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.
‘Approaching the Elephant’ (2015)
Stream it on Tubi. Rent it on Apple TV.
As children return to classrooms, it’s the perfect time to watch this documentary on the first year at an unusual school in New Jersey. It’s a “free school,” which is to say it has no required classes. Instead, the students and teachers vote on rules and activities together. A title card explains that anarchists created the concept as a response to the rigid model of education that took hold during the Industrial Revolution. But a purely democratic approach to pedagogy has its own drawbacks. Granting equal voting power over a curriculum to elementary-age kids is not going to yield a disciplined learning process.
Mirroring this relative lack of structure in her film’s form, the filmmaker Amanda Rose Wilder made the movie in the direct-cinema style associated with the brothers Albert and David Maysles. (The black-and-white cinematography recalls their “Salesman,” as well as Frederick Wiseman’s late-1960s documentaries and Allan King’s “Warrendale.”) Wilder is credited with camerawork but not direction as such. Other than what we observe, she provides almost no context on the teachers’ backgrounds, why the parents have chosen this option for their children or practicalities like state accreditation.
We see some evidence of traditional learning. The students are taught how to look at light and shadow in a painting. A whiteboard contains references to mythology and symbols. But much of the activity Wilder captures is more hands-on, as the children make art, wield shop tools and, at one point, even explore what appears to be a nearby drainage canal. Horseplay is rampant, and the imperatives of safety — one of the few areas in which the adults theoretically have override authority — clash with the school’s egalitarian spirit. Lucy, a student who emerges as one of the major stars, demands a meeting after Alex Khost, the school’s director, tells the kids that they can’t jump off plastic storage bins onto a mattress. “It may be a safety precaution, but maybe we should just make a few rules about how to jump off safely,” Lucy says. Is she wrong?
“There’s definitely a certain amount of, like, ‘Is this really working?’” Alex says at one point. “But we probably won’t know for 20 years.” By now, Wilder should consider a follow-up.
‘Secret Mall Apartment’ (2025)
Stream it on Netflix. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango and Google Play.
Here’s another example of anarchy, or at least rebellion against commercialism. In “Secret Mall Apartment,” a cadre of artists recall how, over a span of about four years in the aughts, they created a functional semblance of an apartment within a mall. This wasn’t “Dawn of the Dead”; it was Providence Place, a huge shopping center in Rhode Island. The group’s leader, Michael Townsend, realized that the structure, which opened in 1999 amid fraught debates over revitalization efforts in the city, contained a weird, surprisingly large nook of underutilized space.
Townsend, an artist whose work had already dealt with issues of gentrification and homelessness, and seven co-conspirators set about clandestinely furnishing a habitable pad in the alcove. The space could be accessed from outside. An extension cord provided electricity. One of the gang’s most daring efforts involved sneaking cinder blocks into the building, so that the den-plus could be walled off and made, essentially, theirs. They didn’t always stay overnight, but it was possible. A china cabinet and framed photos added a homey feel. And the project, unseen though it was, made a defensible artistic and social statement. It “was this opportunity to have this set, almost, where we could play out the unrealistic and unattainable fantasies of the mall,” says Adriana Valdez Young, who was married to Townsend at the time. (We get a sense there was some friction over how much effort went into their mall home instead of their real one.)
“Secret Mall Apartment” eventually brings on a production designer, Suja Ono, to try to re-create the space. But the director, Jeremy Workman, also has great footage that the mall artists shot of their own activities. The images of them pulling furniture up a ladder or lugging the cinder blocks through the stairways are priceless. Confidence — and, some of them suggest, deference accorded to them because they were white — enabled them to avoid arousing serious suspicions from security for quite a while. But even an ersatz apartment isn’t rent-free.
‘Zodiac Killer Project’ (2025)
Stream it on AMC+. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango and Google Play.
When Charlie Shackleton stumbled on “The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up,” an obscure book proposing a theory on the California serial-killer case, he hoped to make a screen adaptation of it. But he couldn’t secure the rights. So instead he went meta: In “Zodiac Killer Project,” Shackleton tells viewers about the movie he wanted to make, if only he could. He opens with a parking lot. “If we’d made the film, there would have been a car here,” he explains. He describes how he might have cut the scene, a re-enactment depicting the meeting between his two major characters.
Over the course of this essay documentary, Shackleton reveals a fondness and a keen eye for the tropes of true-crime movies and television. Through clever juxtapositions of popular streaming series, he reveals just how pervasive their clichés have become. Opening-credit sequences, he points out, often show birds taking flight or a shadowy man walking away. The score tends to be country-inflected. Shackleton loves “evocative B roll”: shots of tape recorders, cigarettes and file boxes. At one point, he describes a moment in his own hypothetical film when the evocative B roll would be “going into overdrive.”
Shackleton explains that he is able to get away with this non-adaptation in part because the author, Lyndon E. Lafferty, wasn’t shy about his ideas; it’s possible to find some of them in sources other than the book. More pertinently, it becomes clear that “Zodiac Killer Project” isn’t really interested in dramatizing Lafferty’s theories; it’s a broader reflection on the craft of true-crime filmmaking and the question of why we watch. Shackleton interrogates the ethics of shows like “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” a series that he suggests spent nine episodes on violence only to turn self-righteous in its final hour. (He liked it anyway.)
Much of “Zodiac Killer Project” consists of Shackleton delivering narration over eerily placid 16-millimeter footage of California locations. He never mentions David Fincher’s “Zodiac,” which is a strange omission. But in a way, “Zodiac Killer Project” is about absences: It’s a placeholder film that, in all likelihood, is even better, and certainly more original, than the movie that wasn’t.
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