The innovative documentary filmmaker Errol Morris made two off-beat, critically-acclaimed studies (1978's "Gates of Heaven", about pet cemeteries, and 1981's "Vernon, Florida", about small-town American eccentrics) before achieving his breakthrough with the feature-length "The Thin Blue Line" (1988). The film was an unsettling investigation into the case of Randall Adams, a Texas man who claimed he had been wrongfully convicted of murder. It mixed oddly deadpan interviews, stylized recreations of conflicting accounts of the crime and alienating close-ups of documents and objects both centrally- and tangentially-related to the case, all underpinned by a driving, hypnotic score provided by composer Philip Glass. "The Thin Blue Line" was influential in securing the ultimate overturning of Adams' conviction.

Although his narrative feature debut, the Robert Redford-produced "The Dark Wind" (1991), based on the Tony Hillerman novel, went straight to video, he scored big with his next movie, "A Brief History of Time" (1992). Made for NBC, the film documented wheelchair-bound, British scientist Stephen H Hawking and his courageous battle with Lou Gehrig's disease. Unable to talk, Hawking typed his words onto a keyboard enabling a computer to speak for him, and, undaunted by his physical limitations, kept his razor-sharp intellect attuned to the cutting edge of science. Philip Glass once again provided the score.

Many have compared "The Thin Blue Line" with Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" and Norman Mailer's "The Executioner's Song", both nonfiction works about killers, but Morris, making a film, not writing a book, found himself in uncharted waters with his murder investigation/movie: "It took over my life. I'm still obsessed by it." A remarkable, one-of-a-kind movie, it helped set an innocent man free and stands as a monument to the relentless pursuit of the truth. Morris has described himself as a new kind of hyphenate, a director-detective, and has carved out a niche for himself by telling the stories of unique individuals in his distinctive voice.

"Fast, Cheap & Out of Control" (1997), a contemporary meditation on the myth of Sisyphus, profiled four esoteric professionals: a topiary gardener, a lion tamer, a robot scientist and a mole-rat photographer. On the surface an unrelated group, but Morris discovers surprising links among them. The two former are practitioners of idiosyncratic dying arts while the latter two reflect what may come to pass--a world pre-programmed by instinct only. While the helmer lets the audience draw its own conclusions, the film is a singular, cerebral and original look at four unique individuals.