This summer, the editor-in-chief of Fandango.com, Chuck Walton, decided to watch 100 films in 100 days. And although he might be approaching movie fatigue at this point, he was able to talk with us about what documentaries will soon be big. “Documentaries have changed,” he says about the genre. “It’s not the same old ‘I’m going to educate you about something’ kind of film, but rather it’s a great style of storytelling.”
‘The Tillman Story’
I saw ‘Restrepo’ over the summer and really loved it,” Walton says regarding the film chronicling the year journalist Sebastian Junger and a photographer spent with an American platoon in Afghanistan. “[‘The Tillman Story’] is a different, more personal take on the Iraq war,” he says about this doc about the death of former NFL player and U.S. Army Corporal Pat Tillman.
‘Freakonomics’
Walton is curious about this one, not only because it’s based on the best-selling book, but also because the style of the film is so appealing. “Each vignette [five in all] is by a different documentary filmmaker, including Alex Gibney and Morgan Spurlock,” he says of the award-winning “Taxi to the Dark Side” and “Super Size Me” directors, respectively.
‘Waiting for Superman’
“Anyone who is a fan of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ will be interested in this film,” says Walton. Directed by Davis Guggenheim (“An Inconvenient Truth,” “It Might Get Loud”), the film analyzes the failures of U.S. public education by following students attempting to navigate the system.
