrorist shootings and explosions of that night in November 2015 that...

Source:  CNN Walk around the streets of Duhok in northern Iraq, and you'll see the same face staring back at you. Stoic and square-jawed, the inscrutable portrait is a common sight behind shop counters and stalls in this city, a short drive north from Mosul. Everyone...

Source:  The New York Times A conventional portrait of a highly unconventional woman, Erika Cohn’s documentary, “The Judge,” has a worthy subject in Kholoud al-Faqih, the first woman to be appointed, in 2009, to the Middle East’s religious courts. Dealing mainly with...

Source:  The Hollywood Reporter Good documentaries expose characters and conflicts that are unfamiliar to most audience members. Sometimes, however, these films also open wounds that are almost too painful to behold. "A Sniper’s War," a documentary that received its...

Source:  Variety By turns edifying and frustrating, Hava Kohav Beller’s “In the Land of Pomegranates” focuses on an annual gathering in Germany known as Vacation From War, an event designed to make young Israeli and Palestinian attendees view each other as human...

Source:  Chicago Tribune Can a single-issue protest party come to power? The answer, as shown in "An Insignificant Man," a new documentary by first-time filmmakers Vinay Shukla and Khushboo Ranka, is a resounding yes. "An Insignificant Man," released by VICE in the...

Source:  The Atlantic “Did you kill any members of ISIS?” a hairdresser asks his client. The young man doesn’t answer. He simply stares at himself in the mirror—a soldier clad in camouflage with a rifle casually slung over his shoulder. Another try: “So, did you kill...

Source:  Deadline “This movie is a lot about kids. It’s a younger generation that was born, and in their first steps, they’re going into the war,” Oscar-nominated director Evgeny Afineevsky says, reflecting on his Syrian civil war documentary "Cries from Syria."...

Source:  The Atlantic “The whole world knows about the problems in Darfur,” says Nouri, a recently resettled refugee, in Kristian Engelsen’s moving short film, "Nowhere." "My life was in danger. Many in my family died. So I had to run away.” Now, Nouri lives in...

Source:  Vox For the third Vox Borders documentary, "Inside North Korea’s Bubble in Japan," Vox visited an elementary school in Japan. The kids were well-behaved and lively, exactly what you’d expect. But these kids face hostility in their birth country because...

Source:  The Hollywood Reporter Ugis Olte and Morten Traavik's film purports to be a documentary, but it must surely be a put-on. Chronicling the events leading up to a concert performed by the Slovenian rock band Laibach in North Korea, the movie is so...

Source:  Observer Geert Wilders’ similarities to Donald Trump don’t stop at his perfectly quaffed, bleached hair. The world-famous, nationalist Dutch politician has ridden the populist wave to notable acclaim. Like Trump, Wilders has lived in the limelight for decades...

Source:  PBS A boxing match in Brooklyn; life in postwar Bosnia; the daily routine of a Nigerian midwife; an intimate family moment at home: these scenes and others are woven into a tapestry of footage captured over the twenty-five-year career of cinematographer...

Source:  TMZ Sean Penn is using a full-court press to either block or re-edit the Netflix documentary, "The Day I Met El Chapo," that suggests Penn ratted out drug kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman by alerting the United States Department of Justice of his...

Source:  Independent Lens From Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, from Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair, "Shadow World" reveals the shocking realities of the global arms trade, the only business that counts its profits in billions and its losses in human lives. Directed by...