People love to rail on the Best Documentary category at the Oscars, and while it’s mind boggling that something as innovative and fresh as “Stories We Tell” couldn’t make the cut, it’s quite often that the final crop is never so terrible.
This year the branch diversified their picks with some crowd pleasers, profiles, surreal experiments and important political statements. And what’s really fortunate is that four of the five nominees (“20 Feet From Stardom” excluded) are all streaming on Netflix.
Here’s a brief rundown of each of the nominees and my own prediction of who might take Oscar gold.
The Act of Killing – 4 stars
One of the early great scenes in “The Act of Killing” shows Anwar Congo, a former gangster and executioner in Indonesia who alone murdered 1000 individuals and lives to boast about his former glory, demonstrating how to strangle a man while minimizing the blood splatter. It’s absolutely harrowing how casually he performs it with a spring in his step, but when Director Joshua Oppenheimer shows Congo the footage, he feels nothing and isn’t phased in the slightest. “The Act of Killing” takes us deeper down the rabbit hole by allowing these evil men to stage recreations of their horrible crimes. People act with bravado in surreal scenarios, and the film crosses the border between movie making fiction and reality. It’s darkly funny and disturbingly beautiful at times, and it pulls the miraculous trick of actually making us sympathize with this wretched man, someone we smiling and even petting ducklings. To see him purge his horror at the film’s end is magnificent.