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Thought-Provoking Documentaries

Thought-Provoking Documentaries

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Thought-Provoking Documentaries
  • Chichinette: The Accidental Spy

    Movie

    Directed by Nicola Alice Hens • Documentary • 2020 • Germany, France • English, French with English subtitles
    Featuring Marthe Cohn

    The extraordinary story of Marthe Cohn, who joined the French Resistance as a feisty young woman during WWII. After her family fled south and her sister was sent to...

  • Churchill and the Movie Mogul

    Movie

    Directed by John Fleet • Documentary • 2019 • UK • English
    Featuring Dilly Barlow, Ian Beyts, Stephen Fry

    Winston Churchill was mad about movies, but the full extent of his use of film as a wartime weapon has never been told. Before WWII, producer Alexander Korda enlisted Churchill as a writer a...

  • The Image Book

    Movie

    Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • Arthouse • 2018 • Switzerland, France • English, French, Arabic, Italian with English subtitles
    Featuring Jean-Luc Godard

    The legendary Jean-Luc Godard extends his iconoclastic legacy with a provocative collage essay probing the history and ontology of the moving i...

  • The 78 Project Movie

    Movie

    Directed by Alex Steyermark • Documentary • 2014 • US • English
    Featuring Alex Steyermark, Lavinia Jones Wright

    Journey across America as today's musical artists perform the early songs that inspired a century of popular music, recording them exactly as originally captured on one-of-a-kind 78rp...

  • Mr. Nobody Against Putin

    Movie

    Directed by David Borenstein, Pavel Talankin • Documentary • 2026 • Denmark, Czechia, Germany • Russian with English subtitles
    Featuring Pavel Talankin

    "Mr. Nobody Against Putin" is a riveting first-person exposé of Russia's wartime student indoctrination program told through the eyes and lens...

  • Shari & Lamb Chop

    Movie

    Directed by Lisa D’Apolito • Documentary • 2025 • US • English
    Featuring Shari Lewis, Mallory Lewis, Sarah Sherman

    The legendary ventriloquist Shari Lewis rose to stardom with her beloved sock puppet Lamb Chop. When her popular children’s show was cancelled, Shari had to find a way to make peac...

  • Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore

    Movie

    Directed by Shoshannah Stern • Documentary • 2025 • US • English
    Featuring Marlee Matlin, Aaron Sorkin, Henry Winkler

    In 1987, Marlee Matlin became the first Deaf actor to win an Academy Award. Thrust into the spotlight at just 21, she faced industry skepticism and isolation before rising as a p...

  • Radical Wolfe

    Movie

    Directed by Richard Dewey • Documentary • 2023 • US • English
    Featuring Michael Lewis, Gay Talese, Niall Ferguson

    From a beat reporter at the Washington Post to an overnight sensation as the leader of the New Journalism movement, Tom Wolfe was at the forefront of reshaping how American stories a...

  • Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk

    Movie

    Directed by Sepideh Farsi • Documentary • 2025 • France, Palestine • English, French, Arabic with English subtitles
    Featuring Fatma Hasson, Sepideh Farsi

    This intimate, first-hand perspective on life under siege in Gaza is told through video calls between director Sepideh Farsi and 25-year-old P...

  • Riefenstahl

    Movie

    Directed by Andres Veiel • Documentary • 2024 • Germany • English, German with English subtitles
    Featuring Leni Riefenstahl

    Leni Riefenstahl was Nazi Germany's preeminent filmmaker and one of its key propagandists. Yet from the end of WWII until her death, she denied her close ties with Hitler ...

  • Name of the Game

    Movie

    Directed by William Forbes, Douglas Skinner • Documentary • 2025 • US • English • Mature Content

    In the shadow of Chippendales, male exotic dancing in South Central Los Angeles thrived from the late 1980s until the early 2000s. “Name of the Game” introduces iconic dancers past and present and ...

  • One Hand Don't Clap

    Movie

    Directed by Kavery Dutta Kaul • Documentary • 1988 • US • English
    Featuring Lord Kitchener, Calypso Rose

    The infectious rhythms and exhilarating irreverence of calypso and soca music are celebrated in this newly-restored and vibrant documentary. Told through the eyes of legendary musicians Lord ...

