15 documentaries on Netflix that will make you smarter about business Here’s a quick and fun way to enrich your business knowledge: streaming documentaries on Netflix. The online movie and TV service has a vast cache of business and tech documentaries that anyone with a subscription can watch instantly. The topics range from profiles of great innovators like Steve Jobs and Henry Ford to the psychology behind human behavior. Each of these 15 documentaries offers an entertaining storyline, as well as valuable insights into business success.Have you seen any good documentaries lately? I’d love to share five great ones…Life Itself remembers beloved film critic and social commentator Roger Ebert. Known for his wit and candor (in his review of The Human Centipede, he refused to award it any stars at all, saying, “The star rating system is unsuited to this film. Is the movie good? It is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don’t shine”), Ebert was the first film critic to win a Pulitzer, wrote over a dozen books and was regarded as one of the most powerful critics of all time.

Ebert was diagnosed with cancer in 2002, which cost him the lower portion of his jaw. But even when he could no longer speak or eat, he wrote every day, right up until his death in 2013. We haven’t actually seen this documentary yet—it opens on July 4th—but early buzz has been fantastic. Finding Vivian Maier tells the story of a mysterious nanny who secretly took more than 100,000 photos of people on the streets of New York and hid them in storage lockers. sushi san felipe yaracuyAlthough she was one of 20th century’s greatest photographers, her work wasn’t discovered until a 26-year-old real-estate agent bought a box of old negatives at an estate auction in 2007. jiro dreams of sushi vfIn this captivating film, her story is finally brought to light.sushi girl online subtitrat

The Queen of Versailles tells the extreme riches-to-rags tale of billionaires Jackie and David Siegel, owners of Westgate Resorts. The film opens with the couple building the largest single-family house in America—a 90,000 square foot palace with 9 kitchens, 13 bedrooms and 25 bathrooms, plus a bowling alley and movie theatre. But over the next two years, they stop construction and put the property up for sale, as their company falters after the economic crisis. sushi grade fish modesto caThe Economist calls the film “an uncomfortably intimate glimpse of a couple’s struggle…ichiban sushi menu liverpoolWhat could have been merely a silly send-up manages to be a meditation on marriage and a metaphor for the fragility of fortunes, big and small.”jiro dreams of sushi sverige

Alex convinced me to watch When You’re Strange on vacation a couple years ago—and as soon as the movie started, I was hooked. Jim Morrison, the lead singer of the Doors, died mysteriously in 1971 at the age of 27—and ever since then, countless books and films have made him out to be a supernatural force: a modern day shaman, a genius poet, maybe even immortal. But that’s why we loved this documentary: It digs beneath the myths to look at the real person. Drawing on amazing behind-the-scenes footage and an intelligent script, the film, narrated by Johnny Depp, takes an honest look at how a shy Navy brat with a taste for brainy books transformed himself into a rock deity in leather pants, and how the journey ultimately destroyed him. The new documentary Fed Up examines America’s obesity epidemic and the food industry’s role in it. For example, 80 percent of food items sold in America have added sugar—of course, you’d expect candy and ice cream to have sugar, but tomato sauce?

This topic is near and dear to my heart, as we try harder and harder to keep our children from eating too much sugar during the day. (At Toby’s school, they give the kids birthday cupcakes at 10am! Side note: Check out their two great movie posters.Any others you’d recommend? I’d LOVE to hear…This week’s MSN DVD column takes a look at three new releases targeted at teens — Joseph Kahn’s “Detention”, about which more this week, and also Noel Clarke’s “4.3.2.1” and Liza Azuelos’ “LOL”. Not the most fertile of genres, the teenpic, but “Detention”, at least, is trying to do something new. More importantly, Chris Marker has died — and on his 91st birthday, which seems kind of uncouth. Celebrate his memory by watching “La Jetee” right here, if you’re so inclined, and then spin up “The Beaches of Agnes” to see what I believe is his final on-screen appearance, in a manner of speaking. As expected, “The Dark Knight Rises” trounced all comers to hold the top spot at the box office for a second weekend, earning $64 million and landing well ahead of “Ice Age: Continental Drift” and “The Watch”, which were jockeying for second place with about $13 million apiece.

(I’d expect “The Watch” to drop down to third when final figures are released later today; the 3D premiums on the “Ice Age” sequel are sure to nudge it ahead, even if they are predominantly for children’s admissions.) Further down, “Step Up Revolution” opened in fourth place with $11.8 million, and “Ted” took fifth with $7.4 million — ahead of “The Amazing Spider-Man”, which had to settle for sixth place and $6.8 million. Guess all the superhero dollars were still pointed at Batman … A little diversion for MSN this weekend: A gallery of 2012’s worst movies to date, as chosen by yours truly. Take your time reading it, lest it deprive you of all hope for human creativity.Ennui ain’t nothing to fool with.) The disappearance of “Red Lights” and “Bob and the Monster” from this week’s release schedule makes the competition seem awfully thin. Or maybe everyone’s just expecting “The Dark Knight Rises” to continue to roll over everything in its path in its second weekend.

But here’s what is opening today: “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry“: Alison Klayman’s documentary about the Chinese dissident artist becomes more and more relevant every time it plays here. I dearly wish that didn’t have to be so. “Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance”: Glenn isn’t exactly down on Bob Hercules’ documentary about Robert Joffrey’s dance company, but you can tell he wanted more out of it than he got. “Step Up: Revolution”: The fourth chapter in the mismatched-dancers-falling-in-love series has another pair of mismatched dancers falling in love. Rad found the dancing great and the drama less so, which is more or less what we were all expecting, right? “The Watch”:  Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Jonah Hill and Richard Ayoade are suburban nerds who fight aliens, or something, in the new comedy from “Hot Rod” director Akiva Shaffer. Wait, Richard Ayoade is in this? And the NFB documentary “United States of Africa: Beyond Hip-Hop” screens at the Bloor this weekend.

