Under the Sun (Netflix)

Most documentaries try their hardest to hide from the viewer the moments that have had to be contrived so that they can always give the appearance of authenticity; Under the Sun puts those moments front and center. The film, which gives us an inside look at a family living in the dictatorship of North Korea, opens with an explanation that in order to make the film, the filmmakers had to agree to let the government of North Korea script and frame every moment of the film. Every moment is perfectly chosen to show how happy and prosperous the people of North Korea are. Every location is pre-chosen by the government. The citizens of North Korea hold hands and sing songs, celebrate holidays, are assigned jobs that they feel great pride in, and praise the Generalissimo Kim Jong-un. It feels part utopia, part The Wicker Man, part The Truman Show, and part David Lynch fantasia.

Not every moment of Under the Sun is North Korea sanctioned, though. There are moments where the camera keeps lingering, in what you have to assume was footage that wasn’t signed off by the government, and see what is happening behind the scenes. We watch as the family members are fed lines, as scenes are repeated, and where the little girl in the center of things is taught how to be more “authentic.” We see the same conversations almost a dozen times in some cases, each time tweaked a little bit in order to get the exact feeling the handlers want the film to give. At one moment, we visit a sick child in the hospital in what turns out to be a staged scenario to show how wonderful the medical system is. The patient’s dialogue, which is coached to death, sounds more like a bad local commercial than a true conversation. It is a frightening portrait to watch unfold, letting us not only understand how a world foreign to us exists, but what allows it to exist as harmoniously as it does.

Zero Days (Showtime Anytime)

Alex Gibney is easily the most prolific documentarian of our time, churning out at least one new film a year. His newest film, Zero Days, is about the Stuxnet computer virus. Gibney gets deep into computer malware and the virus itself. One of Gibney’s greatest talents is making the incomprehensible seem elementary, and here he makes viruses, malware and advanced computer science seem accessible and understandable to someone computer illiterate enough that I can’t figure out how to post this review with an accompanying picture. But like a lot of Gibney’s films, Zero Days covers a lot more ground than that. It spans decades and continents. The focus at times can be all over the place, but like a lot of Gibney’s more explorative documentaries, that is the point. Like Taxi to the Dark Side, We Steal Secrets, and Enron, this film is never comfortable just digging into one story; these films expand their scope grandly, placing a small incident in the greater scope of international relations and remind us that nothing is unrelated to anything else.