13th (Netflix)

More of a cinematic essay than a straight-out documentary, Ava DuVernay’s 13th traces the African-American experience from the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, to today’s Black Lives Matters movement. Her main thrust is the continued forced labor of black men post-slavery, as they have been increasingly incarcerated and the prison numbers in America have stacked up. We are now home to a quarter of all the incarcerated people of the world. Perhaps the most powerful images in the film are the graphs of how many prison inmates there are in America, which she returns to again and again as we see it rise gradually and then skyrocket in the past 40 years. It is a horrific statistic, and DuVernay makes sure we don’t ignore it.

Using a variety of balanced talking heads, DuVernay packs a lot of information into 100 minutes of screen time. Her experts cover Jim Crow, the 1994 Crime Bill, The Birth of a Nation, Black Lives Matters, Trayvon Martin, the Civil Rights movement, ALEC, Richard Nixon, Trump rallies, and the War on Drugs with intelligence and clarity. There isn’t a whole lot of new information here, but that isn’t the point of the film. DuVernay is connecting the dots for us, letting us see how pieces of the Jim Crow laws are still evident in today’s prison system, or how the careful word choice of Richard Nixon has echoed again and again through conservative politicians. At one point, she repeats a black and white image of a man followed by police during the Civil Rights movement, but cross cuts it with a clip from a Donald Trump rally. History, in DuVernay’s mind, just keeps repeating itself over and over again, and each time it gets harsher and harder to break out of.

The most power comes from the politicians, though, many of whom are willing to be candid about their own piece of the puzzle: a wide range of the political spectrum, from Newt Gingrich to David Dinkins to Charlie Rangel, admitting that they messed up in their legislation and that they might have added to the problem. They might not even understand every part of the problem they tried to solve. The best of intentions don’t always work out. In the end, we aren’t left with any solutions, but maybe that is just because we are running out of traditional solutions. It is time to start changing our assumptions and finding solutions outside of the box because things aren’t getting better on their own.

Hamilton’s America (PBS.org)

Hamilton’s America, the Great Performances documentary about the Broadway phenomenon, tells three stories simultaneously: the true story of the founding father, the story of the creation of a hip hop musical about him, and the story the musical puts on stage every night. The clips of the show, unexpectedly, are magnetic. They pop off the screen and are well worth checking out, especially for those of us who can’t afford the arm-and-leg it costs to see the show in New York (or now Chicago). The film also has moments from a concert at the White House guaranteed to choke you up; Christopher Jackson singing “One Last Time,” George Washington’s farewell address, to a soon-to-leave President Obama is a true highlight.

Unfortunately, the rest of the documentary is really just an infomercial to sell those overpriced tickets. We follow Lin-Manuel Miranda as he develops the show, but there is nothing really new in these moments that we haven’t seen in hundreds of other behind the scenes documentaries. We follow cast members to the real life locations depicted in the show, but there is nothing really new to be learned from these moments. There is also no drama in the story at all. Everyone keeps bragging that Hamilton celebrates the triumphs and flaws of the founding fathers, but they only want to celebrate the triumphs of the show. To watch Hamilton’s America is to believe that the show flowed from the minds of the creators fully formed and that there was no struggle to get it out. Past Great Performances documentaries have highlighted the personal demons that artists face when getting brilliant work out of them; Tales from a Ghetto Klown is a particularly memorable one from the past few years. Down the road, I’m sure that someone will find an interesting, flawed tale about the difficulty of creating one of the most brilliant shows in American history. We haven’t seen it yet, though.

Amanda Knox (Netflix)

That latest in Netflix’s surge of true crime documentaries, what you learn from Amanda Knox most likely depends on what you know coming in. I must admit that I knew only the very briefest outline of the case, and before the documentary I probably could not have told you the outcome of the case. When Amanda Knox first appears on screen, I was a little shocked to see her narrating her own story. I guess that serves as a spoiler of sorts. The film does a very nice job of laying out the case, mostly through the first person accounts of the major participants themselves. But it doesn’t add up to a whole lot more than a very glossy, intelligently edited true crime documentary.