I wrote about it here, if you’re curious, but it’s another of those “Joffrey” situations, to be honest. Eleventh-hour reshuffling by not one but two distributors this week means you don’t get to see my pieces on either “Bob and the Monster” or “Red Lights”. (And I have the sense you’ll be lucky to see either one grace a Toronto screen any time soon.) But all is not lost! There’s still my contribution to the August edition of NOW’s Hot Summer Guide, and a callback to my April interview with Alison Klayman, director of “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry”, which begins its Toronto commercial run tomorrow. Oh, and I wrote this MSN Movies gallery about other movies based on the works of Philip K. Dick for our “Total Recall” minisite. This week’s MSN DVD column tackles “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”, a documentary I didn’t get to review on its theatrical release but have been waiting to talk about for months. Watch it with the knowledge that whatever you eat afterward will be very, very disappointing.

(One thing, though: “Jiro” is not available on Blu-ray in Canada, which is a shame, since a high-def transfer would really bring out the rich, glistening texture of Jiro’s creations. You can, however, order it from Amazon’s US site.) And if you feel like going out tonight instead of watching a movie at home, why not join me down at Harbourfront for this week’s Free Flicks presentation, “Napoleon Dynamite“? Sure, it’s more freak-show than narrative, but the jokes are great and that’s Mac from “Veronica Mars” as the love interest. And like I said, free movie. Shall I save you a seat? The Toronto International Film Festival set the ball rolling on its 2012 edition with a press conference this morning. I wrote about it for NOW, but here’s the quick version: “Looper”, Terrence Malick, Joss Whedon, Noah Baumbach, Robert Redford, Bill Murray, Zhang Ziyi, Dustin Hoffman, Billy Connolly and at least two films apiece for Ben Affleck, Anna Kendrick and Bradley Cooper.

And I already want to sleep for a week. I wasn’t sure I was going to write anything about the massacre Friday morning at the Century 16 in Aurora, Colorado. It’s not an entertainment story, no matter how desperately certain media shriekers try to spin it, and it’s not something I feel like I need to pile onto, either. It’s an awful, awful event that played out on the scale it did because American gun control is monstrously negligent, and that doesn’t seem to change any time soon, so what’s another wave of text going to do? But then Glenn Kenny posted this, and Bill at The Kind of Face You Hate expanded on it here, and I figured I could at least point you in their direction, if you hadn’t already seen it. And there is an observation that I wanted to make, after all. Almost none of the copious media chatter following the incident raised the boogeyman spectre of “Islamic terrorism”. That feels like finally we’re turning a corner: We know this sort of thing is almost always an isolated incident — some crazy white guy who’s bought military-grade ordnance online and wasn’t detected by any of the law-enforcement organizations that are supposed to look for such behavior.

And in a horrible way, that’s become a comfort in the post-Bush age. I mean, this was undeniably terrorism, but no one will call it that, because it wasn’t the right kind of terrorism, the scary-brown-people terrorism that Dick Cheney and Fox News spent years screeching about, and never really stopped. This was a crazy white guy — and remember, it’s almost always a crazy white guy — who wanted to shoot a lot of people, and was enabled to do so because in America, you can buy an assault rifle for $650. And as Tom Tomorrow pointed out back when a crazy white guy shot Gabrielle Giffords and eighteen other people, we won’t be having a substantial conversation about that, either. Obama and Romney will talk about “evil”, because it’s a safe, non-partisan talking point, but they won’t talk about the way that this particular evil was enabled by the policies of the NRA and right-wing media organs that have been stoking fears of The Gummint Taking Away Your Guns for decades, while simultaneously championing the rights of their viewership to purchase assault rifles and clips that can enable those rifles to fire a hundred rounds in under a minute.

Because you never know when the black helicopters will come, do you? So I want to say this as clearly as I can say it: Fuck those people. The blood isn’t on Batman’s hands, but on theirs. This isn’t news, and I’m just another voice in the ether. But hey, if I didn’t say anything, you might think I’m okay with things the way they are. I was going to write this introduction in BAT-CAPS, but thought better of it. No one needs that so early in the morning. “The Dark Knight Rises“: Christopher Nolan’s latest obscure art project involves Oscar-winners Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman and Marion Cotillard, and also Anne Hathaway, Tom Hardy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and that Gary Oldman guy. I dunno, I guess it has a chance at finding an audience. “First Postion”: I missed Bess Karman’s documentary about aspiring ballet dancers at TIFF — and again at TIFF Kids, I think — but I’m really keen to catch up to it. Especially since reading Glenn‘s review.

“Moving Day”: After the inept “Afghan Luke”, I had very little hope for Mike Clattenburg’s next picture, a far less ambitious comedy about a decent guy (Will Sasso) in a dead-end job. Susan thinks it’s okay, so maybe I’ll give him another chance. “The Redemption of General Butt Naked”: Rad is really high on this documentary about the eponymous Liberian warlord, who claims to have renounced his murderous ways and turned to the path of peace and light. Sounds like “Machine Gun Preacher” without the incoherent moral stance or the button-pushery, and without a white American running around saving generic dark-skinned characters. “Trishna”: Michael Winterbottom’s third adaptation of a Thomas Hardy text — after “Jude” and “The Claim”, which reimagined “Jude the Obscure” and “The Mayor of Casterbridge”, respectively — transposes “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” to contemporary India. “Vito”: Jeffrey Schwarz’ documentary pays much-deserved tribute to Vito Russo, the author and critic whose book “The Celluloid Closet” had a seismic impact on American film at the beginning of the queer cinema wave .