Catch up on the 2026 Oscar-nominated documentaries : NPR

The killing of Ajike “A.J.” Owens is the topic of the The Good Neighbor, considered one of 5 Academy Award nominees for excellent documentary characteristic this yr.

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There’s a prevalent sentiment amongst documentary filmmakers that the majority streamers and distributors are solely excited about initiatives concerning the three C’s — cults, crime and celebrities. However this yr’s 5 Oscar-nominated characteristic documentaries show that, whereas that could be largely true, such a perception is just one aspect of the image, and that even documentaries that fall into these classes can nonetheless carry an progressive, transferring and impactful strategy to nonfiction storytelling.

Regardless of the difficult points all these movies discover — from terminal sickness, to life in one of many deadliest jail techniques in the USA and in a small Russian city within the midst of a conflict — these filmmakers sort out them with sensitivity, humanity and sudden humor. Within the period of big-budget documentaries, these movies are an awesome reminder of the transformative energy of nonfiction tales, and that, most of the time, all you want is a digital camera and a powerful story that have to be instructed to maneuver and join with audiences.

The Alabama Resolution

The Eighth Modification of the USA Structure was ratified on Dec. 15, 1791. It merely reads “extreme bail shall not be required, nor extreme fines imposed, nor merciless and strange punishments inflicted.” Practically 235 years later, 1000’s of individuals have died whereas in authorities custody, at prisons and jails, in what advocates — and courts — have mentioned are direct violations of prisoners’ constitutional rights. Maybe nowhere is that this extra true than in Alabama, one of many deadliest jail techniques in America.

The Alabama Resolution is a six-year investigation into the disaster unfolding at prisons throughout the southern state, discovering over 1,300 deaths of individuals in custody inside Alabama correctional amenities between 2019 and 2024. Documenting abuse inside prisons is dauntingly tough, however because of the bravery of a gaggle of incarcerated males and their households, filmmakers Andrew Jarecki⁩ and Charlotte Kaufman⁩⁩ expose the brutal actuality of life in custody by means of smuggled footage that these males filmed from inside. These movies are graphic and extremely exhausting to look at, however a obligatory step in understanding the lived actuality of the estimated 28,000 individuals at present in custody in Alabama. Earlier this yr, three of the whistleblowers featured within the documentary had been transferred into solitary confinement. Whereas considered one of them has since been launched, the opposite two stay in solitary confinement.

Come See Me within the Good Mild

I’ll admit that, of all of the nominated documentaries this yr, Come See Me within the Good Mild was the one I dreaded watching probably the most. The movie, which chronicles the lifetime of Colorado’s former poet laureate Andrea Gibson and their spouse Megan Falley following Gibson’s terminal most cancers prognosis, screened at virtually each movie pageant I attended over the past yr, gained the 2025 Sundance Pageant Favourite Award, and even has the coveted 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating from critics. My hesitancy was rooted not within the high quality of what I anticipated can be a transferring movie, however moderately in how Gibson’s story would power me to confront my very own mortality. Tissues useful, I lastly pressed play, totally ready to cry, however fully unaware of how a lot I, too, would snort.

Director Ryan White lets the couple’s relationship shine superbly all through this movie — as they go to docs’ appointments, learn one another’s work, and put together for what would in the end be Gibson’s final spoken-word efficiency in 2024, earlier than their passing in July 2025. If I needed to summarize Come See Me within the Good Mild in a single sentence, it could be greatest to make use of Andrea’s personal phrases from their poem Life Anthem: “my story is one about happiness being simpler to search out as soon as we understand we would not have eternally to search out it.” This movie is a celebration of unconditional love, friendship, household, poetry, and the way the little issues in life — informal dinners with pals, a barking canine, a damaged mailbox — in the end make us most alive. Maintain your tissues close by.

Chopping By Rocks

Earlier than Sara Shahverdi grew to become the primary feminine councilor in her Iranian village, she was a midwife, delivering over 400 infants, by her estimate. It’s no shock, then, that Shahverdi’s position as the pinnacle councilor in her village is a part of her plan to make life higher for the ladies round her, lots of whom are younger women she helped carry into this world.

Mr. No person Towards Putin

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a brand new “federal patriotic schooling coverage” that noticed faculty curricula throughout the nation change in a single day to foster help for the conflict. Pavel “Pasha” Talankin, a trainer and occasion coordinator at a small faculty in Karabash, one of the polluted cities on Earth, is requested to begin filming these classes on the faculty, a part of a compulsory reporting system.

However when Talankin stumbles upon a social media callout asking for individuals who have been impacted by Russia’s new insurance policies, he finds himself uniquely positioned to doc the lives of kids throughout the conflict, his work as a videographer permitting him to cover in plain sight as he collaborates with a workforce of worldwide filmmakers to seize what few can, in a rustic infamous for its repression of journalists and people opposing the federal government. Mr. No person Towards Putin is a movie concerning the indoctrination of younger youngsters by means of authorities establishments, and the way, little by little, protected areas the place they’ll assume critically and categorical themselves freely are taken from them, fomenting worry and suspicions between residents to regulate them into obedience and compliance.

The Good Neighbor

Over the course of my journalism profession, I’ve lined many crimes the place race is believed to have performed a job, together with the loss of life of Ajike “A.J.” Owens, a Black mom of 4 younger youngsters who was shot by her white neighbor, Susan Lorincz, on June 2, 2023, in Florida. It isn’t unusual for these circumstances to make nationwide information, a snapshot in time of how neighborly disputes can flip lethal. However hardly ever do audiences have the chance to witness the occasions that result in such violence. For reporters and documentary filmmakers, the query is commonly: how are you going to inform a narrative intimately while you’re not there to movie it? Geeta Gandbhir’s The Good Neighbor does so by cleverly piecing collectively police physique digital camera footage, interrogation video and audio from witness interviews to dissect two years of occasions that led to Owens’ loss of life and Lorincz’s subsequent manslaughter conviction.

The Netflix documentary opens with the 911 name reporting Owens’ taking pictures, then unfolds the best way detectives work: by tracing again all of the out there proof of what occurred within the lead as much as that fateful summer time day in 2023, constructing a case in opposition to Lorincz, who complains concerning the neighborhood’s youngsters taking part in exterior and calls them racist slurs. Police physique digital camera footage itself turns into a witness to the escalation that resulted in Owens’ killing. Sandwiched between the primary name Lorincz ever made to the Marion County Sheriff’s Workplace to complain concerning the youngsters and her sentencing listening to, The Good Neighbor powerfully lingers in a second usually missed within the headlines: the rapid aftermath of the killing.

The documentary lets audiences bear witness to what occurs to Owens’ 10-year-old son Isaac, who was along with her when Lorincz shot her, how the neighbors got here collectively to take care of the kids as medics administered support to Owens, and the devastating second the kids study their mother is not going to be coming house. By all of it, this movie calls us to query how, if ever, these pointless deaths could be prevented.