The Thin Blue Line

Errol Morris began his hugely successful, long-term collaboration with Philip Glass on this pioneering documentary, which combines interview footage with striking crime-scene re-enactments as a way of walking the audience through the events leading up to the shooting of a Dallas Police Officer. The power of that sequence, repeated from multiple perspectives, is enhanced by Glass deploying a memorable theme that, in its own way, probes the events in question. The film’s critical success saw the case re-opened, although documentary purists remained wary of Morris’s techniques.