The film opens with footage from Jim Morrison’s unreleased but widely bootlegged short film, HWY, overlapped with radio commentary breaking the news of Morrison’s death – a tongue-in-cheek nod at the conspiracy theories that have persisted since his demise in 1971. Though there are photos and clips that even diehard fans may not have seen (particularly of Morrison as a teenager), these moments are fleeting and the vast majority of this film will be familiar to anyone who has seen The Doors Collection.

Where the film trips up is its non-linear timeline. In fact when the film premiered at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, a spate of criticism about the narration’s flaws forced writer and director Tom DiCillo to hire Johnny Depp to re-dub it. There’s an obvious logic to drafting in a familiar voice the audience can trust, but it’s not enough to paper over DiCillo’s questionable account of the band’s history.

When Depp’s stunted, hush-toned commentary claims that: “[Morrison] understood exactly how to make it all work for him, and perhaps to protect himself, he made it seem like he couldn’t care less” it’s just one of several dubious claims that take great liberty in filling in the gaps between archive clips. When it’s stated that the band’s increasingly fractured dynamic prompted them to seek a different direction by “turning to meditation” while “Morrison keeps tripping”, it’s not only misleading but contradicts the earlier claim that Robby Krieger and John Densmore first met at meditation class. Taken as a whole, the film’s inflammatory time warps, half-truths and oversights are enough to dash any hope for factual accuracy, rewriting an already blotted chapter in rock history.

Extending Corey's logic, Paris Is Burning is a fantastic movie. A besotted exploration of the black and Latino drag subculture of late-eighties New York, the film harnesses all its emotion behind a lacquer of artifice maintained by the ironic pedantry that surrounds each ball. For Harlem's gay 'children' it's all about perfecting a look that fits within one of the balls' apparently endless sub-categories - 'Luscious Body', 'Executive Realness', 'Winter Sportswear', 'Butch Queen First Time In Drags At A Ball'. The aim in many of the categories is to appear as 'real' as you can while on parade. If the panel of judges think you could blend in with real-life executives, even though you're sleeping under Harlem Pier and shoplifted your outfit from a department store uptown, you've a chance at hauling off a farcically proportioned trophy.

It's not all about mimicking The Norms, though. The subculture has an argot all its own - each 'child' is inducted into a 'house'. Described variously as a "family" and a "gay street gang", some of the 1990 film's best footage follows the various houses mincing about the streets of Manhattan, confident of their family's protection. That sense of protection seeps into the scene's slang and rituals. When brushing up against taunting straights, each queen is equipped with a rehearsed 'reading', a bitchy patter designed to outwit or win over street hecklers depending on the intensity of their distaste. As explained, though, 'readings' are fairly ineffectual when it's queen vs. queen; everyone's black and everyone's queer, so insults are often reflected. The solution is 'vogueing', its derisory, superior poses the one element of the demimonde that went overground courtesy of the Madonna single. The end of the film documents the rise of vogueing and its hero Willi Ninja while the scene's foundation begins to smear in the face of AIDS.

This one on Ella Fitzgerald, part of a BBC4 series predictably called Legends, did a half-decent job. The lady died in 1996 (appallingly with the bottom halves of both her legs amputated because of complications with diabetes), so she wasn’t around to help out with the discourse, and she was never the kind of woman to reveal much about her past anyway. There’s no footage of her on talk shows, which immediately seems strange (she must have done loads), and no filmed interviews from back in the day; just a few audio clips which are played over generic shots of, say, Harlem in the thirties, where she’d moved to with her mum as a child.

The scoop in this hour-long film is, in fact, someone else’s scoop: by accident, a newspaper journalist recently found out that, after Ella’s mother died when she was 15 (pops was never around), she went a bit loony, flirted with crime, and got sent upstate to an institution that’s now a men’s prison. It wasn’t that she denied this interesting period in her life, the talking heads reveal, it was more that she didn’t own up to it. We’ve always known, though, that she was essentially a street kid before she was recruited out of the blue by bandleader Chick Webb, aged 17, and there’s no doubt that she learnt self-reliance and became vastly ambitious exactly because there was once a time when she had absolutely nothing.

