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.
‘Ornette: Made in America’ (1985)
Stream it on the Criterion Channel, Kino Film Collection and Ovid. Rent it through Milestone.
The final feature by the American independent filmmaker Shirley Clarke (“The Cool World,” “Portrait of Jason”) was this documentary on the musician Ornette Coleman. The occasion was a 1983 concert in which Coleman, accompanied by a full orchestra whose members were, it’s suggested, hardly accustomed to free jazz, inaugurated a performing-arts center in his hometown, Fort Worth, Texas.
Mirroring Coleman’s musical style in its own approach to cinematic form, “Made in America” jumps around in time and space: It crosscuts between the framing concert and re-enactments of Coleman’s childhood (Demon Marshall and Eugene Tatum play the young artist as a boy and as a teenager, wandering the neighborhood and railroad tracks with a saxophone). Clarke, who served as her own editor, is unafraid to play with stylization: At one point, commentary from Coleman’s ex-wife, the poet Jayne Cortez, and son, Denardo Coleman (also his drummer and manager), unfolds inside a cartoonish prop TV. Coleman is shown meeting with other creative personalities and jazz aficionados. We see him attend a reading by William Burroughs. In an interview that Clarke, at her most Godardian, intercuts with snippets of neon lights, Coleman discusses the influence of the futurist Buckminster Fuller, whose approach to designing geodesic domes, he felt, was a correlative to the way he composed.
Interwoven with all of this are other Coleman performances, old and then-new, such as “The Link,” an early ’80s concert in which a set of musicians at the World Trade Center interacted via satellite with musicians performing in Harlem. We also hear Coleman, at times sounding lost in his own ideas, hold forth on his philosophy and anxieties; he suggests he could never tell whether women were interested in him as a performer or a person and even describes wanting to get castrated to avoid the problem. He explains his plans to turn a former school on Rivington Street on the Lower East Side into a “multiple-expression center” for artists and scientists. The area was less gentrified at the time; Denardo relates not one but two instances of his father being attacked in the school building in less than a year. But mostly “Made in America” (shot by the great Ed Lachman) is a joyous film, a documentary devoted to finding its own sound.
‘Flickering Ghosts of Loves Gone By’ (2021)
When a distant relative died, the French filmmaker André Bonzel (1992’s “Man Bites Dog,” directed with Rémy Belvaux and Benoît Poelvoorde) inherited a collection of old film reels. He started screening them and was astonished to see himself as a child with his father. “I have no memory of my father’s tenderness, and there he was stroking my hair,” Bonzel explains in voice-over in “Flickering Ghosts of Loves Gone By,” the offbeat and often disarming all-archival documentary that grew out of the find. Bonzel had always regarded his father as an unfeeling man: a biologist and avid hunter who had little regard for his family. Might Bonzel’s impressions have been wrong? If so, could the movies illuminate what his memory had elided?
In “Flickering Ghosts,” Bonzel uses the trove of amateur cinema to learn more about his family history. He has a bit of an advantage, because his ancestors’ love of movies dates back to the beginning: Bonzel says that his great-great-grandfather, an engineer named Maurice Expedit, attended the March 22, 1895, screening that the Lumière brothers held for scientists, even before they exhibited their cinematograph to the public that December. Expedit, Bonzel wryly notes, seemed to pass on a love of movies to his descendants (along with, in some cases, an intertwined preoccupation with sex). Several of Bonzel’s relatives worked with film or in show business.
Bonzel is curious about how the film collection matches and complicates his memories. The only footage he finds of his mother shows her laughing, something he rarely remembers seeing her do in life. He is not inclined to sugarcoat what he finds. “It is an understatement to say that not everyone in the family was in the Resistance,” he says, before explaining how one of his shutterbug relatives, Jean-Paul, shot newsreels supportive of the Vichy Regime as a way of obtaining film stock — and then, after the war, when collaborators were being rooted out, denounced a woman who had not returned his affection.
Some of the film material is Bonzel’s own, and there is tragedy there as well: Over footage of Belvaux, who died in 2006, Bonzel remarks that although we see dead people in movies all the time, it feels different in this case. At the end, pondering all his flickering ghosts, Bonzel reaches some conclusions about why what is filmed and what is remembered are not the same.
‘The Alabama Solution’ (2025)
Stream it on HBO Max. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango and Google Play.
Early in this documentary from Andrew Jarecki (“Capturing the Friedmans”) and Charlotte Kaufman, Melvin Ray, an inmate in an Alabama prison, makes a remark that conveys the rarity of what we’re about to see. “These are state institutions, but it’s one of the only state institutions that the public or the media has no access to,” he says. “How can a journalist go into a war zone, but can’t go into a prison in the United States of America?” It may well be true that reporters seldom witness prison conditions that have not to some degree been stage-managed by prison authorities, and a title card says that legal precedent allows wardens to, in effect, deny access to journalists. By contrast, much of “The Alabama Solution” is composed of cellphone footage that the inmates themselves furtively filmed, on devices that are contraband but, we’re told, difficult for an understaffed institution to keep out entirely.
Drawing on these raw, alternative points of view, Jarecki and Kaufman fashion a damning indictment of Alabama’s prison system. They aren’t alone in their outrage: In 2020, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Alabama and its department of corrections, accusing the state of fostering unsafe and violent conditions that violated prisoners’ Eighth and 14th Amendment rights. In 2022, the prisoners themselves went on a labor strike for three weeks. Those events are captured in the film and are portrayed as a stunning feat of solidarity and statewide mobilization.
“The Alabama Solution” follows Ray and his fellow activist Robert Earl Council, who goes by the name Kinetik Justice, and their efforts to improve life in prison. Council in particular appears to become a target because of his organizing. We see him being held in solitary confinement, where rats swim in his toilet. The other major strand of the film involves a prisoner named Steven Davis, who died after being beaten in a confrontation with guards. The film, which features Davis’s mother, Sandy, as a major character, strongly suggests that deadly force was not justified. We see a lawyer, Hank Sherrod, on calls with Davis’s fellow prisoners trying to learn what they saw; some are afraid to talk, and Davis’s cellmate, who is set for release soon, suspiciously sounds as if he has been coached. In interviews, former correctional officers describe systemic problems. On multiple levels, “The Alabama Solution” becomes a story of insiders and outsiders, and the power imbalances that those designations create.
