Vague Visages’ Best Documentary Short Films review contains minor spoilers. This article covers All the Empty Rooms (2025), Armed Only with a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud (2025), Children No More: Were and Are Gone (2025), The Devil Is Busy (2024) and Perfectly a Strangeness (2024). Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

It’s hard to conceive of another time in recent history when the headlines have been as unrelentingly miserable as they have been this decade. I assume that this has played a considerable part in the Academy’s recent tendency in the Best Documentary Short Film category to award the production most likely to give them some brief respite as opposed to the most impactful journalism. It’s not a slight on warm tales about friendships between animals and their owners (The Elephant Whisperers, 2022) or the next generation of artists just next door to Hollywood (The Last Repair Shop, 2023) to say they were selected over their grimmer fellow nominees, so much as it’s a sign that the voting body will still insulate themselves from the darkness of the real world if offered the chance.

As for the 2026 Oscar nominees, only one of the documentary short films offers a sobering perspective of tragedies at home and overseas. This sole “feel good” entry is the shortest of the group at 15 minutes in duration, and was seemingly the safe front runner in a field offering dispatches from Ukraine, the families of school shooting victims and anti-genocide protesters in Tel Aviv. This is Alison McAlpine’s experimental short Perfectly a Strangeness, which follows three donkeys in a desert as they encounter the wonder of an observatory for the first time. The director blurs the lines between fiction and non-fiction as she invites audiences to imagine animal perspectives and the wider universe. It’s the kind of experiential, metaphysical experience that plays well to critics and cinephiles at festivals but doesn’t always translate during awards season. In a field where Perfectly a Strangeness was surrounded by Earthly horrors, it invited the most unadventurous Academy voters to collectively imagine their place amongst the cosmos.

Documentary Short Films Review: Related — Review: Sepideh Farsi’s ‘Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk’

With the Oscar punditry now out of the way, I confess that McAlpine leaned too heavily on Nicolas Canniccioni’s gorgeous cinematography (and her unique point of view) by utilizing a variety of lenses to place viewers in the almost childlike perspective of creatures witnessing intergalactic wonders for the first time. By the film’s second half, in which perspective gradually shifts to that of the inanimate desert building itself, the director relies too extensively on the same tried-and-tested techniques of rapid time-lapse montage pioneered by Godfrey Reggio and cinematographer Ron Fricke in Koyaanisqatsi (1982), but with a far more limited scope. That Ben Grossman’s score gradually becomes an homage to Philip Glass’ influential work doesn’t make it any easier to look past the formal comparison. Perfectly a Strangeness would’ve been the most adventurous victor in this category for years, and it’s still overshadowed by an influence that was far more ambitious in its intentions.

Best Documentary Short Films Review: Related — Review: Tom DeNucci, Seth Koch and Rick Lazes’ ‘Knock Out Blonde: The Kellie Maloney Story’

Of the four nominees tackling darker subject matter, All the Empty Rooms — the Best Documentary Short Film winner — had the strongest chance, although that’s likely because I’m taking Netflix’s war chest of campaigning money into account. Arguably more crucial to selling this to voters is the celebrity factor of Steve Hartman, a former CBS News reporter who specialized in lighter human interest stories before embarking on an expansive project to memorialize the victims of school shootings, in collaboration with photographer Lou Bopp. Director Joshua Seftel, a recent nominee in the Best Documentary Short Film category for 2022’s Stranger at the Gate, has an unfortunate tendency to use biographical documentary tropes, with more time spent outlining Hartman’s increasing alienation from a job that only allowed him to tell positive stories at the expense of the ones which needed to be heard. There is no self-awareness from Seftel that, in getting his subject to recount his career troubles, he takes precious time away from the victims. Their stories boil down to brief background exposition, with room decorations intended to fill in the rest of the expositional blanks.

Best Documentary Short Films Review: Related — Review: Benjamin Ree’s ‘The Remarkable Life of Ibelin’

At the time of Bari Weiss’ CBS News takeover, the prestigious news outlet gutted its staff and turned into a glorified press office for the Donald Trump regime, and the approach Seftel takes in All the Empty Rooms hardly attests to the power in-house journalists held in communicating the human side of deeply politicized stories. What should be rousing falls flat, and the same can be said of the other journalism tale to make the cut: Armed Only with a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud, directed by the titular journalist’s brother, Craig — the subject who received a posthumous co-directing credit after being killed during a Russian attack on Ukraine. Told in reverse chronological order and consisting largely of unedited excerpts Brent captured in war zones and natural disasters sites for over two decades, Armed Only with a Camera works best as a procedural study of journalistic research.

