best essay documentaries

The Best 10 Film Essay Documentaries: Exploring Life, Memory and Consciousness

Film essay documentaries are a unique genre that blends the art of filmmaking with the depth of literary essays. They go beyond traditional storytelling to explore profound themes, intertwining personal reflection , historical analysis, and creative visuals.

These documentaries challenge viewers to think critically, engage emotionally, and reflect on complex issues in new ways. If you're looking to dive into a genre that offers both intellectual stimulation and visual delight, here’s a list of some of the best film essay documentaries to re-energize your appreciation for the documentary form.

Film essay documentaries stand out because they are not confined by conventional narrative structures. They often weave together disparate elements—images, music , narration, and personal anecdotes—to create a tapestry that reflects the filmmaker's perspective.

This genre allows directors to experiment with form and content, resulting in films that are both thought-provoking and visually striking. These documentaries can range from deeply personal video diaries to expansive explorations of cultural and historical phenomena, making them a versatile and powerful medium for storytelling.

What makes film essay documentaries particularly compelling is their ability to convey complex ideas through a blend of visual and auditory elements. They offer a space for filmmakers to express their thoughts and emotions directly, creating a more intimate connection with the audience.

10 Essential Film Essay Documentaries

Here are ten film essay documentaries that exemplify the power and beauty of this genre. Each film offers a unique perspective and invites viewers to embark on a journey of discovery and reflection:

Bird Island

Bittersweet.

Color-Blind 

To The Dead

Insectopedia.

Sans Soleil 

Man with a Movie Camera 

Night and fog, shoah , f for fake .

This serene and contemplative documentary is set in a bird rehabilitation center next to a bustling airport. The film juxtaposes the tranquil lives of injured birds with the relentless noise of airplanes, creating a poignant reflection on the coexistence of nature and modernity.

Conceived as a personal video diary , this documentary is the life record of a man afflicted by a disease that is almost impossible to cure. Suddenly, the little things that go unnoticed, skin sutures, children's drawings, a daughter's hair... are poured onto the screen to show us the passing of a life.

Color-Blind

This visually stunning documentary explores the colonial legacy in French Polynesia and Brittany. Using 16mm film, Russell creates a synesthetic journey that includes references to Paul Gauguin, Marquesan techno, and the aftermath of French nuclear testing.

The film’s experimental approach and rich imagery make it a mesmerizing exploration of post-colonial identity and cultural syncretism.

This cinematic essay documentary delves into Colombia’s political and social turmoil. Narrated by a character walking through a cemetery, the film intertwines personal reflections with broader social commentary, highlighting the intersection of the intimate and the political.

Arango’s poetic narrative and evocative imagery create a haunting and insightful portrait of a nation in conflict.

A chance discovery at a flea market reveals a suitcase filled with 16mm film reels documenting fifty years of meticulous insect observation by a mysterious figure.

This documentary weaves together the archival footage with new investigations, crafting a mesmerizing exploration of one man's obsessive passion for the insect world. It's a quirky and intriguing film that highlights the boundless curiosity and dedication of amateur scientists .

Sans Soleil   

The documentary features a collage of footage from various countries, including Japan , Iceland, and Guinea-Bissau, combined with a reflective voice-over narration.

The film explores themes of memory , technology, and culture, offering a meditative and intellectually stimulating experience. Marker’s ability to connect disparate images and ideas makes "Sans Soleil" a timeless exploration of human consciousness.

This pioneering work blends documentary filmmaking with avant-garde cinema. The film captures a day in the life of a Soviet city through a series of dynamic and innovative camera techniques. Vertov’s celebration of modernity and the urban landscape is conveyed without dialogue or narration, relying solely on the power of visual storytelling.

This harrowing documentary examines the horrors of the Holocaust. Using footage from Auschwitz and other concentration camps, combined with reflective narration, the film offers a stark and powerful reminder of the atrocities committed during World War II.

Resnais’ unflinching portrayal of the Holocaust serves as both a historical document and a moral imperative to remember and learn from the past.

This epic documentary delves into the Holocaust through the testimonies of survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators. Spanning over nine hours, the film eschews archival footage in favor of first-person accounts, creating a deeply personal and immersive experience.

Lanzmann’s meticulous approach and dedication to preserving these stories make "Shoah" a monumental work of historical and emotional significance.

