Favourite documentaries of 2020

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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



Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.

All Recommended

David Byrne's American Utopia
My Octopus Teacher
Crip Camp
Dick Johnson Is Dead
The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart
Whirlybird
Zappa
The Three Deaths of Marisela Escobedo
David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet
Welcome to Chechnya
Athlete A
Time
The Metamorphosis of Birds
A Secret Love
On the Record
Disclosure
Belushi
Uppity: The Willy T. Ribbs Story
The Go-Go's
Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets
537 Votes
Uncle Tom
Father Soldier Son
Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado
Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind
My Darling Vivian
Totally Under Control
You Cannot Kill David Arquette
The Perfect Weapon
The Way I See It
Rising Phoenix
Transhood
__________________
It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
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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.



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



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.



Registered User
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...
__________________
I passed my exam during the lockdown: memoir writemyessaytoday.net



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



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.