Technically, the year’s finest documentary isn’t even a movie, but a six-episode HBO miniseries: The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst. I prefer to think of Andrew Jarecki’s project as a four-and-a-half-hour film; so binge-worthy is the true-crime narrative that you may wish to consume it in a single sitting, if not actually hunker down and do just that. Like the metaphorical cliché holds for many a hardcover whodunit, I just couldn’t put it down.

While Jarecki is best-known for his Oscar-nominated doc, 2003’s Capturing the Friedmans, he made a foray into more conventional filmmaking with the 2010 Ryan Gosling/Kirsten Dunst mystery, All Good Things, a fictionalized retelling of the Robert Durst saga. For those of us living outside the Big Apple’s haute ZIP codes, Durst long has been the scorned scion of his family’s eponymous real-estate empire. Following the limited release of Things — in which, it should be noted, Gosling plays a character named not Bob Durst, but David Marks — the press-avoiding Durst contacted Jarecki with a proposition: that the director interview him on camera, so that he could share his side of the story.

Given that Durst avoids the press, this move was highly unusual … and one he’s likely to regret deeply, if he doesn’t already.

See, despite his silver-spoon upbringing and all the millions that grew alongside him, Durst allegedly is a murderer three times over, yet somehow escaped arrest and/or prison sentencing each time, starting with his first wife, who disappeared in 1982, and most recently where The Jinx begins: with the 2001 discovery of a dismembered torso in Galveston Bay. Says one of many interviewees, “He’s not crazy. He’s diabolical.”

And endlessly fascinating. With black pools for eyes, the 70-something Durst is not entirely unsympathetic, even with the sky-high likelihood of committing such heinous, disturbing acts. Viewers may find themselves struggling with the realization that they feel a tinge of sorrow for him, even while recognizing that every sentence emerging from his mouth reeks of calculated bullshit.

The less you know about Durst going in, the more compelling The Jinx will be; even if you are familiar with its celebrated and controversial outcome, the series is riveting all the same. Remaining admirably epic while achieving cohesion, Jarecki’s Jinx owes a sizable debt to Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line; like that 1988 groundbreaker and Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Paradise Lost trilogy, it stands as a work of extraordinary journalism, in which the doggedness of the filmmaker “writes” a new ending stranger than any fiction. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.