Oscars documentary shortlist: A look at all 15 features

(Drafthouse Films)

One of the most chilling and profound documentaries in many years, “Act of Killing” director Joshua Oppenheimer asks a gang of killers in the relatively unknown Indonesian mass slayings of 1964-65 (when the government ordered the killing of more than 1 million communists, labor unionists and ethnic Chinese) to create and star in a film about the actual events. What we see is how such killers bullied their way to power in Indonesia, where even today they openly boast of their bloody exploits, reworked into a patriotic narrative of violence and forgetting.

(Christophe Ena / AP Photo)

For most people, if they’d spent months traveling the globe filming Lance Armstrong in his comeback to the top of the cycling world, and in the midst found out that it was all a lie, they might have pulled the plug on the project. Not veteran documentarian Alex Gibney, who despite his personal disappointment soldiered on with a new query: Just why did Armstrong come back for one last whirl? And while schadenfreude might be one incentive to view “The Armstrong Lie,” the film is more complex than that. Gibney’s question is never really answered, but in this sharp and cleanly documented film we see that as consumers of that towering lie, we’re far from alone and perhaps still far from finished.

(Magnolia Pictures)

A riveting documentary from filmmaker Gabriela Cowperthwaite about Tilikum, a 12,000-pound captive orca who during what is described as 30 years of boredom, cramped confinement and the bullying of other whales has periodically exploded in aggressive behavior, killing three people. SeaWorld, which owns 23 other orcas in addition to Tilikum, is put on the hot seat as former trainers and expert witnesses denounce the whales’ marine park environment.

(Adam Moran)

When snowboarding champion Kevin Pearce sustained serious brain damage in an accident caught on film in 2009, his life was altered forever. Director Lucy Walker’s film displays beautifully what the passion of youth, extreme sports, support of family and the fragility of the human brain can produce. A compelling and invigorating story, even for those who barely know what the Olympic sport of snowboarding is all about.

(Handout)

Zachary Heinzerling’s debut documentary is an uplifting story of lifelong passions and the compromises made to live them. Renowned “boxing” painter Ushio Shinohara and his artist wife, Noriko, are New York artists consumed by their art. In the film, we see inside their messy, chaotic marriage and living/work spaces as well as hear their endless bickering in Japanese. We feel their struggles to keep the art alive. If this doesn’t sound like fun, it is, mostly because the love that welds them together is revealed triumphant.

(Jacqueline Soohen / IFC Films)

Veteran war journalist Jeremy Scahill is taken on an eerie journey through the murky if no less real world of recent amped-up U.S. covert counterintelligence, drone strikes and bold assassinations in director Richard Rowley’s “Dirty Wars.” A dogged, old-school reporter, not satisfied with the easy military press release, we follow Scahill through his discovery of seemingly endless kill lists, questionable “collateral damage” deaths and how those who perpetrate such killings explain their ends-justify-the-means logic.

(Derek Wiesehahn / Full Credit Productions)

Director Roger Ross Williams brings us from the evangelical midlands of Kansas City to current-day Uganda in his documentary, in which he links the growing harshness of Uganda’s anti-gay laws with the anti-homosexual message of some of the more strident U.S. conservative Christians. It’s a polemic view of how Africa is still damaged by the colonialist desire to remake the continent in their own image and agenda without understanding the forces that bubble underneath. The film’s central premise — that despite the good intentions of American missionaries in Uganda, they’ve facilitated a climate of hate with match in hand, and he argues forcefully that it’s now ready to explode.

(Edwin Honig / HBO)

Filmmaker Alan Berliner focuses his lens on Edwin Honig, his mother’s cousin and Berliner’s personal mentor, a man once renowned as a poet, critic, author and Harvard professor now disappearing into the fog of Alzheimer’s. The film delicately balances the current stark reality of a man grown increasingly distant with interviews of him recorded over five years and abstract images of nature.

(Sean Fine/ HBO)

Filmmakers Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine tell the story of Sam Berns, a likable and inspirational 13-year-old, who has progeria, a genetic abnormality that causes accelerated aging. Sam was born to physician parents, and his mother, naturally enough, focuses her resources on the disease, learning about the gene, dealing with drug trials and endless waiting. But it is Sam, with a life expectancy of only another year, who gives the film its heart and poignancy.

(HBO)

Russian performance art/protest band Pussy Riot’s arrest in February 2012 after a guerrilla performance in a church caught the attention of filmmakers Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin, who soon began chronicling the ongoing case. It is excitingly of-the-moment as the directors cull from trial footage, performance videos, YouTube clips, Twitter feeds and interviews with family members.

(Roadside Attractions)

Canadian director Sarah Polley’s film is both a beautiful rendering of memory among family but also a poignant story of self-discovery through film. In it, Polley interviews her various family members about their late mother, whom she discovers in the course of the film had an affair with a man who is Polley’s biological father. We see both Polley and her mother’s lover meet and become friends, amid a wise remembering of familial bonds. Full of wit, recognition and tremendous sensitivity.

(thesquarefilm.com)

A vivid, compelling chronicle of Egypt’s recent grass-roots revolution (and counter-revolutions), “The Square” takes its name from Cairo’s Tahrir Square, where most of the demonstrations took place. Filmmaker Jehane Noujaim documents roiling events up through the ouster in January of newly elected President Mohamed Morsi by the military and never loses sight of the passions and emotions of the people on the ground

(Sony Pictures Classics )

How did 17th century painters such as Dutch Master Johannes Vermeer paint their near-photographic portraits in an era when photography had yet to be invented? Director (and illusionist) Teller films his friend and inventor Tim Jenison on his near-obsessive quest to prove that Vermeer did, in fact, “cheat” with the help of a mirror device called the camera obscura. Delightful to watch, the film shows Jenison, who says he’s never painted before, using the device to create a masterful portrait.

(RADiUS-TWC)

Music filmmaker and director Morgan Neville invites us into the lives (as the film’s tag line reminds us) of “the unsung heroes behind the greatest music of our time.” Featuring utterly top-notch singers such as Merry Clayton and Darlene Love, he lets us not only hear how they vocally backlit so many legendary hits, but we see the tough struggles these (mostly) women have walking the distance from behind the spotlight into the desired hot spot of solo fame. A truly joyous ride, especially for fans of popular music.

(Goldcrest Features)

A heartfelt celebration of combat photographer and filmmaker Tim Hetherington, who was killed in Libya in 2011, from his “Restrepo” co-director Sebastian Junger, the film’s subject emerges as a caring photojournalist, deeply connected to those he covered.