Top Docs: Award-Winning Documentary Filmmakers

Ben Crump knows what it’s like to be in the eye of the storm. As a civil rights attorney representing families in some of the most high-profile cases involving police killings in recent years (including George Floyd and Breonna Taylor), Ben is constantly in the spotlight. But as Nadia Hallgren’s (“ Becoming ”) powerful and incisive documentary portrait “Civil” reveals, it is in the more private mo...

What happened to Sinead O’Connor?  It can be too easy to misremember the “after” story, of  how quickly in the wake of her appearance on Saturday Night Live in October of 1992, this once megastar largely disappeared from the brightest lights of the world stage .  But it also is too easy to ignore the “before” story of what brought her to fame early in life.  In “Nothing Compares”, Kathryn Ferguson...

He survived a government-orchestrated poison attack. He pranked the Russian security agency. He endured (and continues to endure) solitary confinement in a remote gulag. Oh, and he also made some pretty cool TikTok videos. His name is Alexei Navalny, and, as Russia’s leading opposition figure, he will use whatever means possible to try to end the authoritarian regime of President Vladimir Putin. H...

“I was drowning”. Acclaimed filmmaker Brett Morgen (“ Kurt Cobain Montage of Heck ”, “ The Kid Stays in the Picture ”) knew he was in deep trouble creatively when he sat down to write the script for his latest documentary and days stretched to weeks and then months. When your film subject’s own creative output is as varied, unpredictable, and brilliant as rock star David Bowie’s was throughout his...

A mustard-colored Porsche races through the streets of Washington, DC. A crazed political operative holds a pencil to the throat of a former presidential advisor. An orgy hosted by a prominent businessman rages through the night. Does this sound like a documentary about Watergate? Well, it’s not actually. These entertaining, adrenaline-fueled moments are brought to you by the 8-part Starz limited...

The Hollywood Reporter’s Executive Editor of Awards Scott Feinberg joins Mike and Ken to break down this year’s Emmy nominees in all the major documentary categories, including Outstanding Documentary Program; Outstanding Series; Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking; and Outstanding Directing. After considering all the angles, Scott pulls no punches in giving his take on who he thinks will...

When the writer Glenn Kurtz stumbled upon an old home movie buried in his parents’ closet in Florida, he inadvertently discovered a whole world that, tragically, had been nearly erased from history. Returning as a tourist in 1938 to the small village of Nasielsk outside Warsaw where he grew up, his grandfather David Kurtz brought with him a brand new 16mm Kodak movie camera. The three minutes of f...

Not yet 19 years old, a young man named Bitaté Uru-eu-wau-wau is approached by an elder, who tells him, ready or not, it is time for Bitaté to become his community’s new leader. With Brazil’s election of a right-wing president on the horizon, bands of illegal settlers clearing forests, and the impending disaster of climate change, how in the world can Bitaté take on such a staggering responsibilit...

In the delightful and, yes, delicious CNN Original Series “ Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy ” the beloved actor/writer/director is constantly on the move, setting out to discover what makes each of Italy’s 20 regions unique. By the end of season two, Stanley had tramped across nine of them, and along the way, sampled enough pasta and salumi to feed a small army of production assistants. London-...

When Claude Motley got shot… everything changed. Not just for Claude, whose jaw was shattered by a bullet fired through his car window, but for Nathan, the 15-year-old youth who pulled the trigger and for Victoria, the woman who shot Nathan when he tried to rob her, too. These tragic events in Milwaukee in 2014 unleashed a chain reaction of trauma and devastation that continues to wreak havoc on t...

After pop star Britney Spears’ controversial 13-year conservatorship finally came to an end in November 2021, Spears credited the #FreeBritney movement: “I honestly think you guys saved my life.” Filmmakers Samantha Stark and Liz Day also played no small role. When their documentary “ Framing Britney Spears ” premiered in February of that year, it sparked a flurry of international news coverage an...

He pops up often in your social media livestream, appearing from just about every corner of the globe. His head bobbing up-and-down in the frame, his voice slightly frantic, he reports in real-time from the frontlines of whatever new catastrophe has left thousands – or even millions — of people in desperate need of food and to describe what’s being done about it. He’s world-renowned Chef José Andr...

Legendary Director Peter Jackson joins Mike to discuss the Emmy-nominated “The Beatles: Get Back”.  Peter discusses why after a career that has spanned “Heavenly Creatures,” “The Lord of the Rings,” “The Hobbit,” and “King Kong,” he turned to documentary filmmaking with "They Shall Not Grow Old." And how the techniques that he employed in turning the trenches of the First World War to life  came t...

Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. They were America’s most beloved couple and Hollywood’s ultimate power couple. But when the studio lights were turned off, what was it like being the “real” Lucy and Desi? How did their relationship inform everything they did — from creating the groundbreaking sitcom “I Love Lucy” to running one of Hollywood’s most successful television studios? With “ Lucy and Desi ”,...

Frederick Douglass was not only one of our greatest activists, he was a great writer, an artist who worked in words.  Director Julie Marchesi (P.O.V., American Masters, African-American Lives) and producer Seun Babalola (NOVA, The United Shades of America, Africa Everywhere) explore the growth of his mind and the power of his words in their Emmy-nominated “Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches.” Ea...

“Nazaré”. To those who follow the world of big wave surfing, the word speaks for itself. A once sleepy fishing village on the coast of Portugal, Nazaré has now become one of the world’s preeminent big wave surfing spots. It’s also the most likely future location for that most elusive of all surfing dreams: the 100-foot wave. As the hunting ground of legendary surfer Garrett McNamara, Nazaré plays...

George Carlin wasn’t just a comedian, he was one of the great American artists of the later half of the 20th-Century, and he was shaped by and interacted with the great events of his day with intelligence, wit, and an ever-adapting nature.  That’s what co-director Michael Bonfiglio (with Judd Apatow) of  “George Carlin’s American Dream” explains when he sat down with Mike. Bonfiglio’s (producer of...

Racking up win after win, Mack Beggs is well on his way to an undefeated season and a second consecutive Texas state high school wrestling crown. But, far from being recognized as the top athlete that he is, Mack finds himself the target of criticism from parents, social media trolls and national commentators. As a young trans man, Mack wants nothing more than the opportunity to compete against ot...

With 55 million matches to date, Tinder advertises itself as the world’s most popular dating app. But, back in 2019, it was one match in particular — between a Norwegian woman living in London and a charming, self-described “Prince of Diamonds” — that became a viral sensation. It turned out that “Simon Leviev” was no prince, but a convicted con artist who used Tinder to woo a series of women in an...

It’s more than a song.  As Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller (“ Ballet Russes ”, “ The Galapagos Affair ”) point out in their new documentary, Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” is a journey.  A journey of artistic and spiritual discovery, a 7-year Odyssey of composition, and, once all but lost, an even longer journey to find its place as one of our most admired songs, admiration which take the form of crit...

Coined by a Harvard psychologist in the 1980s, the “Martha Mitchell Effect” describes a process in which a person’s beliefs are initially labeled as delusional but later turn out to be true. But who was the real Martha Mitchell? What were her claims about Watergate? And why, until now, has she been largely erased from our collective memory? Opening up to Ken about their riveting all-archival docum...

Love and Lava, Magma and Matrimony.  Sara Dosa’s (“ The Last Season ”, “ The Seer and the Unseen ”)  “Fire of Love” encourages such puns, and that’s no accident:  The film explores the relationship of Katia and Maurice Krafft, married volcanologists as they chart the world's volcanoes from the late 1960s until their untimely deaths in 1993.  It’s a film that takes science seriously, but, like its...

Sha’Carri Richardson is fast. Really, really, really fast. At the 2021 U.S. Olympic trials, Sha’Carri, only 21 at the time, ran the 100-meter finals in 10.84 seconds, more than a tenth of a second faster than her closest competitor. In “Sub Eleven Seconds”, his artfully crafted documentary portrait of this superstar athlete at a moment of peak performance, the director Bafic captures Sha’Carri’s s...

In a small town in India, a cow vigilante group seeks to recruit teenage boys to join its ranks. Who are these so-called cow vigilantes and how are they using the welfare of the cow, which is sacred to India’s majority Hindu population, to fan the flames of nationalist extremism? In Varun Chopra’s fascinating, multifaceted and provocative new short documentary “Holy Cowboys”, the filmmaker follows...

Like a freshly sculpted work of clay, director Rebeca Huntt’s stunning documentary debut BEBA captures in real-time her family’s fluid interpersonal dynamics; the complicated legacies of inherited national, ethnic and racial identity; and her own brewing caldron of coming-of-age dramatics. To call it a “personal film” is both a wild understatement and a reductive miscalculation: “BEBA”, for all it...