The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we’ll choose three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.
‘Man on Wire’ (2008)
Stream it on Amazon Prime Video, Fandango at Home, Kanopy, Netflix, Peacock, Pluto and Tubi. Rent it on Apple TV and YouTube.
This month marked the 50th anniversary of Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk between the twin towers, and James Marsh’s Oscar-winning documentary on how he did it is still a crowd-pleaser, combining the logistical intrigue of a caper film with a protagonist whose boundless enthusiasm makes him a real live, uh, wire onscreen. Even some of the more Hollywood-ified aesthetic choices — the use of re-enactments, the Michael Nyman scoring — add to the atmosphere here, maybe because the idea that anyone would dream of walking on a cable more than 100 stories up in the sky seems like the stuff of fiction. Also, as Robert Zemeckis’s less effective (if still underrated) “The Walk,” from 2015, showed by casting Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Petit, there is no substitute for watching the real Petit tell his story. It’s surreal just to see him alive after such a feat.
In “Man on Wire,” we learn about Petit’s previous coups traversing the airspace between the towers of Notre-Dame Cathedral and Sydney Harbour Bridge. We also get quite a bit of detail about how much effort and time he and his eccentric co-conspirators put into casing the World Trade Center site to figure out how to draw the wire between two edifices that, to paraphrase Petit, were well beyond human scale.
The film includes vintage footage of Petit’s friends trying to knock him off a practice wire above grass, to prepare him for the possible effects of wind. And Marsh smartly maintains suspense by keeping the procedural elements of the story — that is, how Petit and his friends entered the towers with heavy equipment and hid out there overnight — running throughout the entire film. It’s amazing they didn’t get caught. And once Petit was on that wire, there was little the police could do about it. They didn’t “know how to react to a daydreaming wire walker laying down and dialoguing with a sea gull,” he recalls.
‘John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection’ (2018)
Stream it on Kanopy, Pluto and Tubi. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango at Home and YouTube.
With the U.S. Open in full swing, it is a great time for tennis-minded cinephiles to discover this highly original essay film from the director Julien Faraut. Nominally, it is a movie about John McEnroe and his astonishing 1984 season: His win rate was 96.5 percent, although his famed loss to Ivan Lendl in the French Open helped keep perfection out of reach.
But “John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection” isn’t interested in rivalries or even the outcomes of matches. It’s a documentary as much for film fans as it is for tennis enthusiasts. It even opens with a quote from Jean-Luc Godard: “Cinema lies, sport doesn’t.” Drawing on the writing of the critic Serge Daney and film rushes made by the tennis player and filmmaker Gil de Kermadec, Faraut probes the parallels between movies and tennis, in which time is especially elastic. Unlike in some other sports, the movie quotes Daney as saying, “The length of the match depends on the ability of the players to create the time that they need to win.” A match can last less than half an hour or the length of three “Godfather” movies with hourlong breaks between them, the narrator, Mathieu Amalric, notes in the voice-over.
Faraut is also interested in McEnroe’s penchant for self-dramatization and how his acting out may have had a kinship with plain-old acting. On the court, the movie posits, McEnroe “played on the edge of his senses”: Like a fanatical auteur, he could react to the slightest sound. The de Kermadec footage is distinctive, someone suggests, because it covers only one of the players. De Kermadec is said to have been more interested in the athletes than the match. He captured how McEnroe moved. The film links him with a tradition that extended back to early cinema pioneers like Étienne-Jules Marey, who conducted experiments in chronophotography — essentially, motion studies. And as Faraut points out, he worked on the present-day site of the French Open.
‘Pictures of Ghosts’ (2024)
Stream it on the Criterion Channel.
Early in “Pictures of Ghosts,” the Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho (“Bacurau”) describes coming home one night and hearing a sound he hadn’t heard in years. “It was Nico barking, the neighbor’s dog,” he says in voice-over. “There was just a problem: Nico was dead.” Then he realized that he was overhearing one of his own films: His debut feature, “Neighboring Sounds,” was showing on national TV, and his neighbors were watching it. And because, like much of his early cinematic output, the film was shot in and around the Recife apartment he had called home for 40 years, it was bringing the ambient past to life.
In this endearing, highly personal documentary, Mendonça Filho ponders how Recife has changed over time. In particular, he looks at the city through the prisms of that apartment — which he says has “been shot from every angle in every room” — and the downtown cinemas that formed him. Those theaters have mostly shuttered, and the downtown area, he says, is “a place part of the city seems to have forgotten.” Money has migrated elsewhere. The offices that the Hollywood studios kept in a five-story building closed in the 2000s. Mendonça Filho describes how a mini mall was built inside one of the theaters, without tearing the structure down: “This thing took root inside the Veneza like an alien organism, and the cinema became its host.”
But Mendonça Filho still has photographs and footage of the glorious auditoriums he remembers. He includes old video he made of a projectionist preparing to close out a theater called the Art Palácio, which dimmed its lights for good in 1992. (The present-day building, from the outside, appears to have seen better days.) Marquees, Mendonça Filho says, are timekeepers; he ponders a glitch in video footage of one advertising the 1989 “Batman.” Is the glitch some sort of digital ghost, trying to send a message, he wonders?
Anyone who has spent a great deal of time immersed in movie theaters will relate to Mendonça Filho’s nostalgia for them as spaces. When you spend years of your life going to a cinema, he says, “the relationship gets emotional and confusing.”
Read More: Three Great Documentaries to Stream
