The true-crime wave: 30 picks to stream now
We’ve rounded up the genre’s best documentary films and series to satisfy your inner armchair detective
CU L T M U R D E R S , lottery heists, deadly dating apps, killer clowns: We’re in the midst of a true-crime wave, and television is the culprit. From HBO Max to A&E, true-crime programming is more prevalent than illegal weed dispensaries. So, like the authorities — at least the honest ones — we’re stepping in to help. ¶ Here, selected by yours truly and compiled from Times coverage, are 50 of the best true-crime documentary films and TV series you can stream right now. The choices run the gamut in terms of subject matter and tone, tackling all matter of narratives: following the gumshoe detectives of “The First 48,” exposing miscarriages of justice in “Who Killed Malcolm X?,” chronicling crimes so bizarre it’s hard to believe they qualify as true in “Sasquatch.” ¶ The filmmakers behind these productions have solved crimes, freed the wrongly accused, exposed
the guilty and given voice to victims and survivors. And yes, they’ve also unraveled the twisted tales of heinous murders, heartless scams and wanton corruption for the sake of entertainment. Critics of the genre argue that true crime is exploitative and voyeuristic, and there’s no doubt that’s part of its allure. True-crime buffs often point to the thrill of playing armchair detective (see “Don’t F— With Cats”) and the satisfaction of solving a real-life puzzle. I’d like to believe the form has become so popular because perps and their wrongdoings are exposed in the majority of the programming, and accountability is in short supply elsewhere these days.
Like any list, this one comes with limitations: I’ve excluded networks dedicated to the genre, such as Investigation Discovery and Oxygen, which feature so much content they deserve their own guide. I’ve also sought to strike a balance among many tones and subjects, so the reasons
for including the titles vary as much as their production values. Some are barsetting films from master documentarians, others are necessary works from filmmakers who uncovered incredible stories. Some were simply too juicy to pass up.
And you may be surprised by a few of the big titles that didn’t make the list, like “Making a Murderer” and “The Staircase.” I could write essays on my issues with both docuseries, but I’ll spare you. In short, I left them out because I found problematic the artistic license both series used. Go ahead. Arrest me.
To my fellow true-crime aficionados: I’ve undoubtedly overlooked your favorites or promoted others that have no business on this list! I get it. But once you’ve stopped fuming, I hope you’ll discover new titles, or give another shot to one you previously dismissed. Sleuth away.
There’s no shortage of productions about prolific serial killer Ted Bundy, but many of those narratives rely on the recollections of the highly articulate killer who never seemed to stop talking about himself. “Falling for a Killer” by director Trish Wood takes a different approach by reframing his story through the voices of women who knew him. His former girlfriend Elizabeth Kendall is primary to the story, as she recalls their halcyon days and, later, signs that something was terribly broken in her handsome yet troubled partner. The story is set against the feminist movement of the 1970s. Kendall and others share their memories of the man they thought they knew in this insightful, fivepart docuseries. —Lorraine Ali
22 THE IMPOSTER 2012 | Rated R
Apple TV+: Rent/Buy | Prime Video: Rent/Buy | Peacock: Included Directed by Bart Layton
A whole lot stranger than fiction, “The Imposter” is a documentary that’s disturbing in ways only reality can manage. This is a train wreck you think you see coming, but no matter how prepared you are, the nature and extent of the damage will overwhelm you.
As directed by British documentarian Bart Layton, “The Imposter” tells the story of a dark-skinned French Algerian man, a world-class deceiver and manipulator who managed to convince members of a distraught Texas family that he was their long-lost blond and blue-eyed teenage brother and son. What makes this film so spooky and unnerving is that it shows how much of what we consider to be reality is merely a function of what we want to believe. Next to the power and desires of the human heart and mind, few things stand a chance, certainly not the puny construct we like to call the real world.
