The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we select three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.
‘The Other Side of the Mirror’ (2007)
In the new biopic “A Complete Unknown,” Timothée Chalamet becomes the latest movie star to impersonate Bob Dylan. (There were six Dylan avatars in Todd Haynes’s “I’m Not There” alone.) But documentaries have given us plenty of the singer himself. And while the more celebrated examples of the Dylan-mentary include D.A. Pennebaker’s “Dont Look Back” (1967) and two features from Martin Scorsese (“No Direction Home,” from 2005, and “Rolling Thunder Revue,” from 2019), the sleeper is Murray Lerner’s “The Other Side of the Mirror.”
Released in 2007, the film consists almost entirely of concert footage from the Newport Folk Festival in 1963, ’64 and ’65. At that last event Dylan touched the third rail of folk music by playing an electric guitar, in a performance that prompted boos from the audience — although whether the booing was a response to the transgression or the sound quality has been the subject of debate.
The movie itself is good and loud, and its circumscribed structure makes it “remarkably pure,” as A.O. Scott wrote in The New York Times when it opened. It offers an opportunity to watch Dylan evolve as an artist in cinematic shorthand. Here is a chance not only to see him perform in close-up — or alongside Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, the Freedom Singers and Peter, Paul and Mary — but also to watch his persona change. At the end of his ’64 appearance, the audience begs for more, and he has to run onstage to calm them. “Time! It’s all like a matter of time, they say,” he says, explaining why he has to go, adding, “I want to say thank you. I love you.”
Cut to 1965, and the good-natured, fan-pleasing Dylan is gone. Now, with that troublesome electric Fender Stratocaster, he’s singing that he “ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more” and in essence telling his worshipers, with “Like a Rolling Stone,” that they’re on their own. Then, in what plays like damage control, he returns with an acoustic guitar, and asks the audience to chip in (“An E harmonica, anybody? Just throw them all up”; cue the clatter of what sounds like multiple harmonicas hitting the stage). He then sings “Mr. Tambourine Man,” before hinting, with “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” that the concertgoers won’t call the shots from now on.
‘For Sama’ (2019)
“For Sama” is one of the most moving documentaries to have come out of Syria in the last decade. The journalist Waad al-Kateab, who directed with Edward Watts, presents the film as a kind of documentary diary addressed to her daughter Sama, who was born in January 2016 and spent her first year of life in embattled Aleppo. That is where al-Kateab and her husband, Hamza al-Kateab, a doctor and activist, insisted on remaining despite the bombs and carnage all around them.
Waad says in voice-over that she needs her daughter to understand why the couple made the choices they did, and why it was important to stay behind. Leaving would set a bad example, Waad says, pondering another couple’s choice to stay, while remaining means putting a family through hell.
In Aleppo, Waad says elsewhere in the film, “There is no time to grieve.” When a hospital where the family has been living is destroyed — the doctor who checked the newborn Sama’s vital signs is among those killed — Hamza helps set up a new hospital that may be harder for Russian warplanes to spot. The children Waad interviews have become inured to violence; we hear one girl talk matter-of-factly about a bus getting hit by a “cluster bomb,” a device she knows by name.
One of the more harrowing sequences comes after an airstrike, when doctors perform an emergency cesarean section and frantically try to get a response from the infant. Later we see that even Sama, not yet 1, has seemingly adapted to the traumatic atmosphere. “You never cry like a normal baby would,” Waad says of her. “That’s what breaks my heart.”
Waad also searches for glimmers of beauty in the scarred city, like the sight of snow on ruins. That personal touch helps make “For Sama” haunting even now that a new phase in Syrian history has begun.
‘Will & Harper’ (2024)
Will Ferrell and Harper Steele met in the 1990s when Ferrell joined “Saturday Night Live,” where Steele eventually became the head writer; they formed a friendship that has lasted for almost three decades. The catalyst for “Will & Harper,” a documentary directed by Josh Greenbaum, was Steele’s revelation to Ferrell that she was coming out as a trans woman.
Ferrell, knowing his friend’s love of road trips, proposed that they take a cross-country drive together, which would be Steele’s first such journey since transitioning. Along the way, they could learn more about each other and what the change meant for them. “Does he want to ask me all the questions you’re not supposed to ask trans people?” Steele wonders for the camera. Ferrell, for his part, asks, “Will I be making a completely new friend?”
It is tough to summarize “Will & Harper” without making it sound like an earnest public-service announcement, yet somehow it’s a real crowd-pleaser. Naturally, Ferrell and Steele bring their senses of humor along for the ride, but it’s the disarming candor from both — Steele says there are “no ground rules” for their discussions; Ferrell comes to realize just how much pain his friend was in — that helps make the movie so much more than a description suggests.
The pair go to a basketball game in Indiana where they have a chance encounter with the state’s Republican governor, Eric Holcomb — “the photo you don’t want to be in,” Steele remarks. They go to a biker bar in Oklahoma that Steele initially wants to enter alone. (Walking in with a celebrity like Ferrell would alter the stakes, although so does the unavoidable presence of a camera.)
They confront a much crueler crowd at a Texas steakhouse; after that, Steele reads vicious social media responses to the overall trip. At the Grand Canyon, a retired therapist who fears she didn’t do enough for a patient long ago asks Steele questions. And most heartbreakingly, Ferrell and Steele visit a decrepit house in remote Trona, Calif., a property that Steele bought several years earlier so she could hide there and live as a woman.
Two comedians surely know better than most people that humor is a way of broaching tough subjects. “Will & Harper” shows that it can be salutary for an audience as well.
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