What you should see: No End In Sight (2007), Inside Job (2011)

Studiously shying from the polemic of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, Charles Ferguson’s first doc, No End In Sight, played like a blooper reel for Neo-Con foreign policy. Ferguson uses a scalpel where Moore brandished a shotgun, and tracked down some of the key protagonists, including Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, prising candid intel from them all. A one-time software whiz who set up an IT firm and flogged it to Microsoft for $133m, Ferguson’s also a writer, researcher and visiting lecturer at M.I.T. and Berkeley, which means that his brain is officially the size of Kansas. It probably needed to be to understand the uber-complex machinations of Wall Street and make it digestible for audiences of his most recent film, Inside Job. That’s a clear, shocking and bleakly funny factual horror about the 2008 financial crash, boosted by Matt Damon’s voiceover and input into the script, that sees Ferguson go two for two for Oscar nominations. Expect more to follow.

Filmmaking philosophy: “Filmmaking is my third life and I think both of my previous lives had an effect. I learned how to think and how to structure things and make arguments, and I think that helped a lot in making these films.”

What the critics say: "Masterfully edited and cumulatively walloping, No End In Sight turns the well-known details of our monstrously bungled Iraq War into an enraging, apocalyptic litany of fuck-ups." Rob Nelson, Village Voice