By David Fear

A VIDEO CAMERA records a family around a dining-room table. Voices get raised, tempers flare, and accusations fly fast and furious even as various members slowly shuffle out of the frame. The camera catches it all with a stoic eye, unaware that this intimate meltdown, when things have long since fallen apart and the center can barely hold, will be seen again years later by hundreds of similarly transfixed orbs that were never meant to witness it. But view it they will. Many will tell their friends about it. And even more will attempt to seek it out.

Taken out of context and with all identifying elements conveniently left unsaid, it could easily be taken for a stolen moment from any number of the "vérité" voyeurisms still glutting the television airwaves. Only it isn't, and chances are fairly good that people you'd be describing it to have already seen it. Take, for example, the throng of social larvae waiting next to me at a bar one night who couldn't stop talking about it. One member of this rather large party, however, had no idea what they were gabbing on about, and as the group tried to explain Capturing the Friedmans to their bewildered friend, the stranger directly to my left recommended it the only way he knew how: "It's like this incredibly engrossing, well-done reality TV show!"

Welcome to 2003, the year that documentaries finally "broke." Sure, exhibiting the truth 24 frames a second has been around since audiences first watched those workers emerge from the Lumière factory. But other than your odd Hoop Dreams here or a Roger and Me there, it's been rare for docs to even make a minor dent. Even when nonfiction films did manage to procure a decent theatrical release, they were still largely considered cinematic broccoli by the masses, movies you knew were good for healthy bones but oh-so-boring compared to the cheeseburgers all around you.

This summer, however, when moviegoers were supposed to be spawning over each other like frenzied salmon to see the latest from Tinseltown, many were lining up to watch true tales of the birds and the (spelling) bees. Literally, in the form of the French flying lesson Winged Migration and the buzz bomb Spellbound, two surprise hits that were still filling houses and adding screens months after their initial openings. Rewind to the spring before, and the main post-Oscar chatter wasn't about breaking the racial barrier or even the Brody smooch ... everyone was too busy debating muckrakin' Michael Moore and his Bush-baiting Bowling for Columbine acceptance speech, which helped push the film to an unheard-of $22 million box-office tally (most docs are lucky to break the $1 million mark). Fast-forward several months as films like the Bay Area-based Weather Underground and Brazil's Bus 174 (IndieWire reports that both are still doing great business across the country), and one can see the cinematic road traditionally less traveled being repaved for wider acceptance.

It was Friedmans, however, that left the deepest mark, and the one that offered the most clues to the unexpected success of the current wave. Reality TV has slowly, almost subliminally acclimated mainstream viewers to the vocabulary of vérité, co-opting the shaky-cam visuals and fly-on-the-wall perspectives of the genre and grafting them onto soap opera story lines. It's not a groundbreaking move (PBS's American Family did the same thing years ago), but it wasn't until relatively recently that it entered the national lexicon on such an across-the-board basis. You can see traces of this network programming windfall in several of the movies mentioned if you look closely enough (what is Spellbound's and-then-there-were-three suspense modus if not a different flavor of Survivor's tribal banishing?), but the markings of our current fascination with everyday people, intentional or not, are all over the dysfunctional family opus. Friedmans became the must-see movie of the moment, a cultural phenomenon past the PBS crowd not just because it was well crafted but also because many who'd never be caught watching a "boring" documentary were now primed to accept the form. David Friedman's documentation of his family's crisis, predating these shows' existence by years, registers as recognizably modern. Its visual language mirrors Big Brother's surveillance, even if the debt owed is to the earlier "direct cinema" movement. Even his video diary excerpts resemble nothing so much as those Real World confessionals minus the hip soundtrack.

