Review: In the Oscar-Nominated Documentary Shorts, Moving Portraits and Visceral Stories

In some years, watching the Oscar-nominated documentary shorts is the easiest way to spot the winner. This year there are plausible rationalizations for all five.

The front-runner is probably Elaine McMillion Sheldon’s “Heroin(e),” which bears the imprimatur of Netflix, the company that took this statuette last year with “The White Helmets.” The most visceral of the nominees, it addresses an issue in the news — the opioid epidemic — with present-tense reportage and an eye toward putting human faces on the crisis.

The movie follows three women combating the proliferation of drugs in the heavily affected city of Huntington, W.Va. The filmmakers trail Jan Rader, who becomes the city’s fire chief, on tense overdose calls, and sit in the courtroom of Judge Patricia Keller, who speaks to the recovering addicts before her with the patience of a parent. Necia Freeman hands out food to addicted prostitutes.

At 39 minutes, “Heroin(e)” sprawls; each thread could sustain longer-term treatment. In sheer scope, the movie is likely to overshadow Thomas Lennon’s “Knife Skills,” though Mr. Lennon’s film will attract anyone eager to gawk at mouthwatering food. It follows the first class of trainee workers at Edwins, a Cleveland haute cuisine restaurant committed to hiring the formerly incarcerated, with the hope of preventing their returns to prison.

Police brutality is front and center in Kate Davis’s powerful “Traffic Stop,” which revisits the violent arrest of Breaion King, an African-American teacher in Austin, Tex., flagged by an officer for a traffic violation. The movie combines the dashcam footage of the arrest with Ms. King’s reflections on the incident. The biographical details, meant to warm the heart and stoke outrage, feel superfluous. (A violent arrest would be a violent arrest even if Ms. King weren’t a model citizen.)

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“Heaven Is a Traffic Jam on the 405” tells the story of Mindy Alper, who spent her life grappling with mental illness, and emerged as a successful artist. The director, Frank Stiefel, draws on Ms. Alper’s artwork for visual flair, but the film is a bit of a slog.

“Edith+Eddie,” from the Chicago documentary house Kartemquin Films, simply offers a moving portrait. The director Laura Checkoway watches compassionately as the title characters — a Virginia couple who met when splitting a lottery ticket and married in their mid-90s — are separated because of squabbling family members and an indifferent bureaucracy. It’s the most intimate movie in the lineup, and all the better for it.