American Dharma

Gretchen Worden oversees one of the strangest and creepiest collections in existence. As director of The Mutter Museum, she presides over preserved, mummified and mounted remains of human oddities. Glass jars line her walls, each containing a freak of nature, a grossly deformed corpse or body parts. Both the collection and Worden's grave­side manner are chilling but compelling. Errol Morris giggles nervously in the face of death.

What does it mean to be an IBMer? Every employee experiences the company in different ways, but the global impact IBM has made on business and society over the last 100 years gives us all a common framework. "They Were There" is told by first-hand witnesses—current and retired employees and clients—who were there when IBM helped to change the way world works.

Errol Morris gives voice to cancer survivors who beat the disease, and the loved ones of those who did not.

Errol Morris’s Fast, Cheap & Out of Control interweaves the stories of four men, each driven to create eccentric worlds from their unique obsessions, all of which involve animals. There’s a lion tamer who shares his theories on the mental processes of wild animals; a topiary gardener who has devoted a lifetime to shaping bears and giraffes out of hedges and trees; a man fascinated with hairless mole rats; and an MIT scientist who has designed complex, autonomous robots that can crawl like bugs.

Errol Morris takes us to a long-running basement electric football league.

Michael Jordan’s retired North Carolina jersey is stolen.

Lech Walesa, a shipyard worker and electrician in Soviet-bloc Poland, earned a reputation as an agitator and rabble-rouser in the 1970s for speaking out against Communist control of labor unions. Mr. Walesa was subjected to frequent firings and intense police scrutiny. But he was undeterred, continuing his fight for fairer labor laws — in particular, the right to strike — until it grew into something even he could not have expected: an independent political movement that became one of the nails in the coffin of the Soviet Union.

For Steve Coburn, California Chrome was a literal dream come true. In Errol Morris’s fifth of six shorts for ESPN Films, we meet the passionate owner of the horse who nearly became the first Triple Crown winner in 36 years.

Do we have reasons not to vote? How can we hear so much about the election, and not participate? If hope isn’t doing it, isn’t the fear of the other guy winning enough to brave the roads, the long lines?

Through her activism to topple Liberia’s dictator, Leymah Gbowee was able to restore her own faith in humanity. Part 1 of “Three Short Films About Peace.”