That these documentaries clicked could simply boil down to the fact, as many critics have suggested, that audiences finally tired of the microwaved leftovers Hollywood keeps reheating and instead opted for films with substance and a substantially positive word of mouth. That comment I overheard in that bar last September, however, suggests the nonstop stream of "reality" coming out of those cathode ray tubes may be a stronger "breaking" factor than you'd think. The impulse to see real life, or some simulation of it, broken down into easily digestable chunks found purchase outside of prefabricated Paradise Hotels and Temptation Islands; just ask the makers of The Real Cancun, the failed bid to transfer reality TV, literally, to the multiplex. But the lowest-common-denominator shows gave the culture at large fluency with the language, and this summer's nonfiction harvest delivered audiences the goods. The success of these films suggests that the gateway drugs are in the collective zeitgeist punch now. Whether audiences who don't carry around their KQED pledge-drive tote bags will continue to drink it is up in the air, but for a brief period this year, high-quality supply and popular demand meshed into a real-life moment of truth being stronger than fiction.

David Fear's best baker's dozen

1. Demonlover (Oliver Assayas, France)

2. The Magdalene Sisters (Peter Mullan, U.K./Ireland)

3. Divine Intervention (Elie Sulieman, Palestine)

4. Gerry (Gus Van Sant, USA)

5. Irréversible (Gaspar Noé, France)

6. Dog Days (Ulrich Seidl, Vienna)

7. School of Rock (Richard Linklater, USA)

8. Bus 174 (José Padilha, Brazil)

9. Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran)

10. The Station Agent (Tom McCarthy, USA)

11. The Weather Underground (Sam Green and Bill Siegel, USA)

12. Japón (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico)

13. The Triplets of Belleville (Sylvain Chomet, France)

David Fear's five for fighting (for): The ones that got away ... or never even made it here

1. MC5: A True Testimonial (San Francisco International Film Festival) Jams are kicked out and Afro'd rockers heed the revolutionary call to play that funky music, White Panthers! No word on why this hasn't been released widely yet, though good money says the Man is involved somehow.

2. Hukkle (SFIFF) Possibly the most beautiful silent Hungarian film to hit these shores in decades, and easily the best detective story to feature chronic hiccupping, like, ever.

3. Gozu (Toronto International Film Festival, import DVD) Whirling dervish Takashi Miike goes Lynchian on some hapless yakuzas and apeshit on your cerebellum. Sho Aikawa's "entrance" alone makes this psychotropic gem worth the hunt.

4. Woman of Water (SFIFF) Sexiest man alive Tadanobu Asano romances a bathhouse owner (J-pop chanteuse Ua) who may have the ability to create storms from scratch. Gorgeous, engorging, and grossly overlooked.

5. At the First Breath of Wind (Mill Valley Film Festival) A tone poem of an Italian movie that's content to catnap through a minimalist story line in favor of natural-light cinematography bliss. Like something Antonioni would dream up, if he took a lot of mushrooms and watched the nature channel for a month straight.

David Fear's crème de la crap

Because schadenfreude is free

10. Dreamcatcher Remember, whenever you're attacked by aliens with cheery British accents, be sure to grab your mentally disabled childhood friend/the guy from the New Kids on the Block.

9. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake Leatherface has a skin condition ...? And how many Black and Deckers does it take to cut through pure cinematic shite?

8. Boat Trip The joke is they're only pretending to be gay! Cuba, who exactly is your agent?

7. Hulk Hulk clearly thinks Freud's oedipal complex theory is a load of bull. Freud make Hulk want to smash!!!!

6. The Matrix sequels You know what? I change my mind. I'd like the blue pill, please.

5. Really, any film where Keanu plays a Christ figure Only a baby step above him playing Buddha.

4. Every sequel that didn't feature orcs You listening, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, the Wachowski brothers, Lara Croft, George Lucas, et al? Orcs!!!

3. Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat Merely a time-killer until the inevitable One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish movie starring Chris Tucker comes out next year.

2. Masked and Anonymous/Greendale There's a reason even the rabidest of fans never mentions Renaldo and Clara or Human Highway. Proof that when the gods fall, the thud is deafening.