At some point — if it hasn’t happened already — journalism will devolve into two extremes: Twitter and documentaries. This fall offers some of the best of the latter, plus some nonfiction films that take on mind-bending topics and stretch generic conventions into intriguing new forms.
SEPT. 15
THE BEATLES: EIGHT DAYS A WEEK — THE TOURING YEARS
Ron Howard looks back at the defining phenomenon of 20th-century pop culture in this account of the Fab Four’s 1963-1966 road tour, which included some 250 shows. It was a grind almost as long as this film’s title. The music remains as rhapsodic — if at times inaudible — as ever, and the glimpse at the band’s politics is refreshingly timely.
SEPT. 16
AUTHOR: THE JT LEROY STORY
Jeff Feuerzeig’s investigation into the author of a bogus memoir brings academic notions of authorship and truth into the realm of celebrity culture. In 2005, the punk author of “The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things’’ demonstrated the meaning of the title when “he’’ was revealed to be a 40-year-old mother from Brooklyn. Truth proves stranger than metafiction.
CAMERAPERSON
Documentary cinematographer Kirsten Johnson turns her camera on the filmmaking process itself in this diaristic reflection on the medium. She shares snippets of her collaboration on such docs as Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11’’ and Laura Poitras’s “Citizenfour,’’ probing the ethics and implications of putting real life on the screen.
SEPT. 19
THREE DAYS OF TERROR: THE CHARLIE HEBDO ATTACKS
So much carnage has occurred since Jan. 7, 2015, one might almost be able to forget the attack that day by members of Al-Qaeda in Yemen at the Paris office of the satiric weekly Charlie Hebdo. They killed 12 people and injured 11 because of cartoons. Dan Reed’s documentary won’t let us forget. On HBO.
SEPT. 23
THE LOVERS AND THE DESPOT
Not only did the late Kim Jong-il, father of Kim Jong-un, have the longest reign of any modern-day dictator, but he was a prolific film producer as well. As seen in Rob Cannan and Ross Adam’s documentary, he had a Japanese actress and director kidnapped in the 1970s. He offered them a sweetheart deal that included imprisonment and torture and got 17 pictures out of them.
SEPT. 24
HIERONYMOUS BOSCH: TOUCHED BY THE DEVIL
He was one of art’s great visionaries. But Pieter van Huystee’s documentary about the ongoing restoration of the 15th-century Flemish painter’s works poses the questions as to whether the paintings were all really done by Bosch. And why does the guy in “The Garden of Earthly Delights’’ have a flute shoved up his butt?
SEPT. 30
COMMAND AND CONTROL
Robert Kenner’s documentary shows how a little carelessness can ruin everyone’s day, especially when it involves nuclear weapons. An explosion rocked a missile base in Arkansas in 1980, and this is the story of why we are still alive today.
OCT. 2
HOMELAND (IRAQ YEAR ZERO)
We’ve had boots on the ground in Iraq but not much in the way of empathetic witnesses to the unending tragedy. Iraqi filmmaker Abbas Fahdel’s documentary brings the human reality to the screen with his portrait of regular people before and during the war trying to survive as their world, families, and culture disintegrate around them. At the Harvard Film Archive.
OCT. 5
VIVA ACTIVA: THE SPIRIT OF HANNAH ARENDT
Ada Ushpiz’s documentary looks at the German-Jewish philosopher, her affair with philosopher and Nazi supporter Martin Heidegger, and her controversial notion of Adolf Eichmann representing “the banality of evil.’’
OCT. 28
INTO THE INFERNO
In his 1977 documentary “La Soufrière’’ Werner Herzog stood on the brim of a volcano about to erupt. It never did. Here he and volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer visit a number of active ones around the world, pondering their significance, enjoying the view inside, and waiting for the fireworks.
NOV. 4
GIMME DANGER
Unlike “Gimme Shelter,’’ nobody gets stabbed in Jim Jarmusch’s rock doc about his punk pal Iggy Pop. It just feels that way. He shows why Iggy and his band The Stooges have defined rock ’n’ roll for five decades with songs like “Lust for Life’’ and “Real Wild Child.’’
NOV. 11
THE EAGLE HUNTRESS
There will probably be few documentary images this year as striking as that of Aisholpan, a 13-year-old Kazakh girl wearing eldritch indigenous attire with a giant eagle on her shoulder. Otto Bell’s documentary relates the story of how she began training her raptor as a fledgling to compete in the Mongolian Golden Eagle Festival.
UNSCHEDULED
THE B-SIDE: ELSA DORFMAN’S PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY
Cambridge photographer Elsa Dorfman’s giant Polaroid portraits of the obscure and famous are a kind of static form of documentary themselves. Errol Morris shows how her art is done, and why.
Peter Keough can be reached at petervkeough@gmail.com.