  • !Women Art Revolution

    Movie

    Directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson • Documentary • 2010 • US • English
    Featuring Yoko Ono, Cindy Sherman, Marina Abramović

    For over forty years, artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson collected interviews with her contemporaries, shaping them into an intimate portrait of their fight to break do...

  • Eva Hesse

    Movie

    Directed by Marcie Begleiter • Documentary • 2016 • US, Germany • English
    Featuring Selma Blair, Bob Balaban, Patrick Kennedy

    Eva Hesse, one of America’s foremost postwar artists, helped shape post-minimalism through her pioneering sculptures. Her untimely death cut short a dense career marked b...

  • Harvard Beats Yale 29-29

    Movie

    Directed by Kevin Rafferty • Documentary • 2008 • US • English
    Featuring Tommy Lee Jones, Vic Gatto, Brian Dowling

    Blending vintage footage with candid player interviews, including Harvard lineman and future Oscar winner Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Rafferty crafts a vivid portrait of one of the most ...

  • The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill

    Movie

    Directed by Judy Irving • Documentary • 2003 • US • English
    Featuring Mark Bittner

    This classic feel-good film tells the remarkable true story of a Bohemian St. Francis and his loving relationship with a flock of wild red-and-green parrots. Mark Bittner, a homeless street musician in San Francis...

  • Every Little Thing

    Movie

    Directed by Sally Aitken • Documentary • 2025 • Australia • English
    Featuring Terry Masear

    Author and wildlife rehabber Terry Masear has an ambitious goal: to save every injured hummingbird in Los Angeles. But the path to survival is fraught with danger. This heart-expanding Sundance hit intr...

  • Beware of Mr. Baker

    Movie

    Directed by Jay Bulger • Documentary • 2012 • US • English
    Featuring Ginger Baker, Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana

    Ginger Baker is the original rock ‘n roll madman-junkie-superstar that somehow survived 50+ years of drug abuse, disastrous experiments, and four marriages on three continents. This no...

  • Let's Get Lost

    Movie

    Directed by Bruce Weber • Documentary • 1988 • US • English
    Featuring Chet Baker, Vera Baker, Carol Baker

    This portrait of the elusive jazz vocalist and trumpeter Chet Baker uses excerpts from Italian B movies, rare performance footage, and candid interviews from what turned out to be the last y...

  • How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer

    Movie

    Directed by Jeff Zimbalist • Documentary • 2024 • US • English
    Featuring John Waters, Oliver Stone, Dick Cavett

    Explore the rollercoaster life of America’s most controversial and bestselling author of the 20th Century, Norman Mailer. Prophet, hedonist, violent criminal, literary outlaw, and soci...

  • Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation

    Movie

    Directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland • Documentary • 2020 • US • English
    Featuring Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto

    The brilliant work, personal struggles, and cultural impact of iconic American writers Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams explodes onto the screen in this innovative documentary fea...

  • The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden

    Movie

    Directed by Dan Geller, Dayna Goldfine • Documentary • 2013 • US • English
    Featuring Cate Blanchett, Sebastian Koch, Diane Kruger

    Darwin meets Hitchcock in this true-crime tale of paradise found and lost. Fleeing conventional society, a Berlin doctor and his mistress start a new life on uninh...

  • Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story

    Movie

    Directed by Bruce David Klein • Documentary • 2025 • US • English
    Featuring Liza Minnelli, Michael Feinstein, Alan Cumming

    This exhilarating film explores the dazzling and complex Liza Minnelli, as she rose to stardom in the 1970s, just after the death of her mother Judy Garland. Battling person...

  • 5 Broken Cameras

    Movie

    Directed by Emad Burnat, Guy Davidi • Documentary • 2011 • France, Israel, Palestine • Hebrew and Arabic with English subtitles
    Featuring Emad Burnat

    An extraordinary work of cinematic and political activism, this Academy Award-nominated film is a firsthand account of nonviolent resistance in a ...