Orson Welles’ "F for Fake" is a playful and thought-provoking documentary that blurs the lines between reality and fiction. The film examines the lives of infamous art forger Elmyr de Hory and his biographer, Clifford Irving, who faked an autobiography of Howard Hughes.

Welles uses his trademark wit and charm to explore themes of deception, authenticity, and the nature of artistic creation . "F for Fake" is a masterful blend of documentary and essay, showcasing Welles’ innovative storytelling techniques.

Film essay documentaries offer a unique blend of visual artistry and intellectual depth, making them a powerful medium for exploring complex ideas and emotions. These films challenge viewers to think critically and reflect on their own experiences, providing a richer and more engaging cinematic experience. Whether you're drawn to personal narratives, historical analyses, or cultural explorations, the documentaries listed here provide a diverse and compelling selection of the best the genre has to offer.

As you explore these films, remember that each documentary offers a unique perspective and invites you to see the world through the filmmaker’s eyes. They encourage us to question, to ponder, and to appreciate the intricate tapestry of life. 

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The essay film

In recent years the essay film has attained widespread recognition as a particular category of film practice, with its own history and canonical figures and texts. In tandem with a major season throughout August at London’s BFI Southbank, Sight & Sound explores the characteristics that have come to define this most elastic of forms and looks in detail at a dozen influential milestone essay films.

Andrew Tracy , Katy McGahan , Olaf Möller , Sergio Wolf , Nina Power Updated: 7 May 2019

from our August 2013 issue

Le camera stylo? Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

I recently had a heated argument with a cinephile filmmaking friend about Chris Marker’s Sans soleil (1983). Having recently completed her first feature, and with such matters on her mind, my friend contended that the film’s power lay in its combinations of image and sound, irrespective of Marker’s inimitable voiceover narration. “Do you think that people who can’t understand English or French will get nothing out of the film?” she said; to which I – hot under the collar – replied that they might very well get something, but that something would not be the complete work.

The Sight & Sound Deep Focus season Thought in Action: The Art of the Essay Film runs at BFI Southbank 1-28 August 2013, with a keynote lecture by Kodwo Eshun on 1 August, a talk by writer and academic Laura Rascaroli on 27 August and a closing panel debate on 28 August.

To take this film-lovers’ tiff to a more elevated plane, what it suggests is that the essentialist conception of cinema is still present in cinephilic and critical culture, as are the difficulties of containing within it works that disrupt its very fabric. Ever since Vachel Lindsay published The Art of the Moving Picture in 1915 the quest to secure the autonomy of film as both medium and art – that ever-elusive ‘pure cinema’ – has been a preoccupation of film scholars, critics, cinephiles and filmmakers alike. My friend’s implicit derogation of the irreducible literary element of Sans soleil and her neo- Godard ian invocation of ‘image and sound’ touch on that strain of this phenomenon which finds, in the technical-functional combination of those two elements, an alchemical, if not transubstantiational, result.

Mechanically created, cinema defies mechanism: it is poetic, transportive and, if not irrational, then a-rational. This mystically-minded view has a long and illustrious tradition in film history, stretching from the sense-deranging surrealists – who famously found accidental poetry in the juxtapositions created by randomly walking into and out of films; to the surrealist-influenced, scientifically trained and ontologically minded André Bazin , whose realist veneration of the long take centred on the very preternaturalness of nature as revealed by the unblinking gaze of the camera; to the trash-bin idolatry of the American underground, weaving new cinematic mythologies from Hollywood detritus; and to auteurism itself, which (in its more simplistic iterations) sees the essence of the filmmaker inscribed even upon the most compromised of works.

It isn’t going too far to claim that this tradition has constituted the foundation of cinephilic culture and helped to shape the cinematic canon itself. If Marker has now been welcomed into that canon and – thanks to the far greater availability of his work – into the mainstream of (primarily DVD-educated) cinephilia, it is rarely acknowledged how much of that work cheerfully undercuts many of the long-held assumptions and pieties upon which it is built.

In his review of Letter from Siberia (1957), Bazin placed Marker at right angles to cinema proper, describing the film’s “primary material” as intelligence – specifically a “verbal intelligence” – rather than image. He dubbed Marker’s method a “horizontal” montage, “as opposed to traditional montage that plays with the sense of duration through the relationship of shot to shot”.

