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Since I first started covering the annual awards seasons a decade ago, one of the most striking trends I have observed has been a marked uptick in the quantity and quality of documentary features. Each November, the Academy’s documentary branch selects 15 for a shortlist from which they ultimately pick five nominees. This year, I don’t know how they’re going to do it — Fall hasn’t even arrived yet and there are already way more than 15 worthy candidates. Frankly, I don’t think it would be going out on a huge limb to declare 2010 the strongest — or, at the very least, the deepest — year yet in the history of documentary filmmaking.

Here’s a bit of commentary on each of the docs that are registering strongest on my radar at the moment…

Now in Theaters

• “The Tillman Story” (The Weinstein Company, 8/20, trailer) — Amir Bar-Lev (“My Kid Could Paint That”) tells the true story of the man who gave up a multi-million dollar NFL contract to join the U.S. Army; who was killed in Iraq in 2004; whose “heroic” death the Bush Administration tried to use to increase public support for the war; but whose family — most of whom granted interviews for the film — ultimately discovered that the true manner in which he had been killed had been buried as part of a cover-up that led directly to the highest reaches of the military and government.

• “A Film Unfinished” (Oscilloscope, 8/18, trailer) — The object of recents raves in Entertainment Weekly and the New York Times, Yael Hersonski‘s doc deconstructs “Das Ghetto,” a Nazi propaganda film of Jewish life in the Warsaw Ghetto that was shot in 1942, and which for 40 years was considered to be unmanipulated footage until another reel was discovered and exposes it as anything but that. The most powerful part of this multi-faceted effort to set the record straight: testimony from five Holocaust survivors who lived in the ghetto, as well as one of the cameramen who filmed it.

• “Restrepo” (National Geographic, 6/25, trailer) — American journalist Sebastian Junger and British photographer Tim Hetherington co-directed this film, which chronicles the year that they spent embedded with an American platoon in Afghanistan as part of a story for Vanity Fair. The winner of Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary, it derives its name from the outpost that the platoon was charged with protecting, which in turn derived its name from a fallen member of the platoon.

Already Came and Went

• “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work” (IFC Films, 6/11, trailer) — The pioneering female comic granted filmmakers Ricki Stern and Anne Sunberg unrestricted access to her for a year, and the resulting footage — the best of which captures her interacting with regular people who have vulnerabilities and frailties just like her, such as a man who heckles her during a peformance and a woman she visits with her grandson on Thanksgiving — shows that she’s not just another pretty, plastic surgery-enhanced face. (Check out my interview with Rivers.)

• “Countdown to Zero” (Magnolia, 7/23, trailer) — Lucy Walker‘s cautionary film focuses on the security (or lack thereof) of the world’s 23,000 nuclear weapons — particularly those located in unstable countries, like Pakistan, or that have been unaccounted for since the fall of the Soviet Union — and emphasizes the urgent need to reduce the number of them to zero. (See interviews with producer Lawrence Bender on “The Rachel Maddow Show” and outed-CIA spy Valerie Plame on the coincidentally-titled “Countdown with Keith Olbermann.”)

• “Exit Through the Gift Shop” (Producers Distribution Agency, 4/16, trailer) — The street artist Banksy takes us inside the underground world of street art following a bizarre chain of events: Thierry, a Frenchman now living in LA who videotapes everything, gained entree into the city’s subculture through his cousin, a well-known artist, and recorded piles of footage for a film. When he tried to cut it down into something watchable, though, he found himself overwhelmed, and — in an unexpected twist that has some calling the film a hoax — Banksy takes over the filmmaking while Thierry becomes a street artist.

• “Babies” (Focus Features, 5/7, trailer) — Thomas Balmes‘ visually stunning doc is reminiscent of the Oscar-winning “March of the Penguins” (2005), only it focuses on babies instead of penguins, and specifically on the commonalities of and differences between four from different places in the world — Mongolia, Japan, Namibia, and the United States — during the (adorable) first years of their lives.

• “A Small Act” (Harambee Media, 4/?, trailer) — Jennifer Arnold brings us the incredible, moving story of a Holocaust survivor now living in Sweden who sponsored a young Kenyan student years ago and then forgot about it, only to learn one day that — thanks to her simple act of kindness — he completed secondary school, attended Harvard Law School, became a Human Rights Lawyer for the United Nations, and started up a scholarship program of his own in her name. Rarely before has a film so effectively conveyed the reverberating power of both good and evil. (It should be shown as a double-feature with the upcoming “Waiting for Superman,” which deals with similar problems in a vastly different setting.)

