Famous artists are a favourite topic for documentaries proper now — in all probability as a result of folks love to look at them. And there are quite a lot of alternative ways to inform the story of somebody’s life; the extra well-known they had been, the extra instruments on the filmmaker’s fingertips.

Take, for example, the brand new documentary “Remembering Gene Wilder,” a uniformly affectionate take a look at the life and work of the comedian actor who died in 2016. (The movie opens in theaters in New York on Friday, adopted by a nationwide enlargement.) Though he did carry out onstage, Wilder’s most memorable work was in movies like “The Producers,” “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory,” “Young Frankenstein” and “Blazing Saddles.”

Clips from these movies and lots of others are mixed with reflections from a lot of Wilder’s mates and colleagues, together with his frequent collaborator Mel Brooks, Alan Alda, Carol Kane, Richard Pryor’s daughter Rain Pryor and Wilder’s widow, Karen Boyer. Pictures from Wilder’s youth and residential video spherical out a portrait of a person whom everybody describes as light, harmless, sort, kind of saintly — and, in fact, completely hilarious.

There’s a hazard to this type of film, in that viewers get the sense that they’re getting the entire story although choice bias is inevitably at work. (“Remembering Gene Wilder” mentions solely two of Wilder’s 4 wives, for example, and judging from the 2018 documentary “Love, Gilda” — about his third spouse, the comic Gilda Radner — there’s quite a lot of story left untold.) But the filmmakers made the good option to weave narration from the audiobook of Wilder’s memoir into the narrative, drawing the viewers nearer by giving the sense that we’re listening to the story straight from him.

That’s additionally the approach at work in Carla Gutiérrez’s new documentary, “Frida” (on Prime Video), concerning the painter Frida Kahlo (1907-54). Her story has been informed earlier than, in fact. But Kahlo saved copious, frank diaries about her life, her ideas and her wishes in diaries, and her art work is extremely private. The actress Fernanda Echevarría reads from Kahlo’s journals and letters (in Spanish and English, relying on the language through which they had been written), with occasional enter from others near Kahlo.

The impact is fast and private, as if Kahlo is sitting proper there with you, being humorous and passionate and scathing and weak. Gutiérrez makes use of archival footage of Kahlo, in addition to work which can be typically animated, as in case you’re seeing them come to life the way in which Kahlo might need in her thoughts’s eye. The end result feels extra uncooked and unfiltered than the one in “Remembering Gene Wilder,” extra non-public and revelatory. But Kahlo all the time offered herself as a lady portray exterior the traces, so it’s solely applicable {that a} film about her would, too.