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

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For as long as they’ve been around, filmmakers have been making movies about the movies. From Stanley Donen’s Singin’ in the Rain to Federico Fellini’s 8½ nearly every corner of the moviemaking map has been covered through the years, and through a variety of stylistic lenses to boot. But The Wolfpack — director Crystal Moselle’s striking debut feature and winner of this year’s Grand Jury Prize for a documentary at Sundance — casts the power of cinema under a murky new light, focusing instead on how the movies themselves can mold us as emotional creatures, and telling an incredible story of her own in the process.

Moselle met the Angulo brothers — ranging from 11 to 18 years old at the time, with hair down to their backs and dressed as if they’d just left the Reservoir Dogs set — by chance encounter in Manhattan in 2010. A friendship then blossomed over a shared affinity for certain movies, and after sharing their unlikely, almost unbelievable backstory, the Angulos invited Moselle into their cramped Lower East Side apartment, where she would film her documentary.

At the time, Moselle was the family’s first guest in their nearly 20 years of residence in the neighborhood. And if that sounds strange, prepare to be stupefied: The brothers (and their younger sister) had only left the apartment a handful of times for the entirety of their lives, sometimes going an entire year without walking through the front door. Their literally sheltered childhoods were the wishes of their father, a Peruvian immigrant with a radical distrust of the American government and society as a whole, and their mother, a soft-spoken Midwesterner who was tragically convinced that shielding her children from the society’s hazards was for the best.

Because they had so little experience in the outside world, the Angulo brothers’ (named Bhagavan, Govinda, Mukunda, Narayana, Jagadisa and Krsna) only knowledge of it came through their massive DVD and VHS collections, which featured classics like Casablanca and contemporary standards like Pulp Fiction. To pass the time (of which they had a lot), the boys recreated entire scripts of their favorite films, then memorized the lines, built props and costumes from household materials, and reenacted scene by scene with remarkable detail — all from within the confines of their apartment. This was more than just an expression of a love for movies, though; it was how these kids lived, their way of experiencing the real world — or at least their perception of it — and assuaging their mounting curiosity.

But there’s a point at which a massive home video collection will no longer suffice. Through a series of candid, expertly shot interviews, Moselle documents their determination to flee, to experience the lives of which they had been robbed. Much of the documentary examines these grand-scale desires, but it also depicts more subtly meaningful life events, like walking barefoot on a sandy beach or going to a movie theater for the first time. It’s in these moments of understated significance are when The Wolfpack is at its most potent and captivating.

Questions will be raised about whether the Angulos’ story had been exaggerated for artistic license — a definite no-no in the documentary world — and how exactly Moselle was permitted such a degree of access to such a hermitic home. Others will critique the film’s focus on the group rather than examining the brothers as individuals (they all look strikingly similar to one another, and Moselle never really puts names to faces). But The Wolfpack, like many of cinema’s most revered achievements (many of which it references), serves as a reminder of the immense mental and emotional spectrum that the medium often explores, reaffirming the idea that it isn’t as much about the story, but who’s telling it and how it’s being told. —Zach Hale, Oxford Karma

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At the start of Kung Fu Elliot, the outstanding and crazy-entertaining documentary that bears his name, Elliot “White Lightning” Scott expresses his life’s purpose: to “make Canadians go, ‘Wow, we can have an action hero.’” He wants to be Halifax’s answer to Jackie Chan.

Not so fast, Elliot. You’re not even Halifax’s answer to Jackée Harry.

As co-directors Matthew Bauckman and Jaret Belliveau inform us, their subject’s first and second steps toward that lofty goal are the homemade feature films They Killed My Cat and Stalker and the Hero. Both exist to showcase the martial-arts skills of their — how you say? — unconventional (and unemployed) leading man. Both were directed by his longtime, live-in girlfriend, Linda Lum, who appears to be operating the digital point-and-shoot camera under emotional duress and with a saint’s patience. Both are hocked to unimpressed shoppers on the sidewalk outside CD Heaven. (You know CD Heaven, right? Dude, it’s right next door to The Curling Store!)

In theory, Bauckman and Belliveau were tagging along to document the making of Elliot’s latest no-budget bid toward superstardom, Blood Fight. However, shooting of the schlump’s would-be epic is erratic at best. He spends more time trying to convince strangers of his MOD DVD greatness and bragging to them about his championship trophies in kickboxing, sport of the future. If he can trick the more gullible into an autograph and/or a photograph they didn’t ask for, all the better for his unjustifiably enormous ego!

