Documentary

When I think of actress Lupe Ontiveros, who passed away from liver cancer at 69 Thursday night, what stays with me most is her strength. Her women tended to be strong and resilient, no-nonsense types, whether they were running a theater company as she did in "Chuck & Buck," dealing with a rebellious daughter in "Real Women Have Curves," or picking up after some well-heeled white family, as she did in"The Goonies. "There was a "I have seen it all" quality that danced in her eyes, more bemused by the frailties of the human race than bitter about them.

"All the President's Men Revisited," which premieres Sunday on Discovery Channel, returns us to those thrilling days of yesteryear when everyone read newspapers and the legislative and judicial branches of the U.S. government were capable of acting out of something other than political self-interest and scorched-earth partisan intransigence. No, young people, I am not making that up. Narrated by executive producer Robert Redford, who produced and starred in "All the President's Men," the 1976 film of the 1974 book by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, it is not merely the story of the historical events but of the transformation of those events into a work - a pretty great work - of popular art. News footage alternates with scenes from the movie.

"The Dog Whisperer" Cesar Millan is usually focused on rehabbing canines -- but he's now revealing some work he had to do on himself following a suicide attempt in 2010. In February of that year, he lost his top dog, Daddy, to cancer after 16 years as a team. A month later, Millan's wife told him she wanted a divorce after 16 years of marriage. The combined blow knocked him for a loop, he shares in "Cesar Millan: The Real Story," a documentary on Nat Geo Wild. In May 2010, he attempted suicide via drug overdose, winding up unconscious and hospitalized, he said.

Robert Redford never planned to play Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward in "All the President's Men," the Oscar-winning 1976 adaptation of Woodward and Carl Bernstein's account of their investigation of the 1972 Watergate break-in and the cloak-and-dagger cover-up by the Richard Nixon White House. Redford didn't even want the movie to be in color. "I originally wanted to make a black-and-white, small film with two unknowns," said Redford, who also served as producer on the film, which was directed by Alan J. Pakula and costarred Dustin Hoffman, Jason Robards, Jack Warden, Martin Balsam and Hal Holbrook.

Documentarian Shola Lynch first encountered controversial political activist and professor Angela Davis over 20 years ago while still a student at the University of Texas in Austin. Davis delivered a speech that "was all about justice and race, fighting the good fight," recalled Lynch, now 44, on the phone from her home in New York. "In college, that is what we were all about. That was the time we were trying to figure it out. What did equality mean? What does it mean to be black?

"The Ambassador" will make your head spin. Part muckraking nonfiction film, part performance piece, it is a nervy documentary guaranteed, depending on who you are, to enlighten, disturb or offend. Which is what you might expect from a man who describes his work as "a strange mix of Borat and the Economist. " That would be Danish documentary filmmaker Mads Brügger, whose previous film, "The Red Chapel," took his particular brand of political theater of the absurd to North Korea. Now Brügger is headed off to the Central African Republic, a just-about-failed state he describes, in a typical bit of scathing voice-over, as "'Jurassic Park' for those who long for Africa of the 1970s.

There are only two things even remotely amiss with "MLK: The Assassination Tapes," a highly unsettling trip back in time that premieres Sunday on the Smithsonian Channel, 43 years and a day after the beginning of the sanitation workers strike that brought the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis, Tenn., and his death. And they are small things at that. First, there is the slightly misleading title, which seems to imply a single cache of hitherto unsuspected, clandestinely recorded or revealing documents.

The musical mystery “Searching for Sugar Man” won the Oscar for documentary on Sunday night. Directed by Malik Bendjelloul, the film about an obscure Detroit singer made a remarkable near-sweep of eligible awards since its premiere at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.  The film details how for years it was thought that the 1970s singer-songwriter known as Rodriguez had faded into obscurity or died. But through the passionate sleuthing of dedicated fans in South Africa, where he unexpectedly achieved a startling level of fame, he was discovered to be very much alive, living and working in Michigan.

“Inocente,” directed by the team of Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine, won the Oscar for documentary short on Sunday. The film follows a homeless, undocumented immigrant teenage girl in San Diego as she relentlessly pursues her dream of becoming an artist. With heart and wit, the film explores the issue of  homelessness among youth while also capturing the power of art and ambition. The work aired first on EPIX and later MTV. The filmmakers were previously nominated for their documentary feature “War Dance” in 2007.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced Monday its shortlist of 15 documentary feature finalists and, as always, the roll was as notable for its omissions as for its actual titles. Notably absent were such critically and commercially acclaimed docs as the Peter Jackson-produced West Memphis Three investigation, "West of Memphis," Sundance favorite "Queen of Versailles" and Monday's New York Film Critics Circle winner "The Central Park Five. " Another overlooked popular title,  "Paul Williams Still Alive," an in-depth look at the 1970s songwriter and the fickleness of fame, has also often been mentioned as a strong candidate in the original song category.

