Author: Tripp Burton

Life, Animated (Amazon Prime) Life, Animated, the Oscar-nominated documentary from Roger Ross Williams, is as life-affirming as a documentary gets. It follows Owen Suskind, who at the age of three was diagnosed with autism and who is graduating high school 20 years later when the film begins. Owen spent several years unable to communicate with…

Gleason (Amazon Prime) I do not follow football, and the name Steve Gleason meant nothing to me heading into Gleason. The documentary opens with a short recap of Gleason’s career, including the blocked punt that made him a legend in New Orleans, but football is not what Gleason is about. Instead, it focuses on Gleason’s…

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…

The Witness (Netflix) By this point, most of us only know the Kitty Genovese story as the briefest of stories in a sociology textbook: a young woman was brutally murdered in Queens while 38 witnesses stood by and did nothing to help her. The Witness, the debut documentary from James D. Solomon, goes back and…

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…

Suited (HBOGo/HBONow) A brief synopsis of Suited, the new Lena Dunham-produced documentary, is simple: Rae Tutera and Daniel Friedman are New York-based tailors who specialize in custom-made suits for transgender and gender non-conforming clients who have trouble feeling comfortable in off-the-rack options. The film, by first-time documentarian Jason Benjamin, does a lot more than merely…

O.J.: Made in America (ESPN.com) After 20 years of obsessing over the O.J. Simpson trial, from my teenage years glued to the live coverage of the trial to various TV specials to Jeffrey Toobin’s definitive The Run of His Life to the recent FX miniseries The People vs. O.J. Simpson, I thought I was done…

Welcome to Leith (Netflix) Leith, North Dakota is the sort of American small town, with a population of 24, that seems to scream out for a documentary. So when white supremacist Craig Cobb moved into town and started buying up property, you can only imagine filmmakers Christopher K. Walker and Michael Beach Nichols running towards…

Fantastic Lies (Netflix) ESPN’s 30 for 30, which has continued beyond its initial anniversary celebration to bring occasional documentaries to the sports channel, has given us interesting, traditional storytelling over the past five years. They occasionally branch out into something more daring (like the excellent, narration-less June 17, 1994), but for the most part they…

A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness (HBOGo/HBONow) HBO is on a streak at the Academy Awards when it comes to Best Documentary Short, having distributed three of the last five winners, including this year’s A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness a few weeks after winning. Directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy,…

Jim: The James Foley Story (HBOGo) Brian Oakes’ Jim: The James Foley Story begins with a title card telling us that while we will be witnessing disturbing images of war, we will not be shown the video of Foley’s execution. The film then cuts right to one of Foley’s brothers, describing how he found out…

Cartel Land (Netflix) Matthew Heineman’s Oscar-nominated documentary about vigilantes in Mexico and the United States fighting drug cartels contains some of the rawest footage of any documentary from last year. There are moments where the camera is running alongside these vigilantes as they bust through doors and return fire and you clutch your seat in…

Best of Enemies (Netflix) It goes without saying that the Buckley/Vidal debates of 1968, which are the subject of Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon’s documentary Best of Enemies, have gone largely forgotten today. This is shocking because the debates, as this film so gracefully argues, were a major turning point in American political rhetoric. This…