The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Here are three nonfiction films that will reward your time.

“The Look of Silence” (2015)

Director Joshua Oppenheimer, whose first fiction feature, “The End,” opens in December, grabbed the film world’s attention with “The Act of Killing” (2013), in which he invited self-proclaimed “gangsters” who had slaughtered opponents of Indonesia’s military regime in the mid-1960s to restage their murders. Arguably a flaw in the movie is that it never fully acknowledges how the conceit might have encouraged the gangsters’ showboating. The presence of a camera — and of sets and makeup — can’t be ignored as factors in how they comport themselves.

Oppenheimer’s superior follow-up, “The Look of Silence,” plays things straighter, and in some ways poses the more haunting question: Because supporters of the violence still hold political power in Indonesia, families of the victims and families of the killers live side by side. How do you grapple with the knowledge that your neighbors are former executioners?

The central figure in “The Look of Silence” is Adi Rukun, an optometrist whose older brother was among the slain.

Perhaps the most haunting scene comes near the end, when, after a man has confessed to multiple killings and drinking human blood, his daughter bids Adi a friendly farewell. “Please forgive my father,” she says. “Think of us as family.” (Stream it on Freevee and Netflix. Rent it on Apple TV.)

“Filmworker” (2018)

The ultimate perfectionist filmmaker, Stanley Kubrick, had the help of a tireless polymath assistant. The title figure of Tony Zierra’s “Filmworker” is Leon Vitali, who while playing Barry Lyndon’s stepson told Kubrick that he was interested in learning more about the technical aspects of filmmaking. He became something like Kubrick’s right-hand man until the director’s death in 1999. Even after that, Vitali worked to assure that Kubrick’s wishes were honored.

At various points Vitali recalls being involved in casting, photography, sound, studio liaising, checking film prints and even setting up a video monitoring system for Kubrick’s ailing cat. Vitali has boxes upon boxes of Kubrick-related papers. And although Kubrick accorded him what the film suggests was an unusually high level of trust, the flip side of Vitali’s usefulness was that Kubrick never stopped calling on him, for just about any task.

Vitali became an invaluable repository of Kubrickiana: There were few people on the planet (Vitali died in 2022) able to acquire more insight into the man’s precise wishes on aspect ratios, color timing and lens flare. Someone had to keep that perfectionism alive. (Stream it on Kino Film Collection. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango at Home and Google Play.)

“The Edge of Democracy” (2019)

In “The Edge of Democracy,” documentarian Petra Costa reflects on the events that culminated in the April 2018 imprisonment of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, better known as Lula, then a former (and now the current) president of Brazil. Much has changed since the film’s premiere at Sundance in January 2019. Lula was released from prison in November that year, and he was elected president again in October 2022, defeating the far-right incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, whose own ascension to power provides the backdrop of the film’s chilling coda.

But the movie’s broader warnings about the fragility of democratic institutions remain potent. Costa interweaves elements of her family history with the recent history of Brazil. She and the country’s democracy, she points out, are roughly the same age: She was born shortly before the end of the military dictatorship that had ruled Brazil for two decades, and her heritage is split between two aspects of the nation’s political makeup. Her grandfather was a founder of a construction company that flourished in the 1970s, a period her parents spent in hiding as militants opposed to the regime. Her mother recalls being jailed at the same place as future president Dilma Rousseff, who succeeded Lula’s first stretch in office. (Stream it on Netflix.)