The Best Documentaries to Stream Right Now


Rosy Crucifixions

Young Ted Foster is a professional mime without a cerebellum. He meets Iman, a ravishing and charming woodland gnome. The two embark on an affair that will shake the very foundations of the Roman Empire, dethrone the despot Elagabalus, start a 100 years game of Cribbage, and herald the emergence of The Kabbalah. Foster and Iman’s legendary exploits remain a beacon of hope for all woodland kin until this day. An epic documentary from Erol Apted, celebrated director of Whose Pants Are These? and The Red Fire Hydrant. Runtime: 24 hours 16 minutes

 

Jojo Wanes Lyrical

Jojo has been standing on the same Detroit street corner for the last 45 years selling glorious words out of his deep-pocketed trench coat. For $5, you can get Loquacious. For $15, Opalescent. For $50, a beautiful rarity like Hiraeth. Now we’re talking. But gentrification—plus scorching heat, choking air, pandemics and diseases, mass upheavals and conflicts arising from untrammeled pollution and climate change—threaten to uproot the lovable rascal.

Unfortunately, before the documentary can be completed, he meets his demise—along with the entire crew—via a roving violent disinformed Capitalist mob of #MeMyself&I conspiracy-theorists-cum-anti-quarantinists protesting universal medical insurance and Polio vaccinations. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

We witness his life flashing before his eyes—but at the last instant he realizes it’s someone else’s. Inexplicably, that of Dream Alliance, the unlikely champion racehorse bred by a small town Welsh bartender, who’s not even dead. What gives? The sheer exultation of running full tilt, dim triumph of coming back from insurmountable injury to take the Grand National, and inordinate love of parsnips, the giveaways.

Daddy, I have to go Number 3. Come on, pal, the movie’s almost over. Can’t you wait a few more minutes? I don’t understand this movie, daddy. It’s past my bedtime. Clarence—this is where you’ve been? You take the child to a midnight screening of an R-rated documentary?! That’s it, I want that divorce!

 

The 4 Agreements To The 8 Secrets To The 12 Easy Steps To The Art Of Becoming Enlightened, Rich, Free Of Suffering, And Not Giving A Fuck: And So Can You!

Based on the titular all-time top ten bestselling book by Himhart Holibrook, this life-changing truthumentary, that lays the truth on you so real and truthfully, needs no introduction, save this one.

Revealed for the first time in history: the great primordial Secret Law of Success that the best and brightest, including Andrew “Dice” Clay, Abraham Lincoln, Vlad The Impaler, Cleopatra, Marie Curie, Cheech and Chong, Cruella De Vil, and Buzz Aldrin learned or knew naturally.

The key to unlimited everything you’ve always wanted, damned be all other free agents and the universe at large, merely with the application of true belief!

Now ‘creating your own reality’ isn’t just the domain of psychopaths. You can live like the God of your own solipsistic simulation.

Hey, you know what my sainted, fabulously successful grandpa—who left all his savings to his private exotic dancer (to teach me a lesson in rugged self-reliance and thrift no doubt)—always used to say…

“There are four sure ways to succeed in life. Write a How-To Guide, a Self-Help Book, or become a Guru or Life Coach.”

Who knew life could be 110% magnificent and worry-free? Dream to dare. Amenamaste. Yoga pants $ extra.

 

The Red Fire Hydrant

The red fire hydrant has stood on a nondescript New Mexico desert plot for 84 years. Where was it built? What soul or souls placed it there? What untold happenstance, shenanigans, or poignancies have transpired throughout its lifespan? We’ll never know. Over 84 breathtaking hours, all we see is the decaying artefact in a practically unchanging arid landscape. This doc might have been revelatory had the director picked a more event-prone setting. Or at least a fortuitous window. However, it seems absolutely nothing of significance transpires. Or… is that the point? Another metaphysical meditation on ambiguity, speculation, loss (at very least, lost time)—and BEING-NESS—from master Erol Apted! Runtime: 84 hours

 

About L.  

L., age 28, drinks too much and doesn’t like going outside if she doesn’t have to. In fact if the world were connected by underground tubes she would be happy. She likes anime and memes and food. Girls wear thongs to turn their farts into whispers, she avers. She doesn’t speak French she’s just visiting here, if u have a problem with that suck her ass. So states her Dating App profile.

 

Very Nice, Shmery Nice 

First, best known, and arguably most profound offering by pioneering before-their-time auteur of experimental shorts, innovating designer of experimental shorts, and stranded hobbyist time traveler Arthur Schiznit. An artful, penetrating collage of images and speech fragments revealing not just the timbre of life in 1820s America, but the vacillations of human consciousness amid impermanence and the universal mind. Short. 6 seconds. Liable to change in length, substance, be erased altogether, or fundamentally shift the course and substance of history.