The disappeared boy is sassy 13-year-old Nicholas Barclay, who vanished from the streets of San Antonio in 1994. “It gives you nightmares, it really does,” says his stilldistressed mother Beverly Dollarhide. “It didn’t make the news. It was just news to us.” Then, three years and four months later, the family gets an out-of-nowhere phone call from Linares, Spain. Nicholas has been found, and he wants to come home. Beyond shocked, Nicholas’ sister Carey Gibson remembers thinking that Linares must be a town in Texas. “You had like 100,000 questions you wanted answered immediately,” she says. “You want it to all happen now.”
The person in Spain, we find out at once, couldn’t be further from the 16-year-old Nicholas. Instead, he is 23year-old Frédéric Bourdin, eventually known to European authorities as “La Chameleon” for his shape-shifting abilities. “As long as I remember,” he says, looking directly at the camera, bold as brass, “I wanted to be someone else. Someone who was acceptable.” —Kenneth Turan
21 WHO KILLED MALCOLM X? 2020 | TV-MA | 1 Season Netflix: Included
Created by Abdur-Rahman Muhammad
Abdur-Rahman Muhammad was obsessed with uncovering the truth about Malcolm X’s 1965 murder. The activist and researcher spent 20 years investigating the question of who really killed the civil rights hero during a speech in New York’s Audubon Ballroom, and that quest is at the center of the Netflix documentary series “Who Killed Malcolm X?”
Two men known at the time of the killing as Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson spent decades in prison for the murder. But the case against them was questionable from the start, causing historians and amateur sleuths to raise doubts about the official account of what happened that fateful day. Through archival footage, declassified documents and a number of interviews with former and current Nation of Islam members and retired agents who worked the case, Abdur-Rahman presents a compelling theory that the wrong men took the rap.
He identifies a likely assassin based on his exhaustive investigative research, spurring the Manhattan prosecutor to reopen the case. Then, nearly two years after the docuseries raised its titular question and helped spur a renewed investigation into the assassination, two of the three men convicted in Malcolm X’s killing were exonerated (one of whom is still alive). The series isn’t the tightest of productions, but its impact is immeasurable. —Lorraine Ali
20
2020 | Rated PG-13
Netflix: Included
Directed by Bonni Cohen and Jon
ATHLETE A
Shenk
Former gymnast Rachael Denhollander became the first woman to report sexual abuse at the hands of Larry Nassar, a physician for USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University. In August 2016, she filed a Title IX complaint with MSU and told its police department that Nassar had assaulted her when she was a 15-year-old gymnast.
Her story — now at the center of the Netflix documentary “Athlete A” — would compel over 260 female athletes to come forward with their own tales about Nassar’s abuse. In 2017, he pleaded guilty to federal child pornography charges in addition to multiple charges of firstdegree sexual assault and will probably spend the rest of his life in prison.
But even though Nassar is behind bars, Denhollander and others in the gymnastics world feel the sport has far more work to do to address claims of systemic emotional, physical and sexual abuse. —Amy Kaufman
19 ALLEN V. FARROW 2021 | TV-MA | 1 Season HBO Max: Included | Apple TV+: Rent/Buy | Prime Video: Rent/Buy
Created by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering
“Allen v. Farrow,” from investigative filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, goes beyond the scandalous headlines and makes a compelling argument that revered filmmaker Woody Allen got away with the unthinkable. This four-part series explores allegations that Allen abused Dylan Farrow, his adopted daughter with Mia Farrow, when she was a child. The accusations were turned against Farrow in the media. When Allen later married Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn, Hollywood and the press still largely ignored the unpleasant personal life of their favorite director in lieu of celebrating his work.
Documentarians Dick and Ziering pored over years of custody trial evidence, home movies, recorded phone conversations, photo exhibits and more, piecing together a harrowing picture of Allen as an abuser and master manipulator, and Dylan Farrow as a silenced, disbelieved victim. Allen has long denied the allegations. But here Dylan, now 37, has a platform to tell her side of the story. The result is a convincing and ultimately devastating portrait of Allen. —Lorraine Ali
18 THE SEVEN FIVE 2014 | Rated R Apple TV+: Rent/Buy | Prime Video: Included
Directed by Tiller Russell
It would be hard to imagine a more entertaining corrupt-cop documentary than “The Seven Five,” a slick and fascinating portrait of disgraced New York policeman Michael Dowd. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, Dowd was an officer at Brooklyn’s 75th Precinct, situated in a particularly rough neighborhood that led the city in homicides and police shootings.