Best Documentary Short Films Review: Related — Review: Josh Appignanesi’s ‘Colossal Wreck’

Armed Only with a Camera is far less impactful as a biographical documentary. Craig Renaud offers little depth beyond learning about his late sibling’s autism diagnosis and status as a dog dad because Brent, by his own admission, absorbed himself into his work that much. And more damningly, the director fails to stick the landing when it comes to a call-to-arms thesis on the power of journalism. Brent’s body arrives back from Ukraine with the same fanfare as a fallen soldier, with an American flag draped over his coffin, but Armed Only with a Camera doesn’t properly articulate the sentiment of how necessary journalism has remained at a time when hundreds die annually. The subject receives a hero’s send-off, but his work is never tied into a bigger picture about the increasingly dangerous nature of the profession.

Best Documentary Short Films Review: Related — On Performance: Rosamund Pike in ‘A Private War’

Taking a similarly procedural approach to a dangerous line of work is The Devil Is Busy, a day-in-the-life snapshot of an Atlanta abortion clinic from directors Geeta Gandbhir and Christalyn Hampton. Unlike the previously mentioned films, this is the first, in my opinion, to meet the urgency of the topic and the deeply polarized moment following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, all while maintaining a grounded look at the daily routine of an underfunded abortion clinic, and the challenges they face in providing important healthcare. The main focal point is Tracii, head of security at the clinic, who arrives at 6 a.m. every morning to find that an army of Evangelical protesters are already in the parking lot preaching; they rarely appear onscreen, and yet are heard in almost every scene, their megaphone sermons serving as ambient background noise for every patient appointment.

Best Documentary Short Films Review: Related — Review: Taku Aoyagi’s ‘Tokyo Uber Blues’

As a devout Christian who believes in science — and therefore rejects the claim that the clinic is “killing babies” — Tracii is a warm, engaging presence, trying to maintain client confidentiality and safety in a pressure cooker environment. Many patients have traveled from even more restrictive states and in between impassioned confessionals. Gandbhir and Hampton show the small things Tracii does to make clients feel at home when hostility can be heard from outside. Even just making sure they’re adequately stocked with water and snacks feels like a radical act when the outside environment appears to be doing all it can to punish the women. There are talking head interviews throughout the documentary, yet it feels far more lived-in as a depiction of a daily routine, not needing to lean on Tracii’s testimonials to underline the importance of her work. The Devil Is Busy is a short worthy of its subject.

Best Documentary Short Films Review: Related — Review: Alan Berliner and Benita Raphan’s ‘Benita’

Equally remarkable is Children No More: Were and Are Gone, director Hilla Medalia’s sobering documentary on anti-genocide protesters in Tel Aviv. There was an observation on X — the site formerly known as Twitter — that translating any post from a member of the Israeli government into English post-October 7 was like discovering a long-lost page from Mein Kempf, with messages to the domestic audience far more uncompromisingly violent in their intentions for Gaza than the faux-humanitarian message they presented to the English-speaking world. The social media echo chamber, which now amplifies the most far-right messaging possible, has made it appear like Israelis don’t protest a genocide happening in their name. Medalia’s film corrects that assumption while revealing that their efforts are still largely futile, with the truth still too bitter a pill for many Israelis to swallow.

Best Documentary Short Films Review: Related — Review: Mike Leigh’s ‘Hard Truths’

The Were and Are Gone group convene for silent protests in the center of Tel Aviv, holding placards featuring the names and faces of Palestinian children have been killed in Israeli attacks. I’ve seen a criticism that suggests not enough weight is placed on these young victims, but that’s the same obstacle the group faces. They know the actual death toll is far higher than the reported one but must rely on the scant information offered on social media — sometimes just names without pictures — to try and communicate the sheer scale of loss. Their silent protests attract the intended moments of quiet contemplation when taking place adjacent to anti-government protests, but it’s clear there’s a ceiling for their strategy. Many in those sizable crowds still proudly wave Israeli flags, which is a stark contrast to people wanting to highlight crimes against humanity carried out under that flag.

Best Documentary Short Films Review: Related — Review: Brady Corbet’s ‘The Brutalist’

In the later stages of Children No More: Were and Are Gone, the group decides to venture out to a beach to spread their message, only to be met with aggression from seemingly every passer-by. It’s tough to watch in the ways you’d expect, but it’s an interaction when they head back to more “neutral” territory that lingers the most, as a young heckler tells them he’s sorry that they’re so misinformed. As the saying goes, it’s no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society, and Medalia does an excellent job of articulating the sheer impossibility of making any impact as a human rights campaigner in a country doing all it can to ignore the message. Alongside The Devil Is Busy, Children No More: Were and Are Gone is an urgent dispatch from a country indifferent to the idea that it’s going backwards.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

Best Documentary Short Films Review: Related — Why Criticism: The One-Inch Tall Barrier of Foreign Cinema