Malik Bendjelloul's Searching for Sugar Man, which won Best Documentary Feature at last night's Academy Awards, is a puff piece that exists to deify its subject, Sixto Díaz Rodríguez. It is less a documentary than a montage of fawning over this American folk musician who released two albums in the early '70s, only to be ignored and then rediscovered by South Africa. We hear that he was bigger than Elvis and the Rolling Stones there, that he moved 500,000 copies of his debut Cold Fact there, that he's "like a wise man prophet" with "a genuine quality that all poets and artists have to elevate things." Someone says, "Bob Dylan was mild [compared] to this guy."

I never realized how not pregnant Beyoncé might have been until the Saturday premiere of her HBO documentary, Life Is But a Dream. Since announcing her pregnancy at the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards (in August of that year), there have been naysayers, referred to with tongue in cheek as "Beyoncé birthers." There was that footage of her apparently pregnant belly folding in on itself when she made an appearance on Australian TV in the fall of 2011. Months later, Beyoncé addressed it with a pithy explanation: "It was a fabric that folded - does fabric not fold? Oh my gosh, so stupid."

If Michael Apted's Up series of documentaries plays like the older, more relaxed brother of reality TV, it's because that's basically what it is. Launched in 1964 as a one-off special of interviews with 7-year-olds in Seven Up by director Paul Almond, the film surveyed 14 kids of various economic backgrounds to explore England's class system (it was based on the repeatedly invoked Jesuit motto "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man"). Apted, who helped cast that film, then took over and has returned to its subjects every seven years to document their lives over time. Though the films are still inherently political, what emerged was less of an economic survey and more one of humanity. Reality TV is often referred to as a sociological experiment, but the Up series is as bona fide of a longitudinal study as pop culture has ever offered.

Today (which happens to be Hova's 43rd birthday), a 24-minute documentary on Jay-Z's 8-show stint that opened Brooklyn's Barclays Center in September was released via YouTube. One highlight of Where I'm From occurs when Jay takes the subway en route to his last show and sits next to a kind-faced older woman named Ellen who has no idea who the fuck she's talking to. The ensuing conversation is infinitely sweeter and more humble than if she had.

Empathy comes from the weirdest place and the least savory of intentions in the just-released documentary Addicted to Fame, B-movie director David Giancola's chronicle of his 2007 film Illegal Aliens - the movie that also has the distinction of being Anna Nicole Smith's last. She was hired specifically as a stunt, to cultivate the "oh my god they didn't" factor, as Giancola, puts it. But he never trusted her. To ensure her reliability, he got her to invest in the movie and, aware that he had a train wreck on his hands, he documented the filming process extensively.

Every subgenre needs its classic, and so Spike Lee's Bad 25 is what amounts to the greatest Behind the Music episode of all time. Frenetically paced, ingeniously constructed and brimming with hilarious anecdotes, the look back on the creation of 1987's Bad (the one that had the enormous task of following Thriller), elevates the rock doc to an art form. At over two hours in length, what could have felt like a bloated obituary is unmistakably alive. Although it's unlikely that it would have been assembled were it not for the death of its primary subject, Bad 25 proves that Jackson's legacy has nearly made him immortal.

The most satisfying cinematic moment I've experienced all year occurs during the last 15 minutes of David France's documentary How To Survive a Plague. I don't even want to hint at what it is because it could risk depriving you of the rush it gave me. What works like a movie twist feels like an epiphany in this chronicle of the first nine years of the AIDS advocacy group ACT UP. Just know that if you care about social justice and gay rights, you should see this film. And if you don't know much about ACT UP's history, you will be wowed.

The 90-minute, needlessly 3D documentary Katy Perry: Part of Me is a fantastic document of how guarded our superstars come in 2012. There's more revealed about Madonna in a single snort or eye roll in 1991's Truth or Dare than there is Katy Perry in the entirety of Part of Me. We learn that being a famous singer is Perry's childhood dream come true, that her goal is to make people smile, that she's not yet ready for kids. The biggest revelation is that she looks fantastic out of makeup, and if the words in her Proactive commercial are true, even that shouldn't come as a surprise. No warts at all.

Below, we're talking with Vikram Gandhi, who went undercover as a guru, gained a following and made a film about it. Watch the trailer above, read more about the movie in our announcement post and fire away below.

This week sees the debut of a fascinating new documentary, Kumaré, in which a director from New Jersey, Vikram Gandhi, goes undercover as a guru and ends up gaining a following through his deception. It's something of a social experiment and you can check out the video above for more background on the premise, or read the synopsis below, courtesy of the film's official site:

Me @ the Zoo, a documentary about Chris Crocker's rise to Internet fame, his "Leave Britney alone!" peak and its aftermath, premieres Monday, June 25 at 9 pm ET on HBO. Chris is joining us for a discussion right now. Below, let's chat with him about his inextricably bound life and career and let's not be dicks.

Me @ the Zoo, Chris Moukarbel and Valerie Veatch's fascinating, Kickstarter-funded documentary about Internet superstar Chris Crocker, will premiere Monday, June 25 on HBO. We're getting him first, though, for a live discussion that will happen tomorrow (Tuesday, June 19) at 2 pm ET.

Viewers of China Central Television's documentary on the Shanghai police force probably didn't expect to see Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. But there he is, along with now-wife Priscilla Chan.

This year's Disneynature's Earth Day documentary offering, Chimpanzee, is the latest in a rash of documentaries about the emotional lives of animals to emerge in the past year or so. Project Nim, One Lucky Elephant and The Whale (my favorite of the bunch because it was responsible for one of the most moving cinema experiences I've ever had) dissect and bemoan humans' complicated relationship with those whom we share Earth with – the good, the bad, the exploitative. Those three movies present stories of direct human interaction and, more specifically, how human interruption can severely fuck up innocent animal lives.

Folks who enjoy experiencing Katy Perry on screens of various sizes, in fields of various dimensions are in for a treat this summer: she's coming to the movies in 3D.

"There's nothing to say off camera," goes Warren Beatty's famous roast of Madonna in the 1991 documentary Truth or Dare. "Why would you say something if it's off camera? What point is there existing?"

At the end of last night's public showing of Kirk Cameron's documentary Monumental at New York's Regal Union Square Stadium 14, after a technical error had cut off Cameron's simulcast that concluded the event but before everyone left the still-dark theater, a voice rang out responding to what we had just watched:

The documentary about herself that Sarah Palin secretly commissioned, The Undefeated — a.k.a. Triumph of the Grift — will debut in Iowa at some point later this month. And some lucky film connoisseurs, mostly all for conservative publications, have already viewed advance copies! So does it give Errol Morris a run for his money, or is it undiluted shite? Critics are torn.

What were you doing July 24, 2010? If you'd heeded the call by directors Ridley Scott and Kevin MacDonald, then whatever you were doing, you were filming it. Life in a Day, which debuted at Sundance in January and hits theaters in July, promises to show "the true story of a single day on Planet Earth." Here's the documentary's goose bump-inducing trailer. [via NYM]

One portion of the devastating documentary about the global financial collapse, Inside Job (which won an Oscar, so you have to see it), dealt with academic economists—specifically, the ways that they became financially tied to banks and other players in finance, and how that may have compromised the entire practice of economics. It even showed the heads of the economic departments at Harvard (pictured) and Columbia blithely asserting that there was no need to disclose their financial conflicts of interest in academic papers. It was sickening.