A long-time chronicler of documentary filmmaking, Craig Mathieson is a film critic for the Sunday Age and Sun-Herald newspapers, as well as the creator of BINGE-R, a new website dedicated to covering the shows and movies on Australian streaming services.
The Act of Killing
Stunning in its unearthing and recasting of widespread institutional murder in 1960s Indonesia, Joshua Oppenheimer’s film may well change your perceptions of what a documentary is capable of. It uses theatricality to get at the traumatic truth and is gripping throughout as you see the price an entire country can pay for political failings.
Autoluminescent
Co-directors Lynn-Maree Milburn and Richard Lowenstein are two of the best documentary filmmakers working in Australia right now, and here they capture both the vivid sounds and very specific humanity of Rowland S. Howard, the revered Australian cult musician who formed The Birthday Party with Nick Cave.
Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief
Over the years there has been countless articles and reports about the Church of Scientology, but Academy Award-winning director Alex Gibney combines everything that is known about this cult into a coruscating portrait of an organisation that has run out of control. In the name of faith lives are literally destroyed, and the film’s self-control is exemplary.
Hoop Dreams
In many ways the rich modern age of documentary filmmaking began with this 1994 American saga of race, ambition, poverty and loss that is seen through the lens of two teenage Chicago basketball prodigies. Director Steve James, with heartrending detail, captures the travails of adolescents already focused on reaching a lucrative professional career.
Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
This is a great example of a documentary that can completely change your perception of its subject. If you knew the late Joan Rivers as a comic with wicked one-liners, Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg’s feature reveals a ground-breaking career on stand-up stages and television screens informed by an insatiable drive to work and personal loss.
