Favourite documentaries of 2020
 

What were you favourite documentaries of 2020? Here are mine:

The Way I See It 10/10
Disclosure 10/10
Transhood 9/10
Dick Johnson Is Dead 9/10
Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies 9/10

Honourable mentions: I am Greta, Time, Crip Camp

David Byrne's American Utopia
Athlete A
Crip Camp
A Secret Love
Mucho Mucho Amor

I still really want to see:
My Octopus Teacher
A Life on Our Planet
Time
Dick Johnson is Dead
Class Action Park
Disclosure
Be Water

Re: Favourite documentaries of 2020
 

I've only seen Dick Johnson is Dead, which gets a big recommendation from me.

Re: Favourite documentaries of 2020
 

Top 3:
Social Dilemma
Athlete A
AKA Jane Roe
I watched Octopus Teacher and thoroughly enjoyed it, but it didn't strike me as a 'favorite' in any way.

Re: Favourite documentaries of 2020
 

The social dilemma
After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News

I'll second these...

Be Water
Circus of Books
Spaceship Earth
The Booksellers

The Social Dilemma is not the most entertaining doc of 2020 (it's terrifying in more depresing ways), but it is tthe one most people should see.


Cheating a little, two 2019 docs, because I only just watched them this year:


Autonomy - Fascinating look at the thin line between the emergence of A.I. infractructure and human autonomy, and the debate on how best to integrate the two ethically.


Citizen K - acts as a concise primer for post-Soviet political history, the only flaw is its somewhat hagiogaphic excusal of oligarch's Mikhail Kodorkovsky's very real economic crimes. I haven't seen but am looking forward to Gibney's new films this year, like Agents of Change and Totally Under Control.

Re: Favourite documentaries of 2020
 

Zappa
How Can You Mend a Broken Heart (Bee Gees)

Natalie Wood

My list:




Challenger: The Final Flight
Totally Under Control
76 Days


The last one was particularly touching and deep, as I'm a medical intern and I'll never forget the nightmare caused by Covid-19...

Re: Favourite documentaries of 2020
 

Peacock network has a large inventory of great WWF/WWE documentaries that you all might enjoy. Currently watching Monday Night Wars since I called out sick to work today

The Social Dilemma
Collective

I'm going to cheat a little, because this doc is listed as '2020' on Prime, maybe being the date of its American video release.


All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace is a 2011 BBC documentary from the always interesting Adam Curtis (Pandora's Box, Century of the Self), a three hour examination of about a centurry's worth of imploded scientific and ideological hubris concerning everything from eugenics to futurism, and the current anomie ennui from increasing automation. Similar to Social Dilemma in showing the paradox of interconnectedness/solipsistic isolation, this doc has a hearty intellectual appetite that covers objectivism, global finance, Rwandan genocide, Buckminster Fuller, cybernetics, ecology and a host of surprising connections in-between, woven through a montage deluge of images into multiple layers of themes, associations and contrasts, ultimately with the timely thesis that "we have embraced a fatalistic philosophy of us as helpless computing machines to both excuse and explain our political failure to change the world." It doesn't really matter much that the doc is nearly a decade old, as it is deeply prophetic for many of the social and intellectual trends of the last decade, and would still seem as fresh and relevant had it been made last year.


Curtis does have a new doc series this year called Can't Get You Out of My Head, also concerning the vortex of media, politics and perception, and I'm eager to check it out for the 2021 list.