Recent documentaries: a Marine plotted a mosque attack, then joined the congregation

In Stranger at the Gate, a former US Marine named Richard "Mac" McKinney comes home to Muncie, Indiana, with PTSD and starts planning an attack on the local mosque. Director Joshua Seftel says McKinney went there looking for proof that would justify it. The congregants met him with kindness instead, he kept coming back, and he became a member. The film was nominated for an Oscar, and it runs about half an hour.

That is what a documentary does at its best: it puts a real case on the record. The Scottish filmmaker John Grierson is credited with the word, which he used in a 1926 review of Robert Flaherty's Moana, and he later defined it as the creative treatment of actuality. The cases below were real fights with real consequences: a 94-year-old camp bookkeeper convicted in a German court in 2015, and a 2018 study of facial recognition bias, followed in June 2020 by IBM and Amazon changing course on the technology.

The films below all date from 2018 or later, and each one follows a real case: a trial, a patent, a toy line, a faulty algorithm. Relay lists 28 documentaries from this period with at least 1,000 audience ratings, and these are the ones with the clearest stories to tell.

What makes a recent documentary worth your evening

• A real person with something at stake. A defendant, an inventor, a researcher, a designer.
• A question the film leaves open. Was the verdict fair, was the claim true, who deserves the credit.
• A length that suits the story. Several of these run under an hour and a half, and one runs about half an hour.

7 recent documentaries to watch

The Accountant of Auschwitz (2019)

Oskar Gröning, a former SS sergeant, was 94 when a German court in Lüneburg convicted him in July 2015 of accessory to murder in the deaths of 300,000 Jews. His job at Auschwitz was to collect prisoners' belongings and send the valuables and cash to Berlin. He did not take part in the killing itself. The court gave him 4 years, longer than the 3.5 years prosecutors had asked for.

The film, directed by Matthew Shoychet, follows the case through lawyer Thomas Walther, who represented 51 survivors and relatives as co-plaintiffs and called the theory a new legal argument: that serving in a death camp is complicity in murder. Four survivors are interviewed. The film asks why Germany was prosecuting former guards in their 90s and argues that the conviction is both a reminder of the past and a precedent for the future.

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Coded Bias (2021)

Joy Buolamwini, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, found that some facial recognition systems did not detect her face unless she wore a white mask. She turned that into a study. Her Gender Shades research, announced by MIT in February 2018, tested commercial systems on more than 1,200 images. For light-skinned men the error rate was never worse than 0.8 percent. For darker-skinned women it reached as high as 34.7 percent.

Director Shalini Kantayya has said that three years before making the film she did not know what an algorithm was. The film premiered at Sundance in January 2020 and argues that there is little legal structure around artificial intelligence, even as algorithms decide housing, credit and healthcare. In June 2020, IBM said it would stop developing facial recognition for mass surveillance, and Amazon announced a one-year pause on police use of its Rekognition software.

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Stolen Dough (2023)

Anthony Mongiello, a cheese businessman from Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, says he invented stuffed crust pizza at 18, by accident, while making a pizza for a friend's mother. He received a method patent in 1987 and sent it to the big pizza chains. In 1995 Pizza Hut launched Stuffed Crust Pizza with a $45 million advertising campaign that featured Donald Trump. Pizza Hut has always said it developed the crust in-house.

The Mongiello family sued for $1 billion. Judge Eugene Nickerson ruled for Pizza Hut in 1999, finding that Mongiello held a method patent and not a product patent, and that Pizza Hut used a different method. He did not appeal, and says it would have cost $250,000. Director Stefano Da Frè tells it as a crime-suspense style docudrama, mixing interviews with staged re-enactments.

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Stranger at the Gate (2022)

Director Joshua Seftel's team was making a series of short films about American Muslims when they found McKinney's story in a newspaper article. McKinney, who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, planned an attack on the Islamic Center of Muncie. Seftel says he went to the mosque looking for proof that would justify it, and the congregants responded with kindness.

The film centres on the Bahrami family. Bibi Bahrami fled Afghanistan as a child after the Soviet invasion and is one of the mosque's founders. Seftel says McKinney's own young daughter questioning his views was a turning point. Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, is an executive producer, and the film was nominated for best documentary short at the 2023 Oscars.

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Power of Grayskull : The Definitive History of He-Man and the Masters of The Universe (2018)

Mattel passed on the Star Wars toy license, and rival Kenner turned it into a huge success. Mattel set out to make its own hit. Designer Roger Sweet added clay muscle to a Big Jim action figure and presented three He-Man concepts: military, fantasy and space. The barbarian look won.

He-Man earned about $38 million for Mattel in 1982, its first year. When toy store buyers rejected the planned mini-comics, marketing director Mark Ellis promised a one-hour cartoon instead, and the show went into weekday syndication through the studio Filmation. The line collapsed in the late 1980s under competition from Ninja Turtles, Transformers and video games. The film, directed by Randall Lobb and Robert McCallum, interviews Dolph Lundgren, Frank Langella and Alan Oppenheimer. Sweet said he received no royalties for creating He-Man, and he died aged 91.

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Friedkin Uncut (2018)

William Friedkin directed The French Connection, which won 5 Academy Awards at the ceremony held in 1972, including best picture and best director for him. His next film, The Exorcist, received 10 Oscar nominations and won 2. Then came Sorcerer in 1977, an expensive flop that sent his career into a sharp decline, though he considered it his finest film.

Italian director Francesco Zippel's film premiered at the Venice festival on August 31, 2018. Friedkin tells his own story, joined by Francis Ford Coppola, Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson and Ellen Burstyn. It also covers his early documentary The People vs. Paul Crump, which helped persuade the governor of Illinois to commute a man's death sentence. Friedkin died on August 7, 2023, aged 87.

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Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin (2020)

Bruce Chatwin was a British travel writer whose work explores restlessness, wandering, borders and exile. As he was dying of AIDS, Herzog says, Chatwin gave him his rucksack. Chatwin died in Nice on 18 January 1989, aged 48. His diagnosis was not made public until 1988, and obituaries cited a rare fungal infection.

Werner Herzog, the German director, carries that rucksack through Patagonia, Wales and the Australian outback in a film that had its world premiere at the 2019 Tribeca Festival. Chatwin's novel The Viceroy of Ouidah became Herzog's 1987 film Cobra Verde. The documentary includes interviews with Chatwin's widow, Elizabeth, and his biographer, Nicholas Shakespeare.

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Where to go next

• True crime documentaries
• Music documentaries

All of these are on Relay.