With Kung Fu Elliot, the obvious point of comparison is Chris Smith’s perfect American Movie, also following a regular guy with big-screen aspirations and little talent to back them up. Whereas the delusional underdog Mark Borchardt was someone you wanted to root for — and did — Elliot Scott is merely delusional, and that takes the documentary into dark territory viewers will not expect. Don’t let anyone tell you what that is; be highly unsettled for yourself. —Rod Lott

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If Hardware auteur Richard Stanley had his way, his adaptation of the H.G. Wells sci-fi novel he loved as a child would have featured such shocking scenes as a human man engaged and engorged in foreplay, sucking the many nipples of a panther woman.

But, as we know, he didn’t; New Line Cinema replaced the in-over-his-head Stanley with veteran John Frankenheimer (1962’s The Manchurian Candidate), and the tortured result, 1996’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, tanked. Today, the colossal boondoggle is regarded as one of the worst movies ever made. Personally, I think that’s a bit harsh, but whatever it is, at least it finally yielded some good, nearly two decades after the fact, with Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau, a documentary of What Went Wrong.

A whole helluva lot! That’s why, even with so many of its players dead or absent, Lost Soul can clock in at feature-length. Admittedly an outsider, Stanley is forthright about the mistakes he made before his dismissal; chief among them, he recalls, “I then made another strategic error: I met Val Kilmer.”

While Stanley is pegged as passionate and paranoid from both his supporters and detractors, no one has nice things to say about Kilmer. Then at the height of his Hollywood powers, the Batman Forever star was, by all accounts, an asshole forever. Further poisoning the well was the legendary Marlon Brando, bringing with him an ego larger than his don’t-give-a-shit girth.

Those stories of bad behavior are well-documented. What justifies Lost Soul’s existence is director David Gregory, co-founder of the Severin cult-video label and contributor to The Theatre Bizarre, allowing more time for anecdotes that didn’t make Variety’s front page. For example, before a single frame was shot, New Line toyed with taking the reins from Stanley and giving them to Roman Polanski; understandably frustrated, Stanley did what he had to do: Enlist a genuine warlock on the other side of the world to cast a spell exactly as the filmmakers met in Tinseltown.

Giving lip service to both sides of the fray, Lost Soul may be executed as a glorified DVD extra, but it’s no puff piece. Between this and 2013’s Jodorowsky’s Dune, the case could be made that any high-profile picture that ends up unmade — or not as intended by its original shepherd — deserves a documentary in lieu of a severance package. —Rod Lott

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In 1982, nearly every kid with an Atari 2600 had one white-hot, new cartridge atop his or her Christmas or Hanukkah list: E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. By Dec. 26, I’m guessing they collectively experienced beggars’ remorse, because less than a year later, in September 1983, some 4 million units were dumped in the landfill of the small New Mexico town of Alamogordo.

Or were they?

In the three decades since, the unceremonious mass burial of pop culture’s “worst video game of all time” has been shrouded in enough mystery to morph into urban legend. In the hour-and-some-change documentary Atari: Game Over, director Zak Penn — screenwriter of such Marvel movies as The Incredible Hulk, Elektra and X-Men: The Last Stand — literally goes digging for the truth.

In doing so, we get scoops of gossipy bits (and bytes) from Atari’s heyday in the early 1980s — a workplace of pot, booze, Jacuzzis and, every now and then, games that changed the world one rumpus room at a time. Their blocks-and-bricks graphics are laughable by today’s standards (although I still prefer them to modern games), but they were — and this is no overstatement — revolutionary.

One of those Atari 2600 programmers, Howard Warshaw, pushed the boundaries of game design further with such titles as Yars’ Revenge, Raiders of the Lost Ark and then the aforementioned E.T. Although ambitious in scope and intent, the cartridge proved a crushing disappointment with the public, thanks to a mix of corporate greed, Warshaw’s hubris and an impossibly compressed development schedule that made for maddening game play. What it did not do, contrary to public belief, is kill Atari.

With no shortage of self-deprecating humor, Penn’s Xbox-funded doc aims to rewrite passages of incorrect history and reverse the scorn that has hounded Warshaw ever since. In giving Warshaw a platform, Penn grants his film an emotional center as warm and winning as E.T.’s heartlight. Who would expect that watching grown men sift through trash could make for gripping viewing? That it does is but one reason Game Over simply cannot lose. —Rod Lott

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