Streaming this week are two new documentaries that make for a fascinating pair of character studies about photojournalism, specifically war and combat journalism.

“Love + War” is the latest film from Oscar winning documentarians Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (“Free Solo”), which hits Nat Geo on Thursday, Nov. 6, and Hulu on Friday, Nov. 7. The film is a portrait of Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Lynsey Addario, chronicling how she tries to manage her life with her work, juggling her ambition and sense of purpose with her family and duties of motherhood.

Many texts about combat journalists often try to show us how “different” these people are, how they are driven beyond normal feelings of safety to get the shot, or the story. Indeed, Addario is spectacularly driven to push farther even in the face of danger, but the film underscores just how normal she is too, a wife and mom, who finds her purpose not in any kind of risk-taking but in her responsibility to share what she sees in the hopes of making some small change in the world, tangibly, or through record keeping. It’s a fascinating shift in perspective that sets this film apart and makes for an intimate portrait that’s quite thorny and fascinating, but in ways you don’t expect.

Stream “Love + War” on Nat Geo or Hulu this weekend.

Also new to HBO Max is the short documentary “Armed Only With a Camera,” about documentarian Brent Renaud, the first American journalist killed in Ukraine. At 39 minutes, the film covers the life and career of Renaud, who made documentaries with his brother Craig for HBO, Vice, and the New York Times (heartbreakingly, both brothers are credited as director on the film). Shot with an unflinching honesty, the film opens with Brent’s murder at the hands of Russian soldiers in Ukraine in March 2022, in Irpin. Fellow journalist Juan Arredondo was also injured in the attack.

“Armed Only With a Camera” uses the tributes from friends and mourners at Brent’s funeral to take a tour through the Renaud brothers’ career, covering their most important stories and the people Brent touched along the way. Stream the film on HBO Max.

With journalists targeted more and more at home and abroad, these stories are more dramatic and vital than ever. Photojournalists have also been the subject of recent fictional films as well, including “Lee,” the 2024 film starring Kate Winslet as pioneering photographer Lee Miller, whose photographs from the front lines during World War II offered an eyewitness account of the horrors of the Blitz and the liberation of concentration camps to readers in such publications as Vogue. Stream “Lee” on Hulu or Kanopy.

Alex Garland also imagined a Lee Miller type for his incendiary political saga “Civil War” (2024), in which Kirsten Dunst plays a hardened photojournalist who takes a young protege, played by Cailee Spaeny, under her wing during a hypothetical American civil war. Their perspective becomes the point of view through which we take in the conflict, and how we process it (to somewhat controversial conclusions). Stream “Civil War” on HBO Max.

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