Documentaries -- Documentary DVD Movies

FullReviews Index

DVD Pick: "The Fog of War"
The Fog of War (2003) won the Academy Award for Best Documentary, and I can certainly see why. This is Errol Morris’s film about the life and times of Robert S. McNamara, best known as the U.S. Secretary of Defense during the 1960s. Although I sometimes had to struggle to keep up with the nimble-minded 85-year-old McNamara, I found Morris’s movie about him enthralling. Read a full-length review of The Fog of War on DVD.

Pick of the Week: "Anne Frank Remembered" DVD
Winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, Anne Frank Remembered does a better job of putting a human face on the Holocaust than any movie I know. The filmmaking is deliberately straightforward as the story is told in a low-key, contemplative way. Anne died at age 15 at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, but she left a legacy in the form of a diary she kept that continues to be widely read. Read a review of Frank Remembered on DVD.

Pick of the Week: “Spellbound” DVD
Spelling bees didn't sound like a very promising subject for a documentary to me, and it wasn’t until I could watch it at home on DVD that I was willing to give the film a try. I was pleasantly surprised to find I really enjoyed the movie. What made the film come alive for me was not the spelling bees, but the candid portraits of individual kids, along with their families and teachers, and what this revealed about American society as a whole. Read a review of Spellbound on DVD.