Chris Marker's letters from Japan and Guinea-Bissau; the essay film.
Ken Burns' nine episodes of photographs, letters and Shelby Foote; the documentary miniseries as form.
Herzog at McMurdo asks why penguins go mad.
An optician confronts the men who killed his brother in 1965; the companion piece.
The Harlem drag balls of the 1980s and the houses that voguing came from.
Robert Durst on a hot mic: "killed them all, of course"; the true-crime series that solved a case.
Three days of peace and music in 1969, in split screen; Scorsese edited.
Moore on Bush, Iraq and the seven minutes with My Pet Goat; the highest-grossing documentary.
One chef per episode, shot like a perfume ad; Massimo Bottura's broken lemon tart.
Errol Morris re-enacts a Dallas cop killing and gets an innocent man freed.
How American food is made, from chicken houses to corn subsidies.
Robert McNamara's eleven lessons on Vietnam and Cuba; Errol Morris's Interrotron interview.
Jackie Kennedy's aunt and cousin in a crumbling East Hampton mansion; the Maysles.
Bob Dylan on his 1965 tour of England, with the cue-card video for "Subterranean Homesick Blues".
Philippe Petit walks a wire between the Twin Towers in 1974, told as a heist.
Al Gore's slideshow on climate change; the cherry picker up the CO2 graph.
Alexei Navalny phones his own poisoner; the documentary made before his death.
Alex Honnold climbs El Capitan without a rope; you know he lives and it is still unbearable.
Ayrton Senna from karting to Imola, entirely from archive footage.
Talking Heads in Los Angeles in 1983 and the big suit; the best concert film.
The moon landing from newly found 70mm footage and no narration.
A Kentucky coal strike in 1973, filmed from the picket line; Barbara Kopple's Oscar.
Nimsdai Purja climbs all fourteen 8,000ers in six months.
The paddock drama that turned Americans into F1 fans.
Activists film the dolphin hunt at Taiji with hidden cameras.
A man who impersonated a film director is tried, with everyone playing themselves; Kiarostami's docu-fiction.
An Israeli veteran reconstructs the 1982 Lebanon war in animated interviews.
Vertov's day in a Soviet city, made of split screens, freeze frames and no story at all.
Herzog assembles Timothy Treadwell's own footage of the bears that killed him.
Agnes Varda films the people who pick up what the harvest and the city leave behind.
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