Here, claimed Bazin, “a given image doesn’t refer to the one that preceded it or the one that will follow, but rather it refers laterally, in some way, to what is said.” Thus the very thing which makes Letter “extraordinary”, in Bazin’s estimation, is also what makes it not-cinema. Looking for a term to describe it, Bazin hit upon a prophetic turn of phrase, writing that Marker’s film is, “to borrow Jean Vigo’s formulation of À propos de Nice (‘a documentary point of view’), an essay documented by film. The important word is ‘essay’, understood in the same sense that it has in literature – an essay at once historical and political, written by a poet as well.”

Marker’s canonisation has proceeded apace with that of the form of which he has become the exemplar. Whether used as critical/curatorial shorthand in reviews and programme notes, employed as a model by filmmakers or examined in theoretical depth in major retrospectives (this summer’s BFI Southbank programme, for instance, follows upon Andréa Picard’s two-part series ‘The Way of the Termite’ at TIFF Cinémathèque in 2009-2010, which drew inspiration from Jean-Pierre Gorin ’s groundbreaking programme of the same title at Vienna Filmmuseum in 2007), the ‘essay film’ has attained in recent years widespread recognition as a particular, if perennially porous, mode of film practice. An appealingly simple formulation, the term has proved both taxonomically useful and remarkably elastic, allowing one to define a field of previously unassimilable objects while ranging far and wide throughout film history to claim other previously identified objects for this invented tradition.

Las Hurdes (1933)

It is crucial to note that the ‘essay film’ is not only a post-facto appellation for a kind of film practice that had not bothered to mark itself with a moniker, but also an invention and an intervention. While it has acquired its own set of canonical ‘texts’ that include the collected works of Marker, much of Godard – from the missive (the 52-minute Letter to Jane , 1972) to the massive ( Histoire(s) de cinéma , 1988-98) – Welles’s F for Fake (1973) and Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), it has also poached on the territory of other, ‘sovereign’ forms, expanding its purview in accordance with the whims of its missionaries.

From documentary especially, Vigo’s aforementioned À propos de Nice, Ivens’s Rain (1929), Buñuel’s sardonic Las Hurdes (1933), Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955), Rouch and Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer (1961); from the avant garde, Akerman’s Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1974), Straub/Huillet’s Trop tôt, trop tard (1982); from agitprop, Getino and Solanas’s The Hour of the Furnaces (1968), Portabella’s Informe general… (1976); and even from ‘pure’ fiction, for example Gorin’s provocative selection of Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909).

Just as within itself the essay film presents, in the words of Gorin, “the meandering of an intelligence that tries to multiply the entries and the exits into the material it has elected (or by which it has been elected),” so, without, its scope expands exponentially through the industrious activity of its adherents, blithely cutting across definitional borders and – as per the Manny Farber ian concept which gave Gorin’s ‘Termite’ series its name –  creating meaning precisely by eating away at its own boundaries. In the scope of its application and its association more with an (amorphous) sensibility as opposed to fixed rules, the essay film bears similarities to the most famous of all fabricated genres: film noir, which has been located both in its natural habitat of the crime thriller as well as in such disparate climates as melodramas, westerns and science fiction.

The essay film, however, has proved even more peripatetic: where noir was formulated from the films of a determinate historical period (no matter that the temporal goalposts are continually shifted), the essay film is resolutely unfixed in time; it has its choice of forebears. And while noir, despite its occasional shadings over into semi-documentary during the 1940s, remains bound to fictional narratives, the essay film moves blithely between the realms of fiction and non-fiction, complicating the terms of both.

“Here is a form that seems to accommodate the two sides of that divide at the same time, that can navigate from documentary to fiction and back, creating other polarities in the process between which it can operate,” writes Gorin. When Orson Welles , in the closing moments of his masterful meditation on authenticity and illusion F for Fake, chortles, “I did promise that for one hour, I’d tell you only the truth. For the past 17 minutes, I’ve been lying my head off,” he is expressing both the conjuror’s pleasure in a trick well played and the artist’s delight in a self-defined mode that is cheerfully impure in both form and, perhaps, intention.

Nevertheless, as the essay film merrily traipses through celluloid history it intersects with ‘pure cinema’ at many turns and its form as such owes much to one particularly prominent variety thereof.

The montage tradition

If the mystical strain described above represents the Dionysian side of pure cinema, Soviet montage was its Apollonian opposite: randomness, revelation and sensuous response countered by construction, forceful argumentation and didactic instruction.