Director Tiller Russell relates an evocative tale of cocaine-fueled temptation and greed, interspersing footage from a 1993 hearing for Dowd (who was sentenced to 14 years) with new interviews with the seemingly unrepentant Dowd, his former partner and contemporaries on both sides of the law. The cocky Dowd’s systematic progression from cop on the take to drug trafficker is choreographed with the sort of verve and gusto that gave Billy Corben’s 2006 Miami-based documentary “Cocaine Cowboys” a similar rock ’n’ roll style.
With a wildly colorful cast of characters (especially the swaggerific drug lord Adam Diaz) and sound bites (“Forget Beverly Hills … the ghetto is one of the richest neighborhoods there is!”), there’s no missing that “The Seven Five” would make one swell Hollywood movie. —Michael Rechtshaffen
17 WILD WILD COUNTRY 2018 | TV-MA | 1 Season
Netflix: Included
Created by Chapman and Maclain Way
“Wild Wild Country” is a dippy tale of the early 1980s in which East meets West and, out of an attempt to build a paradise, all hell breaks loose.
Directed by brothers Chapman and Maclain Way (“The Battered Bastards of Baseball”), its focus is a dimly remembered but in its time nationally newsworthy religious group — or sex cult, depending on your point of view — led by Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and the city they set out to build on a remote patch of Oregon.
It’s a story of enemies and neighbors, of power plays and paranoia that includes, among other things, attempted murder, arson, electioneering, bioterrorism by fast food, nude sunbathing, the separation of church and state, 10,000 cassette tapes and 93 RollsRoyces, one of which the guru would daily drive past his admirers.
“Why do they do this?” a TV reporter standing among them wonders. “What do they believe in?”
Rajneesh (later called Osho) and his movement caught on in the 1970s, his ashram becoming a destination of choice for mostly Americans and Europeans seeking enlightenment or spiritual thrills. He promoted, among other practices, a brand of “dynamic meditation” that involved hyperventilation (“designed to arouse the serpent force, called kundalini”); primal-scream catharsis; jumping up and down and saying “Hoo!”; and, finally, silence and stillness. Then maybe some dancing. This might happen with everybody naked. —Robert Lloyd
16 SASQUATCH 2021 | TV-MA | 1 Season
Hulu: Included
Created by the Duplass brothers
True crime, weed wars and monster tales meet in “Sasquatch,” and Hulu’s three-part docuseries delivers on all fronts.
This hybrid whodunit/monsterhunter mashup is centered on one central unsolved mystery, and several ancillary riddles, in the Emerald Triangle, a swath of Northern California wilderness across Mendocino, Humboldt and Trinity counties. It’s a region renowned for its natural beauty, marijuana production — and Bigfoot sightings.
Leading us into the tangled woods is investigative reporter David Holthouse, who was working on a Mendocino dope farm in 1993 when a group of terrified men burst into his cabin with claims of finding three mutilated bodies at a nearby farm. The deceased were torn limb from limb, heads ripped from torsos, their parts strewn around the campsite. This wasn’t a drug heist, they said. No marijuana plants were stolen — and there were giant footprints around the scene. It had to be Bigfoot. Or did it? “Sasquatch” sets
out to answer that question over three episodes. This is an eccentric offering in the world of true crime, which is part of what makes it so addictive. Monsters come in all shapes and forms, and this series grapples with them all. —Lorraine Ali
15 A WILDERNESS OF ERROR 2020 TV-MA | 1 Season Hulu: Included | Apple TV+: Rent/Buy | Prime Video: Rent/Buy
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Created by Marc Smerling
Fifty years after his wife and two young daughters were brutally murdered, and 41 after he was convicted of the crime, the case of former Army surgeon Jeffrey R. MacDonald continues to fascinate. Were the Fort Bragg, N.C., murders, as MacDonald has long contended, committed by a group of drugcrazed hippies chanting, “Acid is groovy, kill the pigs?” Or were they, as the prosecution successfully argued, actually the work of MacDonald, who murdered his family in a psychotic rage?
