We’re deep into the week before Christmas and still cutting a swath through our Best/Worst/It’s Complicated Year-End coverage, most of which we hope you’ve all read and enjoyed, or at least been engaged by (it’s okay, you can disagree). This year, a few documentaries made it onto our collective 25 Best Films of the Year list; in 2016, it seems that many of the achievements in non-fiction cinema have rendered moot the notion of keeping narrative and documentary separate for evaluation.

Continue reading The 22 Best Documentaries Of 2016 at The Playlist.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the field of 15 for the 2017 Documentary Feature Academy Award and while there were some notable snubs the only one that is cringeworthy is the absence of “Miss Sharon Jones!”

“O.J.: Made In America,” which has taken almost every major critics prize so far, made the cut as did 2016 Sundance Grand Jury prize winner “Weiner.”  The notable omissions are actually mostly from Park City debuts and include “Newtown,” “Jim” (the Audience Award winner), “Trapped,”Tickled” and “Audrie & Daisy.”

Other docs that didn’t make the list include “Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds,” Werner Herzog’s “Into The Inferno” and “Amanda Knox.”

105 documentaries were submitted this year and the Academy’s Documentary branch will now pick the final five nominees from the following 15 films.

Continue reading ‘O.J.: Made In America’ And ‘Weiner’ Make The 2017 Documentary Feature Oscars Cut at The Playlist.

Get ready to get very, very paranoid. Just in case you’d begun to regard your laptop or the mobile device on which you’re reading these words as a benign contraption whose primary covert function is the ability to snap quickly to a spreadsheet when the boss walks by, here comes Alex Gibney, on prime Gibney form, to shatter that cozy illusion and make your world feel a lot less safe. His new film “Zero Days” may ostensibly be an investigation of the 2010 malware worm known as Stuxnet, but over its swift-moving 116-minute runtime, Gibney does a much broader and more important job: relating the rather airless, abstract concepts of cyber-terrorism and internet espionage to their real-world consequences.

Continue reading Alex Gibney’s ‘Zero Days’ Will Make You Paranoid [Review] at The Playlist.

It’s amazing what you can do with a few clicks of a mouse. With just some slight movements of your wrist and a connection to the internet, you can send a funny cat video to your favorite aunt….or bring down an entire government. Prolific documentarian Alex Gibney goes to the dark side of the web in the upcoming “Zero Days,” and today we have an exclusive clip looking at the intrigue in his latest film.

Continue reading Exclusive: Secrets Get Stolen In Clip From Alex Gibney’s Documentary ‘Zero Days’ at The Playlist.

…Aaand now the days are getting shorter as we’ve passed the midpoint of the year, meaning it’s high time we brought you the last but very far from the least feature in our 2016 So Far series. We’ve already regaled you with Best (Narrative) Films, Best TV Shows and our most popular hate-read Worst Films of the Year So Far, so that only leaves Best Documentaries of 2016 to fill you in on. Since the doc landscape is, if anything, changing even faster than that of traditional broadcast TV or theatrically distributed features, we’ve relaxed our rules a little here and allowed titles that we caught online or at festivals that have not yet been widely released to sneak onto this list.

Continue reading The 20 Best Documentaries Of 2016 So Far at The Playlist.

“Going Clear: Scientology and the Process of Belief” is one of the more powerful documentaries on the subject of Scientology to see a major release in years, though we all know the film’s release didn’t lack for controversy. Alex Gibney, the film’s director, is a good documentarian in that he has a keen nose for bullshit and a willingness to peer into corners of our world that most would turn a blind eye towards.

Continue reading Watch: New Trailer For Alex Gibney’s Cyberwar Documentary ‘Zero Days’ at The Playlist.

Watch: A Virus Launches A Global War In Trailer For Alex Gibney's 'Zero Days'

Continue reading Watch: A Virus Launches A Global War In Trailer For Alex Gibney’s ‘Zero Days’ at The Playlist.

Berlin Review: Alex Gibney's Chilling Cyber-Espionage Documentary 'Zero Days'

Continue reading Berlin Review: Alex Gibney’s Chilling Cyber-Espionage Documentary ‘Zero Days’ at The Playlist.