Collective

At first look, it seems that not much has changed in Alexander Nanau's Collective, which, unexpectedly, has been nominated for Best Docudrama and Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards, a double nomination that fits the film's dual character. The subgenre is fly-on-the-wall documentation, but the plot is constructed as an investigative journalism conspiracy thriller, in which an inquiry into a specific issue reveals a far broader pattern of corruption. The cinematic visual is dull, featureless, and a touch washed out, owing in part to practical considerations and in part to a deliberate aesthetic decision.

The Collective movie is titled after Colectiv, a Romanian nightclub where a fire in 2015 killed over 50 people - including three of the six members of "Goodbye to Gravity", a local metalcore band performing for the audience. At the beginning of Collective, guests' cell phone video of the catastrophe is shown. Soon after, Nanau started to follow the story, attaching himself to a bunch of journalists at Bucharest's Sports Gazette. as these people started to ask how these fatalities might have been averted.

What ensues is almost too horrifying to be considered entertaining, yet if Nanau expected further drama, his story sense did not deceive him. The success of Collective earns it a spot on our list of the best movies about journalism.

Year of Release: 2019

Stars: Alexander Nanau, Antoaneta Opris

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 99%