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 Sorrow and the Pity’ (1972)
Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango at Home, Milestone and Google Play.
“The Sorrow and the Pity” is by far the most famous documentary by Marcel Ophuls, who died last month at 97. If all you know of the film is its use as a running joke in “Annie Hall,” then it is beyond time to take a look at Ophuls’s exhaustive, densely structured reconstruction of life in Clermont-Ferrand, France, during the Nazi occupation. The film has been credited with puncturing the postwar myth that France resisted German rule en masse.
Ophuls talks to resistors and admitted collaborators alike, from people who would have us believe they saw little or nothing to people who saw everything. Running nearly four and a half hours, the film is divided into two parts — “The Collapse” and “The Choice” — as it moves through how France laid down its arms against the Nazi invasion and then normalized the German presence. Witnesses discuss the attraction of fascism, loyalty to the Vichy puppet government, how movie screens remained illuminated (albeit with Nazi censorship) and how Paris, after the initial shock of capitulation, returned to a simulacrum of its vivacious self. One interviewee says that the Gestapo could not have been as destructive as it was without the help of the French police.
Part of Ophuls’s diagnosis is social. Pierre Mendès-France, a Jewish lieutenant with the French Air Force who escaped to Britain (and later, in the 1950s, served as the prime minister of France), says that it was easy for the Nazis to draw on latent antisemitism and anti-British sentiment in the country. Denis Rake, a Briton who worked in France as a secret agent during Vichy rule, points to class differences: He got the most help, he says, from railway workers. The bourgeoisie, by contrast, had more to lose.
We hear of divisions within the resistance itself — notably communist versus non-communist — and of the debates its members had about what actions to take. Ophuls shows how sentiment changed quickly after the liberation. And Emile Coulaudon, a resistance fighter who had the nom de guerre Colonel Gaspar, delivers a sobering assessment from the standpoint of more than 50 years ago: He warns of the “risk in the world of the reappearance of Nazism, or whatever goes by another name but is still Nazism.”
‘The Times of Harvey Milk’ (1984)
Stream it on the Criterion Channel and Max. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango at Home and Google Play.
The most striking thing about Rob Epstein’s documentary, which won an Oscar 40 years ago, is just how fresh it remains. Part of this is because of when it was made: At the time of its release in 1984, the assassination of Harvey Milk in 1978 was still a relatively recent event. Milk had achieved a milestone in American political history when he was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors as an openly gay candidate. His associates’ sadness and anger at his death are fresh, and they speak from the heart — and without decades of settled sound bites behind them — about what Milk meant to them and what his legacy should be.
Some of them — like Anne Kronenberg, who became an aide to Milk at city hall; Tory Hartmann, a consultant on Milk’s successful 1977 campaign; and Sally Gearhart, a lesbian-rights activist who fought alongside Milk against an anti-gay ballot measure in California — worked closely with him in the political sphere. Other allies are less obvious. Jim Elliot, an auto machinist and union loyalist who admits to having looked down on gays, traces the path he took to seeing Milk as a great man. He was impressed by how Milk brought a boycott of Coors to San Francisco’s gay bars. And Milk’s pitch, Elliot says, was aimed at the little guy: Listening to Milk, he says, you felt like “this is the kind of guy that is going to talk about you.” Most movingly, Elliot recalls marching alongside other Milk allies in a candlelit vigil after Milk was killed.
But this is also a film that centers Milk’s own words. The first time his voice is heard, it is in a recorded will that he wanted played only in the event of his death by assassination — something that we’re told he always knew was a possibility. Milk’s wit is also on ample display. “If teachers are going to affect you as role models, there’d be a lot of nuns running around the streets today,” he says in a retort — re-created in Gus Van Sant’s 2008 biopic, “Milk” — to the position that gay teachers should be barred from classrooms. We are told about how an off-color one-liner from Milk charmed Ruth Carter Stapleton, a sister of President Jimmy Carter who thought she could change Milk’s sexual orientation with religion. And as Hartmann discusses the tragedy of Milk’s death, she notes that it opened a door: In the week that followed, she says, people inspired by his example came out.
‘Bad Press’ (2023)
Stream it on the Criterion Channel.
In sovereign tribal nations, news organizations are often subsidized by the tribes themselves. And at the time of the filming of this documentary, only a handful of tribes had passed laws codifying the principle of a free press. The movie, directed by Rebecca Landsberry-Baker and Joe Peeler, concerns the fight that ensued when, in 2018, legislators for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation narrowly voted to repeal such a law after it had been in effect for just three years. Suddenly, the reporters at Mvskoke Media — a multiplatform operation with a newspaper and radio show — could, in theory, be overruled by the politicians they were covering.
“Bad Press” tells this story from the perspective of those journalists, principally Angel Ellis, who is determined that the paper be free to report the news as it is, rather than simply paint the tribe in its best light. Looking back through archives of the paper before the free-press act was passed in 2015, Ellis says, “I would think there’s not been a problem at the tribe ever.” Her colleague Jerrad Moore suggests that public officials in the nation don’t understand that tough reporting isn’t personal. The restoration of press protections becomes a significant issue in the race to elect the nation’s next chief and the subject of a prospective amendment to its constitution.
But the obstacles to restoring those rights (finding trustworthy politicians, getting the amendment on the ballot) are many. The Carter Center is called in to observe a do-over election after the results of a first one are tossed out. The reporters at Mvskoke Media must grapple with how they can report on a topic on which no journalist anywhere could claim to be objective. (That said, the paper does appear to depend on financing from the tribe — a wrinkle that “Bad Press” might have made more of.) The movie is ultimately a portrait of how tenuous a right can be.
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