The case inspired Joe McGinniss’ nonfiction bestseller “Fatal Vision,” published in 1983, as well as a hugely successful 1984 TV miniseries based on the book — not to mention Janet Malcolm’s famed 1990 reconsideration “The Journalist and the Murderer.” Now it’s the subject of the FX series “A Wilderness of Error,” based on the book of the same name by Oscar-winning documentary director Errol Morris (“The Fog of War”), who has questioned MacDonald’s guilt and the prosecution’s handling of the case.
Morris, whose 1988 film
“The Thin Blue Line” actually led to the overturning of a death sentence, wondered whether the testimony of several key people — a woman who claimed she’d been in the house during the murders, a U.S. marshal who alleged the woman confessed to him and a man who allegedly admitted to the killings — had deliberately been overlooked by the prosecution, and whether the initial investigation by the Army had essentially been a shoddy coverup.
—Lewis Beale
14 MEMORIES OF A MURDERER: THE NILSEN TAPES 2021 |TV-MA Netflix: Included
Directed by Michael Harte
The life and crimes of Scottish serial killer and necrophile Dennis Nilsen are documented in his own words in this highly competent and deeply creepy 85-minute film, culled from 250 hours’ worth of recordings that Nilsen taped in his prison cell after he killed at least 12 young men between 1978 and 1983. Like Ted Bundy, the soft-spoken Nilsen is highly articulate and even charming, but his cover was an unassuming, mousy demeanor. He recounts the events of his life in poetic prose with flowery language, but it’s the recollections of police, survivors and his own mother that shed light on the monster at the heart of his ghoulish crime spree. Directed by Michael Harte (“Don’t F— With Cats”), this documentary is a master class in pitting a killer’s own warped recollections against the firsthand accounts of those who suffered from his actions. —Lorraine Ali
13 THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE 2012 | TV-PG PBS: Included | Kanopy: Included | Apple TV+: Rent/Buy
Directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon
Then-New York Mayor Ed Koch didn’t shrink from calling it “the crime of the century.” A TV newscaster talked angrily about evildoers who “blazed a nighttime trail of terror” that culminated in the horrific beating and savage rape of a Central Park jogger on the night of April 19, 1989. The event became an all-consuming national sensation, but, as it turns out, everything everyone thought they knew was wrong.
This is the devastating premise of “The Central Park Five,” a careful, thoughtful documentary that meticulously re-creates what happened on that night and details how and why everything went so terribly off-course. Co-directed by Ken Burns, David McMahon and Sarah Burns, it projects equal parts fury and despair as it reveals how a particular group of individuals was caught in the unforgiving gears of the criminal justice system.
Five black and Latino teenagers, ages 14 to 16, admitted to the rape and beating (though they almost immediately recanted) of the white jogger and served prison sentences ranging from six to 13 years. But, out of nowhere, compelling new evidence, including a startling 2002 confession by a convicted murderer and rapist whose DNA was present at the crime scene, led a judge to overturn their convictions. Yet it is one of the case’s painful ironies that to this day it is the arrest and not the ultimate exoneration that is remembered.
“The Central Park Five” serves as a cinematic primer on what has become one of the most disturbing aspects of our criminal justice system: the ability — and the unabashed willingness — of police to psychologically manipulate people into confessing to things they have not done. —Kenneth Turan
12 MCMILLIONS 2020 TV-14 | 1 Season
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HBO Max: Included
Created by James Lee Hernandez and Brian Lazarte
James Lee Hernandez and Brian Lazarte’s six-part documentary, “McMillions,” is a twisty, manyfingered, onion-layered story tailormade for cliffhangers and progressive reveals. The HBO series tells the story of the McDonald’s Monopoly game fraud, in which an ex-cop nicknamed Uncle Jerry — in an operation that went undetected from 1989 to 2001 and involved an ad hoc network of “recruiters” and semi-solid citizens willing to participate in what not all fully understood was thievery — managed to scam some $24 million in cash and prizes from the home of the Happy Meal.