"China only releases 20 foreign films each year," a title card at the beginning of "Unmade in China" informs us, adding, "This is NOT one of them. " No kidding. Co-directed by Tanner King Barklow and Gil Kofman, this genial documentary details what happened when Los Angeles-based director Kofman took a job in China to make a motion picture in a language he did not speak. It's a cautionary tale of sorts, but the story is so strange it is often not clear exactly what it's cautioning us against.

Whether it's signing his photographs and his books, participating in a documentary or talking at all, Bert Stern can barely be bothered. Which is a flaw that "Bert Stern: Original Mad Man" never overcomes. It's not that Stern didn't take any memorable photographs or lacked for dramatic incident in his life. Quite the contrary. A creator of images who helped revolutionize the use of photography in advertising, he became celebrated for Marilyn Monroe's last sitting as well as the shot that became the celebrated poster for Stanley Kubrick's "Lolita.

The Somali pirates in the documentary "Stolen Seas" brandish bazookas instead of swords and have roughly the same sense of chivalry as the husbands on "The Real Housewives of New Jersey. " "There's no such thing as a romantic Somali pirate," says one of the movie's many talking heads. You probably suspected as much. Still, Thymaya Payne's ambitious doc contains plenty of surprising and interesting details about the Somali pirate trade, which, according to the film, costs the shipping industry $7 billion to $12 billion annually.

NEW YORK - In 11 previous editions, the Tribeca Film Festival has showcased dozens of glitzy studio productions and stars - Tobey Maguire and his "Spider-Man 3" crew rode into town in 2007, Tom Cruise opened "Mission: Impossible III" here in 2006 and last year Joss Whedon world-premiered "The Avengers" on closing night. But when Tribeca's 12th edition opens Wednesday, most of the famous names won't arrive via big-budget Hollywood movies - they'll come as documentary subjects. This cinematic rite of spring has eschewed the splashy studio premiere this year, opening instead with a documentary about the niche rock band the National ("Mistaken for Strangers")

It's so easy to make fun of the 1980s. Ray-Bans, glam-rock hair, acid-washed jeans, the yuppie and Reaganomics, and all those regrettable images of women in power suits and tennis shoes. It seemed even as it was occurring an age of Culture Lite, a consumer-driven wasteland after the socially and politically transformative '60s and '70s. Even the title of National Geographic's new six-hour, three-part documentary "The '80s: The Decade That Made Us" seems, at first glance, a bit of a joke.

Twenty years ago, veteran caver Chris Nicola received an offer from a Ukrainian friend to explore the well-known gypsum giant caves in the western part of the European country. Nicola quickly accepted the invitation. "My family on my mother's side had Cossack roots and they were known to come from the Ukraine," the New Yorker said over the phone this week. "I thought in the back of my mind I could do some family research. " But his main reason was to visit the 77-mile long Priest's Grotto cave, which is part of an extensive gypsum cave system.

"Senna," a documentary about Brazilian race-car driver Ayrton Senna, has gotten off to a speedy start at the box office. The film, which opened in one theater in Los Angeles and another in New York this past weekend, collected $66,075 for a solid per-theater average of $33,038, according to an estimate from distributor Producers Distribution Agency. "Senna" is the second release for the company founded by John Sloss' Cinetic Media last year when it distributed the Oscar-nominated documentary "Exit Through the Gift Shop" from the street artist Banksy.

Documentary "The Cove" Louie Psihoyos and Fisher Stevens After an unprecedented sweep through the guild awards for directing, producing, writing and editing, plus a host of critics' prizes, it was little surprise when "The Cove" was named best documentary feature. The film is an unapologetically activist look at the issue of dolphin fishing in Japan. Made with a structure that has been likened to a heist film, "The Cove" follows animal activist Richard O'Barry -- who once trained dolphins for the television show "Flipper" -- alongside a team of filmmakers as they attempt to document dolphin slaughter in the Japanese fishing village of Taiji.

Laurene Powell Jobs is giving her first public interview on Friday since the death of her husband, Steve Jobs.  Jobs will appear on NBC's  Rock Center with Brian Williams  to promote a new documentary called "The Dream is Now"  that will air this weekend on sister channel MSNBC. The documentary examines her crusade to get Congress to pass the Dream Act, a bill that creates a path toward citizenship for younger immigrants who have lived in the country a long time. "We need all of these brains," she says in a clip from the interview with Williams.

Sebastian Junger's heartfelt, intense and maddening (in the right way) documentary "Which Way Is the Front Line From Here?: The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington" examines the open-hearted, peripatetic nature of his acclaimed "Restrepo" co-director, who was killed in a mortar attack in 2011 covering the civil war in Libya. A brave, curious soul with an uncanny, almost serene connection to the humanity of his subjects - blinded war children and theatrically dangerous rebel fighters in West Africa, close-knit American soldiers in Afghanistan (the subject of "Restrepo")