93rd Academy Awards: Doc, Doc, who's there? A deep dive into the feature nominees

by Josh Bierman

I’m sure I’m not the only contributor/reader on this site who upon Oscar nomination morning wakes to find they’ve already seen just about every above the line nominee. Or if they haven’t, they come to terms with having to sit through Hillbilly Elegy after managing to avoid it for months. 

This season, like in so many past ones, it’s those below the line nominees that I spent time getting to know after the nomination announcement. I didn't expect to be so far behind on Best Documentary Feature ahead of nomination morning...

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Doc Corner: The Best Documentaries of 2020

By Glenn Dunks

Before this column takes a few weeks break, it’s that time of the year to make lists! I have spent the last few weeks churning through screeners trying to ensure I saw enough of 2020’s documentary output to justify a list of the year’s best, although I do not have the time nor the inclination to watch 238 of the damn things! Nevertheless, below are 30 non-fiction titles (or non-fiction adjacent, but we’ll get to that later) that I believe are among the year’s best movies. I stuck to the 2020 calendar as much as possible because, like Nathaniel, I want to keep some order to it all.

If you were to sit down and watch every film below, you would be taken from rural towns in the heart of the Florida peninsula to rural towns in the heart of the Ukraine via the protests of Hong Kong and a nursing home in Chile. There are serious themes, important subjects, powerful ideas... and hand sanitizer.

There’s also a stripper named Nomi. Something for everything, I reckon...

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Cinema Eye doc nominations

by Nathaniel R

"Time" keeps racking up the honors

The Cinema Eye Honors are now in their 14th year and considered an influential prize for documentary films. Prison sentence justice movie Time leads the nominations with six but two competitors for the top prize, Romania's political corruption doc Collective (Romania's Oscar submission) and Norway's farm doc Gunda aren't far behind with four nominations. 

Outstanding Nonfiction Feature
“Boys State”
“Collective”
“Dick Johnson is Dead”
“Gunda”
“Time”

The full list of nominations and links to our reviews are after the jump...

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Critics Choice Documentary Awards 2020

It's the fifth year since the Critics Choice Awards spun off their documentary honors until a whole sidebar awards. I personally abstain from these as I don't see enough documentaries. Our doc corner guru Glenn Dunks would be an ideal voter, though. If he wrote about these winning films, there's a link. The big winners were Dick Johnson is Dead with the two top wins and an additional honor and My Octopus Teacher with two wins as well. The full list of wins is after the jump...

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Interview: Garrett Bradley, Fox and Rob Rich on their award-winning documentary "Time"

by Murtada Elfadl 

Fox and Rob Rich in a shot from the film

This year’s documentary sensation is Time, now streaming on Amazon Prime, a film that announces the arrival of Garrett Bradley as an accomplished filmmaker. Telling the decades spanning story of Fox Rich, an entrepreneur and abolitionist who spent almost 20 years fighting for the release of her husband Rob Rich out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly known as Angola. He has been given a 60 year sentence for a robbery they both committed in a moment of desperation. Talk about punishment that doesn’t fit the crime.

The film’s 2020 journey of accolades started at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where Bradley won the Best Director award in the Documentary feature competition. Since then it has played the Toronto and New York film festivals and is now available to screen on Amazon. And it is absolutely my favorite film of 2020.

The film is a mix of Fox’s video diaries that she recorded over the years with insight into the last couple of years of her family’s story shot by Bradley. That was not the original concept. After ending the shoot Fox gave Bradley a treasure of archival footage that she had shot through the years. Bradley changed direction and incorporated Fox’s footage. Recently I had the chance to speak to the Riches and Bradley over zoom and I started the conversation at this juncture asking Fox why she gave Bradley her video diaries.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity... 

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