Documentary films

Filmmaker Yoruba Richen's documentary, The Green Book: Guide to Freedom, tells the story of the manual that helped African-Americans find safe places to stay, eat, shop and do business on the road.

Sandi Tan was 19 when she wrote and starred in a film directed by her 40-year-old mentor. Then her mentor disappeared with the film footage. Twenty years later, Tan chronicles the mystery in Shirkers.

Jonathan Olshefski spent 10 years filming Christopher Rainey and his family, who run a recording studio in a working-class African-American section of North Philadelphia. Then their daughter was shot.

The new documentary about Cary Grant is a fascinating look at the contrast between Grant's personal unhappiness, and onscreen persona.

A new documentary focuses on a group of emergency volunteers in Syria's largest city known as the White Helmets. Critic David Edelstein says Last Men In Aleppo is a powerful and affecting work.

Bruce Weber and Margalit Fox have written obituaries for thousands of people, ranging from heads of state to the inventor of the Etch-a-Sketch. They are featured in the new documentary Obit.

TV critic David Bianculli says the new documentary series Five Came Back, based on the book of the same name, "leaves you hungry to seek out more (films) from the briefest documentary short to the subsequent Oscar-winning postwar features.

Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead reviews new ten-part documentary series on the history of jazz by Ken Burns. It premieres on PBS, January 8th.

Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz reviews a new documentary, Ballets Russes, just out on DVD. It tells the story of ballet after the death of Sergei Diaghilev, who founded and ran the company until 1929.

As New Orleans' levees buckled, Kimberly Rivers Roberts turned her video camera on marooned friends, relatives and neighbors. Roberts' footage has been adapted into a powerful documentary that is as much about America as it is about the deadly storm.