Critics have described this year’s crop of award-winning documentary films as “exciting,” “revelatory,” and “boring in the middle.” Here are the plot summaries for this season’s best documentaries:

• A man only washes himself with industrial car-wash fluid for an entire year to prove that industrial car-wash fluid is bad for you.
  

• A group of preteen world handwriting champions prepare for the greatest challenge yet—signing their own permission slips.
  

• A woman who accidentally locked herself in her closet for five years reassimilates to living in the rest of her house.
  

• A man who starred in an embarrassing 1980s public-service announcement about the dangers of eating shellfish has his humiliating past dug up by a documentary film crew.
  

• A group of people who were born without joints in their toes climbs Mount Kilimanjaro.
  

• The terrifying secret about how ice cream is made
  

• A bunch of people who did drugs together at an abandoned airplane hangar in the ‘70s get back together to talk about it.
  

• One man sets out to expose the problem with the country’s public schools by enrolling his dog in the country’s public schools and seeing if they notice.