It was the subject of a 2018 Daily Beast story by Jeff Maysh, “How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions,” which within days became the subject of a bidding war for the film rights. (Fox won; Ben Affleck is scheduled to direct, Matt Damon to star.)
—Robert Lloyd
11 THE INNOCENCE FILES 2020 | TV-MA | 1 Season
Netflix: Included
Created by: Roger Ross Williams, Liz Garbus and Alex Gibney
“The Innocence Files” masterfully examines how innocent people end up in prison and documents the
Herculean effort it takes to overturn those wrongful convictions. Though there’s no shortage of heartbreaking television productions about poor folks who are betrayed by the system, this moving, impactful series stands apart.
Expertly directed by respected documentary filmmakers Alex Gibney, Roger Ross Williams and Liz Garbus, “The Innocence Files” delivers a potent statement on class, crime and the American justice system. The nine-part series takes its source material from Innocence Project cases, following several wrongfully convicted subjects over three different story arcs. The filmmakers explore common defects in the system — from the use of bogus forensic evidence to unreliable eyewitness accounts — exploring the legal and emotional fallout for all involved. —Lorraine Ali
10 DON’T F— WITH CATS: HUNTING AN INTERNET KILLER 2019 | TV-MA | 1 Season Netflix: Included
Created by Mark Lewis
A group of Facebook sleuths track down a deranged killer and wannabe internet star in this threepart series from Mark Lewis. Luka Magnotta was courting the idea of celebrity in 2010 when he became famous for all the wrong reasons. The then-28-year-old Canadian was posting online a series of anonymous videos showing him suffocating, drowning and feeding kittens to a snake. A community of outraged internet sleuths coalesced around the goal of outing this animal abuser.
Filmmaker Lewis embedded with several of the armchair detectives, documenting how they pieced together Magnotta’s identity clue by clue. Is that light socket in the background of his video European or American? Are there any identifying background sounds? Their digital legwork proved invaluable to law enforcement when, in 2012, Magnotta graduated to killing humans. He murdered a 33-year-old computer engineering student from China, Jun Lin, and released a video of the horrific crime online. The series is a wild ride through Magnotta’s sadistic ploys for attention, and the dogged efforts of amateur detectives to stop him. In the end, they were instrumental in his capture during a worldwide manhunt, even if it may have resulted in giving his depraved videos more views than they
9 ever should have had. This doc was one of Netflix’s biggest truecrime hits outside of the problematic “Making a Murderer.” Riveting, but not for the faint of heart. —Lorraine Ali
9 THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY
2021 | TV-14 | 1 Season HBO Max: Included
Created by Alex Gibney
For more than 20 years, Americans have watched the human cost of the opioid crisis as if it were an epidemic without cause. But what if the crisis had been manufactured through a series of cynical misdeeds involving profit-ravenous pharmaceutical companies, bought-andpaid-for medical professionals and a toothless political and legal system?
You probably wouldn’t be shocked, given what we now know from numerous class-action lawsuits, interviews with recovering addicts and grieving parents, hard news exposés and, yes, lots of documentaries. But Alex Gibney’s gripping two-part docuseries “The Crime of the Century” sheds new light on an ongoing disaster by meticulously tracking the moves of one major kingpin: Purdue Pharma, the drug company that made billions off the addictive and often lethal pain medication OxyContin.
—Lorraine Ali
8 LONG SHOT 2017 | TV-14 Netflix: Included
Directed by Jacob LaMendola
Social etiquette crimes are the lifeblood of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Larry David’s HBO comedy series where a self-centered guy named Larry offends everyone he meets, and his bad behavior often has a butterfly effect. But here’s one instance where Larry was a good influence, even if it was unintentional.
