What's up, doc?

Truth may be stranger than fiction, but this year it certainly seems as popular. Coming to a cinema near you, the documentary is back en vogue with a vengeance.

Already we have seen British film-maker Nick Broomfield place the murders of rappers Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. under the microscope in the gripping Biggie & Tupac. And three more are set to hit our screens in the coming weeks.

First up is Stacy Peralta's Dogtown And Z-Boys, a candid exploration of the growth of skateboarding in Seventies California. Then comes Keith Fulton's and Louis Pepe's fly-on-the-wall Lost In La Mancha, a poignant recording of the demise of maverick director Terry Gilliam's long-cherished Cervantes adaptation The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which was abandoned one week into production following a series of catastrophes.

Finally, in a different spin on the genre, we have Doug Pray's intelligent history of hip-hop, Scratch, which has been executive produced by From Hell's Allen and Albert Hughes, and features interviews with key figures from this musical movement including Afrika Bambaataa and DJ Shadow.

Yet this is no passing fad. As this year's Cannes Film Festival showed, this much-maligned cinematic form is making a comeback. Michael Moore's startling investigation into American gun culture, Bowling For Columbine, was the first documentary for 46 years officially 'In Competition'.

Awarded the special 55th Anniversary Prize, it is now set for the biggest-ever release in the US afforded to a documentary. Its highlight must be Moore door-stepping Moses himself, Charlton Heston, who is also, of course, the president of the National Rifle Association. Another American film legend, Robert Evans, producer of The Godfather, Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown, among others, is given his own show in The Kid Stays In The Picture.

Based on the book of the same name and directed by Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein, Evans himself narrates - his distinct and caustic style detailing his meteoric but moving rise and fall. Finally, Rosanna Arquette made her intriguing directorial debut with Searching For Debra Winger - featuring more than 30 actresses, including the titular star of Terms Of Endearment, talking about their experiences as women in Hollywood.

Quite why this rash of non-fiction films has arrived is hard to fathom ? beyond the fact that the recent Danish Dogme movies, such as Festen and Italian For Beginners, have steered audiences towards accepting a more documentary-like approach to feature film-making. Certainly each of this summer's docs extends a warm invitation into an unfamiliar world, and there' s nothing more enticing than a stab at the truth. 'It seems to be if you're going to allow a documentary to be made, it should be allowed to expose everything,' says La Mancha's Fulton. 'It's about the truth. After all, everything else we do is about artifice. We fake everything.'

What impresses about each is the distinct way in which the style mirrors the subject matter. Lost In La Mancha, in which the quixotic Gilliam emerges as a latter-day Quixote, his idealism crushed by reality, renders part of its narrative in crude cartoon form, nodding to Gilliam's own Monty Python animations. Peralta's film, meanwhile, is rough'n'ready - for example, when narrator Sean Penn clears his throat, having fluffed a line.

'Skateboarding is a subversive activity, and the film should be a reflection of that,' says Peralta, himself one of the original Z-Boys who developed an aggressive skate style that would eventually influence a generation. While Peralta is currently working with David Fincher on a fictional version of the story, he believes his training in documentaries will be invaluable when it comes to writing the script.