The talking heads here range from the Brit jazz pack - Cullum, David McAlmont and Guardian writer John Fordham - but the better stuff comes from her old band members, managers and friends, who still seem to be finding out about Ella and still only seem capable of speculating about whether her severe teenage years informed the way she sung those songs. Maybe that’s best. What they do know for sure, however, is fascinating: that she was riddled with insecurities, even when she was the biggest jazz star on the planet behind, or perhaps beside, Louis Armstrong, and that she was never capable of holding down a meaningful relationship with a man. She liked the bad boys, who always stitched her up, and she was eternally something of a girly woman.

Other remarkable things: during segregation, she would demand her audiences be mixed and her request was constantly granted. And for years and years she discreetly used her royalties to fund projects for under-privileged children.

So, not too bad a doc - could have been less, um, BBC, but ultimately you watch these things because you love the subject’s music and there’s loads of amazing performances scattered throughout the film. The most poignant is right at the end - when she’s old and singing a ballad with some bald white guy on an electric guitar. My god, that straight kills you.

Love Story is an obvious but good enough name, not least because it plays like a love letter to a band from two British filmmakers, Chris Hall and Mike Kerry. Shot in 2005 before mainman Arthur Lee’s death, they did well to scoop all the surviving members for interviews, along with Elektra Records’ CEO, John Densmore, producer Bruce Botnick and, bizarrely, Ken Livingstone, a big Forever Changes fan apparently. Hall and Kerry also sensibly opted to have no narration and let the subjects tell their own tales.

Love, it transpires, were unusual - multi-racial, far more street than the other hippy bands, and, unlike the democratic Doors, a dictatorship. It was Arthur Lee’s gig and he ruled with an iron fist, claiming here that his bandmates had no idea what he was cooking up in his head most of the time. That may be true but, as this film points out well, guitarist Bryan MacLean was far more important to Love than music history has remembered. He wrote ‘Alone Again Or’ and was a perfect songwriting foil and competitor to Lee - the McCartney to Lee’s Lennon.

Lee comes across as being an arse (90 per cent of their first ever advance he burnt on a gull-wing Benz for himself), but a visionary and more than a little bitter than he didn’t become a bigger star. Perhaps that’s his fault - he refused to tour and, like the others, drowned his talent in smack - but he’s certainly been remembered. Weirdly, the British Parliament even filed an honorary early day motion in the Commons when he got out of jail in 2001 and toured the UK.

This is not the kind of documentary that will win awards at film festivals - it’s too straight - but it is fascinating and comprehensive.

You can see why it’s a director’s favourite. For starters it’s a Polish-language film set in 17th century Spain, which instantly gives it a unique flavour. It’s also loaded with erotic and religious symbolism, and focused throughout on big subjects such as sex, death, family, betrayal and the workings of fate. Yet there’s another level on which to enjoy this film: Has has a Russ Meyer-like enthusiasm for beautiful women and their cleavage.

In fact, Has likes everything in pairs: the film’s split into two parts and haunted throughout by the image of two men hanging from gallows. The central character is swashbuckling solider Alphonse Van Worden (Zbigniew Cybulski), who is plunged into a world of supernatural intrigue and worldly danger when he encounters two sisters who, naturally, have been locked away for years with only each other to experiment upon. They urgently need a man to sate their raging passions and bear them heirs, but matters are complicated by their requirement that Von Worden convert to Islam, not to mention him being their cousin. He wakes up from his joyous three-way next to rotting corpse, and soon finds himself pursued by the Spanish Inquisition and a riddle-spouting cabbalist.

In part two, the film weaves a hugely confusing web of stories within stories - even Van Worden struggles to figure out what’s going on. The viewer is eventually forced to approach the film as you might a David Lynch movie: you give up on comprehending its plot and just enjoy the witty vignettes and general richness. There’s also much to appreciate in the creepy score composed by Krzyszt Penderecki (The Shining, Wild At Heart) and in the show-stealing sauciness of the temptress Frasquita (Elzbieta Czyzewska).

This DVD package offers Has’s original 180-minute version. When its frustrating conclusion ticks around, part of you wonders if editing is not the black art it’s made out to be. But a bigger part is gladdened that respect still exists for maverick art and wild ambition.