“Long Shot” tells the story of young father Juan Catalan, an Angeleno who was wrongly accused of the 2003 gang-related murder of a 16year-old girl in Sun Valley. But Catalan swears he’s innocent. The accused even has an alibi: He was attending a game with his daughter at Dodger Stadium. The prosecutor isn’t buying it, even after Catalan produces proof in the form of ticket stubs. Defense attorney Todd Melnik scraped for anything else that might prove his client’s innocence. Maybe the Dodger fancam? But the fleeting images of the father and daughter aren’t clear enough.
Here’s where David comes in. The actor had been shooting “The Car Pool Lane” episode of the series, where he picks up a sex worker so he can use the carpool lane to make it to the game on time, and the crew were filming in an aisle near Catalan’s seats. Outtakes of the episode were scanned for images of Catalan, and, as David says in the documentary, “There he was. Pretty cool.” “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and subsequent cell phone data helped clear Catalan. This short and simply made documentary chronicles the incredible story of a wrongly convicted soul who was saved by the least likely of men.
7 THE TRIALS OF GABRIEL FERNANDEZ 2020 | TV-MA | 1 Season Netflix: Included
Created by Brian Knappenberger
Netflix documentary series “The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez” follows the story of the torture and murder of an 8-year-old child, beaten to death in 2013 by his mother and her boyfriend, and the repeated failure of social workers and police officers to intervene. Directed by Brian Knappenberger, “Gabriel Fernandez” piggybacks on the reporting of Garrett Therolf, who covered the story for The Times as it broke, and later elsewhere, and who appears extensively throughout. (Therolf, an executive producer of the series, brought Knappenberger into the project.) A well-made and conscientious work that includes interviews with people involved in the case and experts regarding it from afar, along with footage of police interviews and courtroom testimony, it is old news and an ongoing story, since we have not reached the end of child abuse or institutional incompetence.
6 THE FIRST 48
2004| TV-14 | 24 Seasons
A&E: Included (22 seasons) | Peacock: Included (15 seasons) | Hulu: Included (16 seasons) | Prime Video: Rent/Buy (7 seasons)
Created by Nigel Bellis
Three things are a given in each episode of “The First 48”: a homicide, a homicide investigation and hard questions in a bleak interrogation room. This long-running series takes viewers behind the scenes, following a squad of detectives in the first critical hours after a murder. The sense of urgency around each case is implicit in the show’s opening sequence: “The clock starts ticking the moment they are called,” says the narrator. “Their chance of solving a murder is cut in half if they don’t get a lead within the first 48 hours.”
Now in its 24th season, this addictive unscripted series still sets a high bar as it follows detectives in police precincts from
Dallas, New Orleans, Birmingham, Tulsa and other U.S. cities. Each hourlong episode is shot vérité-style and set to minimal ambient music, building tension subtly as the story unfolds. The results in each case are unpredictable: Many are solved by the closing credits, while others still remain open. Law enforcement turns to a combination of factors to break their cases, from forensic evidence to witness accounts to lies and confessions in the interrogation room, and no two cases ever shake out in the same manner. In a world where bad people always seem to be getting away with doing bad things, “The First 48” is one place where the quest for accountability always drives the story. —Lorraine Ali
5 O.J.: MADE IN AMERICA 2016 | TV-14 1 Season
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Apple TV+: Rent/Buy | Prime Video: Rent/Buy
Created by Ezra Edelman
Comedy, they say, is tragedy plus time. The same equation can also result in revelation, as ESPN’s astonishing documentary series “O.J.: Made in America” proves. There have been many attempts to tell the O.J. Simpson story, to explain why, in 1995, what appeared to be an open-and-shut case of domestic violence taken to its fatal and toooften inevitable conclusion turned into the trial of the century and resulted in acquittal. But all pale beside Ezra Edelman’s 71⁄2-hour chronicle of Simpson’s life and times. Historically meticulous, thematically compelling and deeply human, “O.J.: Made in America” is a masterwork of scholarship, journalism and cinematic art. —Mary McNamara
4 THE KEEPERS 2017 | TV-MA | 1 Season Netflix: Included
Created by Ryan White
The seven-part documentary series “The Keepers” looks at one of Baltimore’s most vexing cold cases through the eyes of the women who continue to push for justice. Sister Cathy Cesnik went missing in November of 1969. Two months later, her body was found in a field not far from her apartment. Five decades later, the murder of the young nun and high school teacher remains unsolved. Policemen and priests — the very people tasked with protecting and consoling the community — are among the case’s prime suspects.
