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We live in the era of true-crime entertainment and reality television.

I trust the former slightly more than the latter, although every so often a glimpse behind the curtain reveals that some reality shows are actually quite raw and unfiltered.

Documentary filmmaking isn’t without a sense of the contrived. When you train a camera on somebody, their behaviour usually changes and cutting and splicing in the editing room will also work its magic.

All of that aside, there are documentaries which have stood the test of time and remain the benchmark against which others are measured. Paste has taken on the arduous task of putting together a list of the 100 greatest ever made, which includes an entry from 1922.

We’re going to skip ahead and look at three of the top 10, starting with Errol Morris’ 1988 masterpiece, The Thin Blue Line:

A little after midnight on Nov. 28, 1976, Dallas police officers Robert Wood and Teresa Turko made a routine traffic stop for a car driving without headlights. When Wood approached the vehicle, the driver pulled a handgun and shot him five times. The car sped off into the night while Turko fired hopelessly in its wake and Wood died at her feet. A cop killer was on the loose in Dallas.

Randall Dale Adams was arrested, convicted, and handed the death sentence. Then Morris entered the picture, camera in hand, and turned everything on its head:

This one ranked seventh on Paste’s list.

In sixth was 2005’s Grizzly Man, directed by Werner Herzog:

Leave it to Werner Herzog to take on a subject as peculiar and tragic as that of Timothy Treadwell, the bear enthusiast who, along with his girlfriend, was killed by his wild obsession in 2003. A sing-songy, pleasant, dangerously deluded man who believed his beloved grizzly companions knew and trusted him, Treadwell, over the course of 13 summers spent in Alaskan national parks, approached bears with both a religious reverence and folksy casualness—the latter of which arguably cost him his life.

The doccie is perhaps most famous for what is not seen or heard. Herzog chose not to use Treadwell’s audio recording of the attack that claimed his life, as well as the life of his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard.

Number one on the list is 1994’s Hoop Dreams, directed by Steve James, which is quite staggering in its scope:

The documentary labeled by none other than Roger Ebert as the single best film of the 1990s is alternatingly beautiful and crushing, an intense profile of life in inner city Chicago and dreams of escape through basketball—of all things.

The story of two young men recruited by a wealthy, predominantly white high school to play basketball, it raised serious questions about modern education, race and socioeconomic status, all of which we’re still asking today.

The doccie, shot over a period of five years, was somehow snubbed from a nomination in the Academy’s best documentary category.

Before you ask, there was no mention of My Octopus Teacher.

That’s fine – the Oscar statue will suffice.

You can see the full list of the 100 documentaries here.

[source:paste]