One of Us (Netflix)

A great documentary can open your eyes to a topic that is far more fascinating than you had ever really considered. Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s One of Us, now on Netflix, does just that for the Hasidic Jewish community in New York. It is a subset of society that I, like many I imagine, had never given much consideration to. I was expecting a film about how this group, who shun technology and many other aspects of modern urban life, adapt to living in the largest city in America. Imagine my shock to see One of Us open with a gut-wrenching 911 call made by a frightened mother holed up in her bathroom while her husband’s family surrounds the house with hammers and clubs. A group I had always thought of as a quaint religious sect suddenly felt a lot more complex.

The documentary follows three former Hasidic Jews who have all left the community after suffering abuse. Their stories are difficult to hear and their journeys difficult to watch; their lives outside of the Hasidic community offer up a whole new set of struggles, both threatening and quaint. The frightened mother must contend with a legal system that is keeping her children away from her and has to go outside in disguise. Another member has fled to Los Angeles, where he is living in an RV on the side of the road and can only hum along to pop songs whose lyrics aren’t ingrained in his memory since childhood like the rest of us. A third is still in New York, trying to find a balance between staying in touch with a community he struggles to believe in and making a new life for himself outside of that community.

At times, the film feels hauntingly similar to the rash of Scientology documentaries of the past few years, where we watch people leave a religious community that they felt was stifling them and struggle to deal with both a community that is reluctant to let them go and an outside world they don’t understand. Like those documentaries, it can also feel incomplete. For obvious reasons, Ewing and Grady do not hear from current members of the Hasidic community. For all the horrors we witness, we never understand what draws so many people into the community or why they stay; religion offers something to those who wish to accept it, and this film never shows that. It is missing that crucial piece of a fascinating puzzle.

One of Us is one of the more hauntingly beautiful films of the past few years. It paints a portrait with sharp camera angles, reflections in rear-view mirrors, and across the street shots that both show off the beauty and horrors of New York. At times, the camera work can feel less like cinematography and more like surveillance footage. These images evoke the mood of the film powerfully: a group of people trying to escape a world that is destroying them to go to a world just as scary that they can’t quite grasp.

Cinema Through the Eye of Magnum (FilmStruck)

FilmStruck knows its audience, and it has recently started putting out short documentaries that play directly to the hearts of its subscriber base: people who love film, no matter the language or era it was made in. Their latest, Cinema Through the Eye of Magnum, offers a look at cinema across time and place. The photographers who worked for Magnum made a specialty of capturing the true essence of Hollywood and international movie stars. The film follows the rise of the Magnum photography company from 1947 to today, chronicling the greatest movie stars, from Ingrid Bergman and Marilyn Monroe to Penelope Cruz and Jeff Bridges, through their images. It is at its best when it lets us relish in their beauty and coolness; one highlight involves a deep explanation of the iconic James Dean in Times Square photo and how it came to be. If the documentary feels a little too much like a one-hour cable program, and isn’t always a great cinematic experience, it is still a great experience for anyone who loves cinema.

Too Funny to Fail: The Life & Death of the Dana Carvey Show (Hulu)

I was 14 when The Dana Carvey show premiered — and quickly disappeared — on network TV. It was bizarre, experimental, offensive, controversial, and unlike anything I had seen before. I was hooked. Hulu, which is now streaming all 8 episodes of the show, has a documentary to go with them exploring how the show came to be, how it managed to be brilliant and short-lived, and what happened in the fallout of the show. The last part is obvious when you look at a list of newcomers who worked on the show, which reads like a history of the past two decades of American comedy: Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Louis C.K., Greg Daniels, Robert Smigel, and even Charlie Kaufman. Unfortunately, there isn’t enough to quite fill 90 minutes of running time, especially when half of these participants are not interviewed for the documentary. To make up, Too Funny to Fail shows a lot of film clips from the show, which are wonderful reminders of its brilliance but take up too much of the running time. Is the story what they created or why and how they got away with creating it? The film is confused to answer that question, and so the answers to the second question get lost in the mix.