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 fear for the filmmakers. At any moment, you think, a bullet could come bursting through the camera. The risk of the filmmaking alone makes Cartel Land worth the price of admission, especially when the admission is free and streaming.

Unfortunately, Heineman isn’t able to tell his story as convincingly as his footage deserves. Cartel Land goes back and forth between two parallel stories: the Mexican vigilante group Autodefensas, led by the vibrant and complex Dr. Jose Manuel Mireles, and the American vigilante group Arizona Border Recon, led by the monotone, less complex Tim Foley. When the film stays in Mexico, watching Mireles risk his life to rid small towns one-by-one of the grasps of the cartels, the film pops. Heineman isn’t afraid to let the flaws come out from Mireles and his followers, and smartly lets us make up our own minds as to the effectiveness of the Autodefensas; as the lines start to blur between them and the cartels they are fighting, Heineman exposes them warts and all but never comments himself.

When the film drifts to Arizona, though, it loses all of the momentum that is building up with the Autodefensas storyline. Tim Foley is much less dynamic a personality than Mireles and his cohorts, and Heineman isn’t able to dig much deeper into him than a string of racial slurs and generalizations. What he is doing lacks the excitement of the Mexico scenes, but also lacks a meaningful motivation. You get the idea that the only thing driving the ABR is a desire to get the Mexicans out of their country (at one point, Foley warns the camera about how races shouldn’t mix in the same country). Heineman even seems to understand how dead-end this story is because as the film goes on, we cut back to Arizona less and less. The true story here is with the Autodefensas, and if Heineman had only stayed with that story and let his footage speak for itself, he would have told a much more powerful story.

The Thin Blue Line (Netflix; HuluPlus later this month)

As true crime seems to be blossoming in the public mindset these days, particularly after Netflix’s 10-part Making of a Murderer came out very late last year, it seems like the right time to revisit Errol Morris’ genre-defining The Thin Blue Line. Billed as a “non-fiction” film rather than a “documentary,” both in terms of trying to draw in audience and facing a backlash at the time for the use of reenactments, The Thin Blue Line traces the murder of Dallas police officer Robert Wood, the conviction of Randall Adams for the crime, and Morris’ revelation that the murder was actually committed by David Ray Harris. Morris’ argument ended up being so convincing, and the film so discussed, that a year after its release Adams was exonerated and released from jail.

What makes The Thin Blue Line so remarkable, and still so powerful almost thirty years later, is that it plays off the myriad of strengths Errol Morris brings to a film. His attention to detail means that the crime plot of the film is laid out meticulously and clearly. Morris was a private investigator before becoming a documentarian and knows how to uncover and present a crime story. Morris, though, is also perhaps our greater chronicler of people, and it is the characters we meet, and whom the film takes the time to get to know, that makes Randall Adams’ story so powerful. Morris’ trademark camera, positioned directly on an interviewee and unflinching in its honesty, isn’t afraid to sit for a while and let the truth come out of someone, whether intentional or not. The film lets its subjects work out what happened in real time and lets the viewers read between the lines of truth and fiction. Compared to the hundreds and thousands of imitators we’ve gotten in the past three decades, The Thin Blue Line remains powerful in its empathy for every person it chronicles and the way it captures a crime, time and place with seemingly effortless mastery. You know more about the people of Vidor, Texas in 1976, and what made them complicit in sending the wrong man to death row, in a 103-minute running time than Making of a Murderer is able to teach in more than five times the length.