Merchants of Doubt

A documentary about the American war in Vietnam, made while the war was still being fought. Davis intercuts interviews with generals, officials, pilots, veterans, grieving Vietnamese families and ordinary Americans, setting the language of policy against what that policy did on the ground and at home.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the editing: Davis lets the war's architects talk at length, then cuts their words against a funeral, a bombed village or a cheering football crowd, and trusts the audience to feel the gap. The pedagogy is in how the film teaches viewers to hear the language of power, euphemism and abstraction included, while looking at what it covers up. Worth knowing that the juxtaposition is the argument, and General Westmoreland and others objected that their words were framed unfairly, so watch it as a persuasive documentary, not a neutral record.

Al Gore's traveling slideshow on climate change, expanded into a film that helped move global warming from a fringe concern into mainstream urgency.

Why it’s here: A former vice president turned a slideshow into a movie and it worked — not because the science was new, but because someone finally said it plainly and often enough that it stopped being deniable in polite company.