(Photo: Courtesy of HBO)

1. Spike Lee’s ‘When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts’
In which the grand-operatic bungling of FEMA, the incompetence of the Army Corps of Engineers, the opportunism of the insurance companies, the cowardly finger-pointing of the governor of Louisiana and the mayor of New Orleans, and the fugue-state indifference and denial of the president of the United States in the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation are pictured in a masterful crosscutting of arrogant past and anguished present, sick-city misery and soul-stirring music, sanctuary and dispossession, liars and corpses. In a year in which documentaries found heartbreak all over the world, from Latin America to Pakistan, Lee’s had the most art and the most soul.