The 10 Best Documentaries of 2021

Teresa joined the police force in part to impress her father, who was also a cop. Montoya became a policeman because he admittedly got off on the alpha-male power of the uniform. They both work in Mexico City; they’re also a couple. Watching director Alonso Ruizpalacios’ documentary on these officers of the law as they go about their daily duties, you’re unsure of whether the film is going to turn into an uncritical ride-along, an indictment of a corrupt system or possibly even pure cop-aganda. (A soundtrack which have been lifted from a 1980s TV cop show doesn’t help clarify things.) And then, having already utilized recreations and fourth-wall breaking within the narration, Ruizpalacios pulls the rug out from under us and introduces an element of performance that further complicates matters. What initially seems like creative problem-solving ends up adding depth and layers to the ways that police officers put on a persona — guardian, authority figure, persecutor — as well as questioning the relationship between those who protect and serve, and the people they’re supposed to be protecting and serving.

Most people know that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was not exactly beloved by J. Edgar Hoover, and that the FBI director kept detailed reports on the Civil Rights icon’s daily activities (and extramarital dalliances). Sam Pollard’s documentary dives into just how extensive the Feds’ fixation on the Nobel prizewinner was, and the result is both eye-opening and jaw-dropping. A longtime editor for Spike Lee, an American Masters veteran and one of the directors involved with the seminal Eyes on the Prize series, Pollard is an expert at weaving together archival footage to tell history’s story on a macro- and micro-level. A dual portrait of two men who helped shape the 20th century — and whose respective legacies of activism and abuse of government-sanctioned power still cast mile-long shadows on our current era.

We got our share of extraordinary documentaries this year on the early days of the Covid outbreak and its continuing aftermath, from the anonymously sourced 76 Days to Matthew Heineman’s The First Wave. Yet it’s Nanfu Wang’s portrait of a pandemic that’s lingered with us the most in 2021, and the way the One Child Nation filmmaker seamlessly transitions from the personal to the political to the panoptical captures a host of perspectives while remaining clear-eyed about what went wrong. Starting with her own trip back to China for New Year’s celebration — “the last moment I can remember when life still felt normal” — right before Wuhan went into lockdown, the filmmaker takes us on a tour of overtaxed ICUs, grief-filled memorials, rage-fuelled protests and press conferences where make-or-break decisions kept landing on the latter. Simmering underneath it all is Wang’s indictment of how governments, politicians and the media used misinformation to “calm” the general public, and ended up metastasizing a medical crisis into a plague upon all of our houses.

After seeing a press conference in which several Kansas City men, all of whom had suffered sexual abuse at the hands of priests, asked for a criminal investigation regarding the Catholic Church’s handling of these incidents, Robert Greene reached out to the lawyer handling their case. He asked: Would your clients be interested in collaborating on a project with him? These men, and a few fellow survivors, would re-enact their traumas with a drama therapist. Greene would help them film the projects, which ranged from the baroque to corrective. Procession is a harrowing watch, to be sure, but also sensitive to what’s happening with these subjects in a way that doesn’t go for easy emotional button-pushing, or playing down the white-knuckle struggle they endure while processing all of it. (The movie’s title contains multitudes.) As with his previous work Bisbee ’17 (2018), the documentarian is using a mix of performance, testimonials, advocacy and activism in the name of reckoning with the past. Yet the stakes feel higher, and far more personal with this  — it’s an extraordinary gamble that everyone is taking here. And by the time you watch one of these survivors destroy a recreated rectory room with a sledgehammer, you realize how the power of art can help pave the way for the possibility of healing.

A young boy growing up in Afghanistan in the 1980s watches as his older brother goes AWOL after being forcibly recruited by the Mujahideen to fight the Soviets. Thanks to the efforts of another sibling living abroad, the whole family is able to leave the country and eventually settle in Europe. Years later, this nameless, now-grown protagonist is a successful academic who’s settled down with a supportive boyfriend. When the Danish director Jonas Poher Rasmussen asks him to recount his story for the camera, however, you can see how being uprooted from his home has never quite been resolved. The result is both an intimate exploration of trauma as well as a chronicle of the universal 20th-century refugee experience, in which that word in the title is a constant way of life. The fact that Rasmussen animates this immigrant’s tale somehow makes it even more graceful and gutting; there’s a sequence near the end that earns the sobs it inspires precisely because of how it’s presented.

If Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s look back at the series of shows that took place in Harlem’s Mount Morris Park in the summer of ’69 had been nothing but musical performances, the fruits of his labor-of-love would still make for a near-peerless concert film: A 19-year-old Stevie Wonder jumping in front of his keyboard before banging out a manic drum solo. Nina Simone turning “Backlash Blues” into the equivalent of a boxing match. Sly and the Family Stone at their peak, reminding you that funk is both a noun and a verb. Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples together, taking everyone to church. What he gives us instead, however, is far more vital. It’s a contextualized look at a specific moment — in Harlem’s history, in African-American history, in American history — that reminds you just how much the music acted as a salve for state-institutionalized violence, a catalyst for change, and a celebration. The mere fact that it’s taken decades for anyone to see this footage is a crime. Thompson’s film is a step towards righting that wrong. It’s a reclamation in more ways than one.