• “Casino Jack and the United States of Money” (Magnolia, 5/7, trailer) — Alex Gibney, the prolific filmmaker who won the best doc Oscar for the Afghanistan-set “Taxi to the Dark Side” (2007), now ventures into the domestic “dark side” in this two-plus hour study of former lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The film presents “Casino Jack’s” evolution from an impassioned College Republican into the chief orchestrator of a massive Indian casino bribery scandal — trading expensive gifts, meals, and sports trips in exchange for political favors — that eventually led to the indictments and conviction of himself, a U.S. congressman, two White House officials, and several congressional staffers.

• “Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist, and Rebel” (Phase 4 Films, 7/30, trailer) — 25 years after Brigitte Berman made a doc that won an Oscar and led to an unlikely friendship with Playboy‘s founder, she is introducing people to his “other” side — his relentless defense of First Amendment rights, civil rights, and, yes, even women’s rights — largely through never-before-seen footage, his personal scrapbooks, and interviews with high-profile figures who, like most other Americans, either strongly support or strongly oppose the man and everything he represents. (See my interview with Berman and chat with Hef)

• “Smash His Camera” (Magnolia, 7/30, trailer) — Much like seeing how hot dogs are made can make them seem less appetizing than they did before, this doc peels back the curtain and reveals the grotesque forces who make their living by feeding the celebrity obsession that has enveloped our society in recent decades. It focuses its lens on Ron Galella, an eccentric character who has snapped — and as much as any person in his profession, antagonized — the rich and famous for 50-plus years (the most famous examples being Marlon Brando, who broke his jaw and knocked out five of his teeth, and Jackie Kennedy, who took him to court).

• “The Oath” (Zeitgeist Films, 5/7, trailer) — Laura Poitras, the Oscar-nominated director of “My Country, My Country” (2006), brings us the story of a friendship between two men that began in 1996 and led to some of the darkest places in the world. One man, Osama bin Laden‘s former bodyguard, is today a free man driving a taxi in Yemen, while the other wound up in a prison cell in Guantanamo Bay charged with war crimes. The doc offers a view of the War on Terror unlike any that has been shown before.

• “Waking Sleeping Beauty” (Disney, 3/26, trailer) Disney, the studio most synonymous with animation, had lost much of its luster by the mid-1980s, when clashes among its staff and other factors resulted in a string of duds and, for the first time, lower box-office intake than rival animation studios. Don Hahn‘s doc recounts how the company, in the aftermath of a 1984 stockholder revolt that ushered in a terrific new management team, managed a remarkable comeback and produced a half-dozen instant classics over the next decade.

• “GasLand” (HBO Films, 6/?, trailer) — 37-year-old filmmaker Josh Fox makes a strong impression — not least through his creepy narration — with this muckraking doc that exposes “fracking,” the extraction of “natural gas” (one of the oft-promoted “alternative sources of energy” that, we are told, could reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil) as an outrageously dangerous process (the gas frequently seeps into drinking water) that is already in practice and making people sick across much of the country. (Check out Fox on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”)

• “12th & Delaware” (HBO Films, ?/?, trailer) — Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, the Oscar-nominated co-directors of “Jesus Camp” (2006), a film that chronicled the education or indoctrination (depending on your viewpoint) of young Evangelicals, even-handedly tackle another divisive subject in this film, which presents America’s battle over abortion rights through the microcosm of an unassuming street in Fort Pierce, Florida that is home to an abortion clinic on one side of the street and a pregnancy care center on the other.

• “Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage” (D&E Entertainment, 6/10, trailer) — Less than a year after “Anvil: The Story of Anvil” took the doc world by storm (and was then snubbed by the Academy), along comes another doc about eccentric Canadian musicians who formed a band and have performed together for decades. The big difference? Rush has been consistently performing to packed houses since the sixties, and this film explores not a comeback but rather a long and fruitful collaboration in an industry in which such a thing is incredibly rare.

• “8: The Mormon Proposition” (Red Flag Releasing, 6/18, trailer) — Reed Cowan‘s timely doc delves into homphobia in the Mormon community and how it motivated its members, who account for only 2% of California’s population, to contribute 71% of the monetary contributions that helped to pass the state ballot measure Proposition 8 in November 2008, which amended California’s constitution to proclaim that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California,” effectively banning gay marriage within its borders.

• “Winnebago Man” (Kino International, 7/9, trailer) — In 1988, pitchman Jack Rebney tried to shoot an advertisement for Winnebago motor homes, but — thanks to a tongue-twisting script, a bad morning, and a bunch of “fucking flies” — the attempt was a disaster. Over 20 years later, the leaked footage of his expletive-laden outtakes (see the original footage) had made him a YouTube phenomenon as “the angriest man on Earth,” but the man himself was nowhere to be found… that is, until Ben Steinbauer found him and got him to tell his story.

• “Best Worst Movie” (Abramorama, 5/14, trailer) — Today “Troll 2″ (1990) is widely regarded as the worst movie of all-time. This doc is directed by a man who had a starring role in that film as a kid and who uses it to showcase the unlikely cult following that “Troll 2″ now possesses. One of the more moving storylines: another man who always dreamed of being a famous actor appeared in “Troll 2″ and then gave up the profession to became a small-town dentist; 20 years later, the film’s rabid fan-base are allowing him to realize his dream, after all.

