Unlike action movies, documentaries have a unique ability to make us smarter on a topic, nearly instantly. They can also make us feel deeply, like a good novel or fictional film. Not every documentary ...

Reality doesn’t bite. Well, okay, at times it does. A number of our choices for the best documentaries of the year capture turbulent realities, ominous politics, and, on occasion, stark tragedy.

The truth hurts — any longtime documentary viewer, who’s likely sat through hundreds of hours of narrators intoning about atrocities over you-are-there footage, can tell you that. It’s also a concept ...