The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we select three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.
‘Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills’ (1996)
Stream it on HBO Max. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV and Google Play.
Perhaps the most chilling of all true-crime documentaries, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s “Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills” was the first installment in what ultimately became a trilogy on the West Memphis Three case. In 1993, three Arkansas teenagers — Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr. — were charged with the murders of three 8-year-old boys, Christopher Byers, Stevie Branch and Michael Moore. The film loses none of its impact from the knowledge that Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley were ultimately freed in 2011. If anything, an awareness of how much time would pass between their convictions and vindication only magnifies the tragedy, in a story that already contains more horrors than most films could bear. And all these years later, the killings are still unsolved.
Part of what has always set “Paradise Lost” apart from other courtroom thrillers is that it is not simply about the legal proceedings; it’s a portrait of how grief and anger convulse all sides. Viewers get to know the parents of the victims as well as the parents of the accused. All are accorded enough screen time to emerge with genuine complexity. When he is first introduced, John Mark Byers, the stepfather of Christopher Byers, rants in the woods about how he plans to desecrate the teenagers’ graves after they die. A few scenes later, he has cleaned himself up and is leading his church in song with a surprisingly lovely and deep singing voice.
That a potential miscarriage of justice is in motion is always apparent. The first case puts considerable weight on shaky statements by Misskelley, whom we’re told has a low I.Q. and witnesses say is prone to suggestibility. A forensic pathologist at Baldwin and Echols’s trial raises serious doubts about a theory of the crime scene. There is also an unforgettable moment late in the film concerning a potential piece of evidence that the filmmakers themselves turned over to the police. A prosecutor, John N. Fogleman, asks a testifying detective, Gary Gitchell, where he got it. “I received it from Joe and the people with HBO productions,” he replies, pointing to the camera. It’s a gesture that reminds viewers that Berlinger and Sinofsky were watching everything unfold. And you can see how they, too, spent years being haunted by this case.
‘Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.’ (1999)
One of Errol Morris’s eeriest and most disturbing subjects is Fred A. Leuchter Jr., a Massachusetts man who developed a line in manufacturing execution equipment. Even early in “Mr. Death,” when Leuchter is still describing that work, he unselfconsciously says things like, “Nobody should have to place his life in jeopardy because an execution is being conducted.” (Leuchter is speaking of the poor prison guards, who might be electrocuted standing in a puddle of a dead inmate’s urine.) A disturbing implication of the movie is that a little desensitization to killing goes a long way.
And in Leuchter’s case, it may well have been a factor in the episode that became the source of his lasting infamy. In 1988, the Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel sought out Leuchter as a supposed expert who could study the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Leuchter traveled to Poland — Morris includes video of him sneaking around the death camp and chipping away at the structure — and concluded that there were no gas chambers. Others in the film cogently explain why his science was hopelessly shoddy. But it was good enough for the Holocaust deniers, who embraced his ostensible findings.
A terrifying example of a man doing his own research and winding up in the company of conspiracy theorists, “Mr. Death” is one of several Morris titles that examine the human capacity to compartmentalize, and to rationalize away countervailing evidence. Those themes run through subsequent films — “The Fog of War” (2003), “Standard Operating Procedure” (2008), “American Dharma” (2019) — about higher-profile scandals and figures. But Leuchter, late in “Mr. Death,” offers perhaps the most succinct summation of the sort of blinkered reasoning that fascinates the director.
“Have you ever thought that you might be wrong, or do you think that you could make a mistake?” Morris asks him.
“No, I’m past that,” Leuchter replies.
‘The Devil and Father Amorth’ (2018)
Stream it on Tubi. Rent it on Fandango at Home.
If it weren’t Halloween, and the movie weren’t in keeping with this month’s loose chiller theme, I wouldn’t be recommending this specious documentary from William Friedkin with anything like a straight face. But Friedkin, who serves as onscreen host and wanders through the proceedings as if he were narrating an episode of “Unsolved Mysteries,” is a lot of fun — an amusingly brusque guide through an hour of hokum.
On some level, you hope he intended “The Devil and Father Amorth” to be seen as tongue-in-cheek. Friedkin, who died in 2023, sets out to rectify a guilty omission: When he made “The Exorcist” (1973), he (quite forgivably) hadn’t seen an exorcism ritual performed in the real world. Then, for Vanity Fair, he wrote about Father Gabriele Amorth, a priest with the diocese of Rome who was the closest thing the 21st century had to a celebrity exorcist. Amorth had blamed the Devil for Harry Potter, among other wild claims that aren’t mentioned in the documentary. He also, according to Friedkin, considered “The Exorcist” his favorite movie. (“I guess, of course,” the director deadpans.)
Amorth — who died in 2016, as is shown toward the end of the film — let Friedkin shoot the ninth exorcism of one of his clients. (The first eight rounds didn’t do the trick.) And while the woman’s writhing and apparent double voice aren’t terribly convincing, Friedkin shows the footage to doctors at U.C.L.A. and Columbia who take the episode seriously. The Columbia psychiatrists don’t see it as a legitimate case of possession, but they push back when Friedkin asks if what’s happening is fraud. They have a plausible diagnosis and even suggest that the performance of an exorcism might be helpful, in a way, as the ritualistic equivalent of the placebo effect.
The filmmaker isn’t big on that kind of nuance, though; he needs a spooky climax at a church, although we have to take his word for what happened there. “I didn’t take my camera inside,” he explains in voice-over, “so this is my memory of what happened.”