• “South of the Border” (Cinema Libre Studio, 6/24, trailer) — In this doc, lefty filmmaker Oliver Stone offers a controversial paean to Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and six of South America’s other democratically elected leaders. Traveling through Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Ecuador, and Cuba, he is granted unprecedented access to their leaders, and comes to believe that the mainstream media has willfully or ignorantly failed to report on what he regards as marked social and political improvements across the continent.

Coming Attractions

• “Waiting for ‘Superman’” (Paramount Vantage, 9/24, trailer) — Davis Guggenheim, the Oscar-winning director of “An Inconvenient Truth” (2006), offers a searing indictment of education-inequality in America today, using the experiences of five kids and one school’s lottery system as a microcosm of the problem while also highlighting ideas that might help America’s public schools once again surprass the many other countries’ that it has fallen behind. (The film was recently celebrated by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times.)

• “Inside Job” (Sony Pictures Classics, 10/8, trailer) — Charles Ferguson, who made millions in Silicon Valley before turning to film and directing the Oscar-nominated Iraq War doc “No End in Sight” (2007), once again employs a professorial and interview-centric approach in his second film, which suggests that America’s financial meltdown was and/or should have been anticipated by more people than has been widely reported, and questions why those most responsible for it have thus far escaped harsher punishment. (Matt Damon narrates.)

• “Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer” (Magnolia, 11/5) — Alex Gibney, who scored a best doc Oscar nod for “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” (2005) and won for “Taxi to the Dark Side” (2007), returns to their themes of greed and secrecy, respectively, in his study of New York’s ex-governor. The man once regarded as “The Sheriff of Wall Street” and a possible future president all but imploded his career (and nearly his family) after it was revealed that he had regularly used a prostitution service. His supporters and detractors, some of the service’s call-girls, and even Spitzer himself are interviewed in the film.

• “Freakonomics” (Magnolia, 10/1, trailer) — This adaptation of Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt‘s 2004 best-selling book of the same title, which debunked a great deal of “conventional wisdom” about the ways we experience life, is divided into five segments directed by the acclaimed filmmakers responsible for “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” “Jesus Camp,” “The King of Kong,” “Super Size Me,” and “Why We Fight.” (It has the potential to become a rare profitable doc, argues the New York Times.)

• “Bhutto” (First Run Features, 11/?, trailer) — The story of Pakistan’s Bhutto family is something like a Greek tragedy, someone says in this film, which tells their story and focuses, in particular, on Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of the nation’s former Prime Minister who went on to twice hold that position herself, becoming the first woman elected to lead a Muslim state. Following charges of corruption, she went into a self-imposed 8-year exile in Dubai, but returned in 2007 to challenge the incumbent president, only to meet a tragic end.

Still Seeking U.S. Distribution

• “Tabloid” — The great Errol Morris, who won an Oscar for “The Fog of War” (2004) and specializes in what he has called “”sick, sad and funny” films about eccentric individuals, certainly found a plum one for this doc: Joyce McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming who allegedly went on to abduct and rape a Mormon missionary; jumped bail; and was later sentenced in-absentia to a year in prison. The best news is that Morris gets McKinney to sit down for an interview in front of his famous Interrotron, and the resulting footage is reportedly awesome.

• “Lucky” (trailer) — Jeffrey Blitz, who directed the Oscar-nominated spelling bee doc “Spellbound” (2002), now profiles a different sort of competition in which everyone and anyone can participate: the lottery. He highlights a handful of individuals from across America who beat the incredible odds and won huge sums of money, and chronicles the ways in which it has impacted their lives — for the better and, more often than one might think, for the worse.

• “My Perestroika” (trailer) — In this film, Russian filmmaker Robin Hessman introduces us to five members of the last generation that was raised behind the Iron Curtain in the USSR. We learn their stories — from that time, through the collapse of the Soviet Union during their teenage years, through their lives as adults with children of their own in 21st century Russia — through their testimony in present-day interviews, rare home footage from their childhoods, and displays of the propaganda they grew up around.

• “The People vs. George Lucas” (trailer) — Thousands of “Star Wars” devotees who feel betrayed by creator George Lucas‘ stewardship of the franchise since “The Return of the Jedi” (1983) responded to Alexandre O. Philippe‘s request for video clips outlining their grievances, and many of them appear in this doc alongside critics and Lucas acquaintances. At its heart, the film is an exploration of the question: at what point, if any, does an artist have to answer not only to himself but also to his audience?

Photo: Eliot Spitzer speaks during a scene in the doc “Inside Job.” (Spitzer is also the subject of another doc “Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer.) Credit: Magnolia.

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