This Week In Documentary

Theatrical & Streaming Releases - New & Recommended - March 1-7, 2024

Welcome to March! There are a lot of great documentaries arriving in theaters and on various home entertainment platforms this month, with much of it debuting on this first day. It’s also the beginning of Women’s History Month, so please look at our old list of women’s history films from the website including recommendations of such titles as Town Bloody Hall (available on The Criterion Channel) and Chisholm ’72: Unbought & Unbossed (currently streaming on Prime Video, Kanopy, and Ovid).

Not everything out in the next seven days could be viewed in advance, and there wasn’t enough room to highlight everything worthy of watching. This includes non-new documentaries hitting different streaming services (The Last Waltz on Prime Video, for one example) and returns of hit series like Netflix’s Full Swing. As promised in the past, the release calendar portion of This Week in Documentary is now behind a paywall. Please consider upgrading your subscription to continue accessing this helpful, comprehensive reference material that we put a lot of work toward.

Nonfics Pick Of The Week: Our Body (2023)

Our Body

“Our Body overwhelms the viewer, in a good way…more than a comprehension of what goes on at a gynecology ward of a hospital, Simon brilliantly provides an intimate, sensitive, and maybe even kind of transcendental understanding of what women (and trans men) and their bodies uniquely go through in life.”

I just published my full review of Our Body and you can read all about the film and my very positive opinion of it there. I wasn’t expecting to like it so much let alone make it this week’s top highlight. I hope that you’ll appreciate it as much as I did, as it’s easy with such a long documentary (168 minutes) for viewers to lose focus and miss its total value. In any event, Our Body is a good place to start with Women’s History Month for its spotlight on patients of all ages and needs at a gynecology ward of a hospital.

Directed by Claire Simon (most of whose earlier docs are exclusive to Doc Alliance and worth watching), Our Body was nominated for many awards last year, including an Outstanding Direction nod at the Cinema Eye Honors, and in the Best Documentary category at both the Césars and the Gothams. I regret that it wasn’t also recognized at all at the Critics Choice Documentary Awards.

Following its Berlinale premiere and then its theatrical release last summer, Our Body makes its streaming debut on The Criterion Channel on March 1. It’s one of several essentials new to the platform immediately this month, including the classics American Movie, Sepa: Our Lord of the Miracles, and The Passion of Remembrance plus Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine and a bunch of Isabella Rossellini films that could be classified as nonfiction works. The Reverend, which I also reviewed this week, is another doc making its streaming debut on The Criterion Channel.

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Other Documentary Highlights

Nicky Nodjoumi in A Revolution on Canvas

American Symphony (2023), Four Daughters (2023), Kokomo City (2023), & Welcome to Wrexham Season 2

Awards season continued this week with many documentary titles honored (all of them for the umpteenth time) for their achievements. At the PGA Awards, the Netflix exclusive American Symphony was recognized in the Outstanding Producer of Documentary Theatrical Motion Pictures category, spotlighting the work of Lauren Domino, Matthew Heineman, and Joedan Okun. Netflix was also in the mix with a win in the Outstanding Sports Program category for the limited docuseries Beckham.

The ongoing series Welcome to Wrexham (on Hulu and FXNow) won the PGA Award for Outstanding Producer of Non-Fiction Television, which named all of these instrumental figures: Josh Drisko, Bryan Rowland, Jeff Luini, Alan Bloom, Nicholas Frenkel, George Dewey, Rob McElhenney, Ryan Reynolds, Miloš Balać, Liz Spano, Aaron Lovell, Shannon Owen, Patrick McGarvey, Patrick Gooing, and Molly Milstein. And the VR documentary Body of Mine, which allows users to experience gender dysphoria and trans identity, was given the PGA Innovation Award.

Oscar hopeful Four Daughters (presently on VOD) won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary Feature. Among those films it beat was Kokomo City (now streaming on Showtime via Paramount+), which was named Documentary of the Year at the Dorian Awards, presented by GALECA, the Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics. The same film, which showcases Black trans sex workers, also won the Dorian Award for LGBTQ Documentary of the Year.

The Dynasty: New England Patriots (2024) Episodes 5 & 6

As long as new episodes of Apple’s The Dynasty: New England Patriots debut weekly, I may have to include them in the highlights until they’re all released. This week’s two installments are both exceptional. Episode 5, “Torn,” focuses on the 2008 season when Tom Brady suffered a long-term injury and Matt Cassell stepped in as starting quarterback. Cassell has a lot of charm and is a great, albeit brief addition to the impressive roster of astute talking heads in this series.

Episode 6, “At All Costs,” is all about Aaron Hernandez, who was charged with murder following his highly successful rookie season with the Patriots. You can get a fuller document of the story in the Netflix limited series Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez, but this episode is worth watching for different players’ comments on whether or not the team should have anticipated tragedy with the troubled and troublesome tight end. Even more than in last week’s “Spygate” episode, Bill Belichick’s demeanor as he declines to comment is revealing of his character.

Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013)

The biggest movie out this week is Dune: Part Two, the second installment of Denis Villeneuve’s potentially continuing adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novels. Long before the success of this franchise, though, and even ahead of the disappointment of David Lynch’s effort, Dune was to become a movie in the 1970s with surrealist filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky at the helm. Decades later, Frank Pavich chronicled the whole affair of the failed production with the feature documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune. In our review of the film, Dan Schindel argued that it works mainly because of Jodorowsky’s interview and is ultimately “an entertaining, informative way to learn and think about what could have been.” Watch it now on Max.

The Program: Cons, Cults and Kidnapping (2024)

Netflix delivers another docuseries that’ll have people talking. Across three episodes, The Program: Cons, Cults and Kidnapping shares filmmaker Katherine Kubler’s hell of an experience being sent to an abusive disciplinary boarding school as a teenager. Kubler is the latest investigative documentarian to prove the value of a personal touch in stories like this, as she discovers and details firsthand engagement, from then and now, with the traumas of the infamous Academy at Ivy Ridge. The Program debuts on the streaming service on March 5.

Queens (2024)

There are plenty of nature documentaries focused on babies, including titles from various Disney brands. Now it’s time for a docuseries devoted to the moms. Surprisingly arriving in March instead of the Mother’s Day month of May, Queens is a seven-part docuseries in which each episode is focused on a different region of the planet and its matriarchal representatives of the animal kingdom (actually, the seventh episode spotlights the women who worked on the show). Narrated by Angela Bassett and as narrativized as any family-focused nature program these days, it’s fast-paced and looks incredible.

Only the first three episodes of Queens premiere on National Geographic on March 4, with the other four broadcast one week later, yet the entire docuseries arrives on Hulu and Disney+ on March 5.

A Revolution on Canvas (2023)

Combining an art documentary with world history and a family dynamic, A Revolution on Canvas is a feature focused on Iranian painter Nickzad Nodjoumi and the more than 100 works of his that disappeared during his country’s revolution in 1979. The film is directed by his daughter, Sara Nodjoumi, who also appears in the doc, in continued collaboration with Till Schauder (The Iran Job), and there’s something about that closeness between creator and subject that gives it a lived-in feel and allows the audience to slip right into the story with ease, regardless of familiarity with the people or the place involved. A Revolution on Canvas makes its streaming debut on HBO and Max on March 5.