Annal:2004 Academy Award® for Best Documentary Feature
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Academy Award® in the year 2004. For a ranked list of films, try an honor roll:
The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
- 2004 Oscar-Documentary winner
- Score: 10.54
The Fog of War, the movie that finally won Errol Morris the best documentary Oscar, is a spellbinder. Morris interviews Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and finds a uniquely unsettling viewpoint on much of 20th-century American history. Employing a ton of archival material, including LBJ’s fascinating taped conversations from the Oval Office, Morris probes the reasons behind the U.S. commitment to the Vietnam War—and finds a depressingly inconsistent policy. McNamara himself emerges as—well, not exactly…
Carlos Bosch, Josep Maria Domènech
- 2004 Oscar-Documentary nominee
- Score: 6.54
An Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Feature, Balseros is the heartrending yet triumphant account of seven Cuban refugees—and their families—who risked their lives to venture towards America’s shores on homemade rafts. The Village Voice raves that Balseros is an “engrossing documentary” with an “extraordinary sense of recording stories as they unfold!” While Presidents Clinton and Fidel Castro argued over the closing of Cuba’s coast in the chaotic summer of 1994, nearly 50,000 “balseros” (a slang term for Cuban rafters) set out towards…
- 2004 Oscar-Documentary nominee
- Score: 6.54
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival, and with over $3 million at the box office to date, Capturing The Friedmans is nothing short of the most riveting, provocative, and hotly debated films of the year. Despite their predilection for hamming it up in front of home-movie cameras, the Friedmans were a normal middle-class family living in the affluent New York suburb of Great Neck. One Thanksgiving, as the family gathers at home for a quiet holiday dinner, their front door explodes, splintered by a police battering ram. Officers…
My Architect: A Son's Journey
- 2004 Oscar-Documentary nominee
- Score: 6.54
A riveting tale of love, art, betrayal and forgiveness—in which the illegitimate son of a legendary architect undertakes a worldwide exploration to discover and understand his father’s and the personal choices he made.
Louis I. Kahn is considered by many historians to have been the most important architect of the second half of the twentieth century. While Kahn’s artistic legacy was a search for truth and clarity, his personal life was secretive and chaotic. His mysterious death in a train station men’s room left behind three families—one with his wife and…
The Weather Underground: The Explosive Story of America's Most Notorious Revolutionaries
- 2004 Oscar-Documentary nominee
- Score: 6.54
The key players in the radical movement known as the Weather Underground are skillfully brought to life in this Oscar-nominated documentary. The Weathermen were born of sixties protest, but took their scheme to overthrow the U.S. government to especially violent extremes. Never a well-populated movement, the Underground petered out as its leaders aged during the seventies; by decade’s end, weary of hiding, most of them had turned themselves over to the authorities. That journey, by which a fire-breathing revolutionary such as Bernadine Dohrn became a (still…
