07/02/25 - Secret Mall Apartment (2024) - 6/10

8/20/25 - Con Mum (2025) - 5/10

10/12/25 - Orwell: 2+2=5 (2025) - 6/10

10/21/25 - Blood & Myth (2025) - 4/10

12/13/25 - The Perfect Neighbor (2025) - 6+/7-/10

A seeming graduation from the excellent short documentary from Incident where that film was entirely through bodycams and CCTV, this uses mostly bodycams and CCTV but adds recorded police dialogue and some interview spots that help further flesh out the crime, responders, victims and perpetrator. It's strong and engrossing.

12/20/25 - 2000 Meters to Andriivka (2025) - 8-/10

Literal on the frontlines as you get a first person accounting of the death, the toll, and the grizzly nature of this war in Ukraine - both through blood and through spirit. Harrowing stuff and amazing footage & stories to capture.

12/28/25 - Predators (2025) - 6/10

12/30/25 - Cover-Up (2025) - 7/10

1/3/26 - Unknown Number: The High School Catfish (2025) - 6-/10

1/21/26 - The Alabama Solution (2025) - 8-/10

Journalistic expose told from the prisoners living & dying their shared experience of a cancerous system and its rotten progenitors. Good storytellling with solid throughlines and highlighting the block that built this house of lies and loss. It's sad and disheartening to see the beatings, death and hardship that is endemic to this institution but at least some of these things are getting out via this film.

1/26/26 - Mr. Nobody Against Putin (2025) - 6/10

A lived in expose from preexisting footage, seeing the sliding changes of everyday Russians, in particular their school system, during the ongoing war in Ukraine and the tightened grip of Putin. Interesting and laudable, but lacking a real zest or drive.

2/8/26 - Cutting Through Rocks (2025) - 6/10

An empowering but ultimately gutting documentary about an independent woman running for office in her Iranian village. Subversive, empowering and progressive, but incurs wrath, scorn and untimely heartbreak in a picture that speaks to what could be but ultmately runs into what is. Solid and non-boundary pushing prductiton wise, but a good doc overall.

3/3/26 - Come See Me in the Good Light (2025) - 7/10

I put this one off due to the subject matter - a lesbian poet couple grapple with the impending cancer demise of one of them - which was not inviting. And though generally accurate, this general idea description could not include the magnitude of their love, the joy in their vision of life/love/the world, and the affirming nature of the glimpse into their experiences. It was moving and funny and a strong documentarian message. Not sure it’s the best in the field, of the genre, or of the nominated, but it was worth the watch.

DOCUMENTARY ROUNDUP 2025