The best non-fiction film I saw last year — and maybe the best film I saw, period — was The Shining documentary Room 237. Directed by Rodney Ascher, the movie showcases the theories of five unseen Shining obsessives about what Stanley Kubrick really intended with his 1980 Stephen King adaptation. The end result is at least twice as entertaining — and at least five times funnier — than that synopsis might indicate. (My colleague Owen Gleiberman did a much better job of summing up the movie when, in the course of writing about his favorite movies of 2012, he described it as “a veritable Kubrickian Da Vinci Code that’s really about the power that conspiracy theory now holds over our thinking.”)