Sister Cathy’s former students at Archbishop Keough High School, such as Gemma Hoskins and Abbie Schaub, have spent the majority of their adult lives trying to solve the murder of their beloved teacher, who was 26 at the time of her death. But as “The Keepers” shows, the list of theories and suspects only grows with time.
“The Keepers” is an unusually empathetic true-crime offering that places the memory of Sister Cathy above all else, yet still brings much needed heat to a tragically cold case. —Lorraine Ali
3 NIGHT STALKER: THE HUNT FOR A SERIAL KILLER 2021 | TV-MA | 1 Season Netflix: Included
Created by Tiller Russell
Los Angeles was terrorized by a phantom in the spring and summer of 1985. Creeping into homes at night, he tortured and murdered more than a dozen people, with the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys the focus of his mayhem: assaulting women in their 80s; kidnapping and molesting children as young as 6; scrawling a pentagram on one of his murder victims and demanding that another pray to Satan.
Netflix’s docuseries “Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer” chronicles the pursuit of the elusive predator though the recollections of the investigators and cops who chased him. Analog detective work — years before cellphone data and DNA became useful investigative tools — and the help of the community led to the capture of demon worshiper Richard Ramirez. His crimes stand out as particularly heinous and evil, even by today’s standards, in a metropolis that’s no stranger to the darkest of crimes (the Black Dahlia, the Manson
Family, the Hillside Strangler).
The four-part series is a powerful and haunting addition to the streamer’s onslaught of true-crime fare, capturing a place and time that many Angelenos regretfully claim as part of their city’s collective history. —Lorraine Ali
2 THE JINX: THE LIFE AND DEATHS OF ROBERT DURST
2015 | TV-14 | 1 Season
HBO Max: Included | Apple TV+: Rent/Buy | Prime Video: Rent/Buy
Created by Andrew Jarecki
“The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst” is a seductive sixpart series about a murder, maybe two murders, maybe three. Although its particulars are a matter of public record, it is helpful in watching “The Jinx” to know as little as possible about Durst — the son of a billionaire New York developer, the husband of a woman missing since 1982, just to start — in order to let its strangeness breathe and its cleverly ordered revelations have their full effect.
Director Andrew Jarecki — best known for the Oscar-nominated “Capturing the Friedmans” (2003), starts the series in 2001 with the discovery of a headless, limbless torso floating in Galveston Bay and works backward and forward from there. It’s a puzzle box that gives up its secrets slowly and unpredictably.
—Robert Lloyd
1 THE THIN BLUE LINE 1988 Rated 18+
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Criterion: Included | Apple TV+: Rent/Buy
Directed by Errol Morris
Considered one of the most impactful documentaries ever made, Errol Morris’ “The Thin Blue Line” changed the form and saved an innocent man from death row. Fusing cinematic technique with investigative journalism and activism with art, Morris dissected the troubling case of Randall Dale Adams, a drifter who was charged with the 1976 murder of a Dallas police officer. The officer was shot to death after a routine traffic stop. The evidence pointed to repeat offender 16-year-old David Harris, and the teen bragged to his friends about killing a cop, but he was still able to convince detectives that Adams was the culprit.
Morris used the power of cinema to expose staggering irregularities in the investigation and presented his findings in an exquisite display of experimental filmmaking. His unorthodox approach included haunting reenactments, original music by Philip Glass and profound excerpts from the interviews he conducted. For example, Adams’ co-counsel said she believed that the forces of law and justice, faced with a police killing, went after Adams because, as an adult, he could be sent to the electric chair, while Harris, as a minor, could not. Her theory is one of many that Morris uses to build an alternate narrative in his film. The result is a wonderfully made film that confronts injustice, exonerating a wrongfully convicted man while changing the face of documentary film forever.