The top docs at Philadelphia Film Society's SpringFest

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the premiere of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood — a show that already inspired one PBS documentary — director Morgan Neville pays tribute to the great children’s-television entertainer Fred Rogers with another. I can honestly say I didn’t see a dry eye in the Prince Music Theater, where it was screened.

The film works Rogers’s life story into 90 minutes. A brilliant, groundbreaking TV producer, Rogers made a show that looked and was paced like nothing else at the time. It also shows the genesis of Rogers’s worldview. He adhered to a set of ethics inspired by a liberal strain of Protestant Christianity and the self-actualization and self-esteem movements of the 1960s and ‘70s.

The film tells us Rogers was the real deal. There was no hidden dark side, even if there were quirks — such as a tidbit about Rogers being so obsessed with the numerology of the number 143 (the number of letters in “I,” “love,” and “you”), that he allegedly kept his weight at exactly 143 pounds his entire adult life.

All the key neighborhood moments are here, of course, and even a few you may not remember, such as a Vietnam War allegory that aired in the early days of the show, in which King Friday erected a wall in the Kingdom of Make-Believe. There’s also, in a brilliant device, a series of animated vignettes involving a version of Rogers’s main alter ego, Daniel the Striped Tiger.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor? recalls I Am Big Bird (about Caroll Spinney) and Life Itself (about Roger Ebert), past docs highlighting beloved entertainers of the 20th century. If Mr. Rogers ever meant anything to you, this film must be seen.

Three Identical Strangers

This pretty amazing film tells a pretty amazing true story, from a director, Tim Wardle, whose work has been limited mostly to BBC documentaries. Three Identical Strangers tells the story of three men who met one another in the late 1970s and discovered they were triplets, separated at birth.

The brothers became celebrities in Studio 54-era New York, a fixture on talk shows and in Manhattan’s hippest nightspots. Wardle’s documentary shows what happened to them afterward — and, indeed, what happened to them beforehand.

It’s an intriguing, infuriating, and sad tale that unspools organically, in a way that never feels dishonest or manipulative. It arrives from NEON this summer and will eventually be broadcast on CNN.

RBG

This documentary about Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is also set to air on CNN, where it’s a natural fit. While the film is unusual in that it provides unfettered access to a sitting Supreme Court justice, it’s not particularly groundbreaking from a filmmaking standpoint, nor does it tell us a lot that we didn’t know already about the court’s liberal lion.

Directed by Julie Cohen and Betsy West, RBG examines Justice Ginsburg’s life story and distinguished legal career, while also showing her reactions to her emergence, in her 80s, as a cultural icon among hip young liberals. We see Ginsburg watching Kate McKinnon’s Saturday Night Live impression of her. The woman who has been called “Notorious R.B.G.” also notes that she and Notorious B.I.G. both hail from Brooklyn, New York.

A lot of this, though, is old news. For example, we didn’t need to hear again about Ginsburg’s friendship across party lines with Antonin Scalia or their shared love of opera.

RBG isn’t the kind of earnest liberal documentary where the filmmaking takes a backseat, and the whole thing ends with a call to action and a URL for emailing your Congressperson. However, it is a straightforward portrait that doesn’t break a whole lot of new ground.