One of the instructions given to screeners for True/False is to treat documentaries as "cinema." Does a given film play well as a movie? There are documentaries by the scores that fail at this very specific function, whether from a misguided view of documentary as journalism or from a simple inability to string together a coherent narrative that will hold an audience's attention for seventy five minutes. The ones that succeed at this, though, sometimes succeed big. Some footage is inherently cinematic, for want of a better word.
My own corollary to this is: "trust your b-roll." Film after film fails to make the leap to "cinema" from a simple desire to explain too much, whether with intrusive textual elements or an over-reliance on talking heads. It's a cliche to say that a storyteller should show rather than tell, but it's true. I mean, you can get away with a movie that's interviews and archive footage, but that is often dependent on who you're interviewing and what they're talking about. Last year, True/False showed The Gatekeepers, which is a stark example of what I mean by this: it's a film that's cinematically dull. It's almost all talking heads. It's who those talking heads are that makes it compelling (in that film, it was the last six heads of Shin Bet, the Israeli security service). That film became an Oscar nominee, though it lost the award to Searching for Sugar Man, a film that fails as a document but succeeds as feel-good entertainment. It's a double edged sword.
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