No less than the mystics, however, the montagists were after essences. Eisenstein , Dziga Vertov and Pudovkin , along with their transnational associates and acolytes, sought to crystallise abstract concepts in the direct and purposeful juxtaposition of forceful, hard-edged images – the general made powerfully, viscerally immediate in the particular. Here, says Eisenstein, in the umbrella-wielding harpies who set upon the revolutionaries in October (1928), is bourgeois Reaction made manifest; here, in the serried ranks of soldiers proceeding as one down the Odessa Steps in Battleship Potemkin (1925), is Oppression undisguised; here, in the condemned Potemkin sailor who wins over his imminent executioners with a cry of “Brothers!” – a moment powerfully invoked by Marker at the beginning of his magnum opus A Grin Without a Cat (1977) – is Solidarity emergent and, from it, the seeds of Revolution.

The relentlessly unidirectional focus of classical Soviet montage puts it methodologically and temperamentally at odds with the ruminative, digressive and playful qualities we associate with the essay film. So, too, the former’s fierce ideological certainty and cadre spirit contrast with that free play of the mind, the Montaigne -inspired meanderings of individual intelligence, that so characterise our image of the latter.

Beyond Marker’s personal interest in and inheritance from the Soviet masters, classical montage laid the foundations of the essay film most pertinently in its foregrounding of the presence, within the fabric of the film, of a directing intelligence. Conducting their experiments in film not through ‘pure’ abstraction but through narrative, the montagists made manifest at least two operative levels within the film: the narrative itself and the arrangement of that narrative by which the deeper structures that move it are made legible. Against the seamless, immersive illusionism of commercial cinema, montage was a key for decrypting those social forces, both overt and hidden, that govern human society.

And as such it was method rather than material that was the pathway to truth. Fidelity to the authentic – whether the accurate representation of historical events or the documentary flavouring of Eisensteinian typage – was important only insomuch as it provided the filmmaker with another tool to reach a considerably higher plane of reality.

Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm (1931)

Midway on their Marxian mission to change the world rather than interpret it, the montagists actively made the world even as they revealed it. In doing so they powerfully expressed the dialectic between control and chaos that would come to be not only one of the chief motors of the essay film but the crux of modernity itself.

Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), now claimed as the most venerable and venerated ancestor of the essay film (and this despite its prototypically purist claim to realise a ‘universal’ cinematic language “based on its complete separation from the language of literature and the theatre”) is the archetypal model of this high-modernist agon. While it is the turning of the movie projector itself and the penetrating gaze of Vertov’s kino-eye that sets the whirling dynamo of the city into motion, the recorder creating that which it records, that motion is also outside its control.

At the dawn of the cinematic century, the American writer Henry Adams saw in the dynamo both the expression of human mastery over nature and a conduit to mysterious, elemental powers beyond our comprehension. So, too, the modernist ambition expressed in literature, painting, architecture and cinema to capture a subject from all angles – to exhaust its wealth of surfaces, meanings, implications, resonances – collides with awe (or fear) before a plenitude that can never be encompassed.

Remove the high-modernist sense of mission and we can see this same dynamic as animating the essay film – recall that last, parenthetical term in Gorin’s formulation of the essay film, “multiply[ing] the entries and the exits into the material it has elected (or by which it has been elected)”. The nimble movements and multi-angled perspectives of the essay film are founded on this negotiation between active choice and passive possession; on the recognition that even the keenest insight pales in the face of an ultimate unknowability.

The other key inheritance the essay film received from the classical montage tradition, perhaps inevitably, was a progressive spirit, however variously defined. While Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938) amply and chillingly demonstrated that montage, like any instrumental apparatus, has no inherent ideological nature, hers were more the exceptions that proved the rule. (Though why, apart from ideological repulsiveness, should Riefenstahl’s plentifully fabricated ‘documentaries’ not be considered as essay films in their own right?)

The overwhelming fact remains that the great majority of those who drew upon the Soviet montagists for explicitly ideological ends (as opposed to Hollywood’s opportunistic swipings) resided on the left of the spectrum – and, in the montagists’ most notable successor in the period immediately following, retained their alignment with and inextricability from the state.

Progressive vs radical

The Grierson ian documentary movement in Britain neutered the political and aesthetic radicalism of its more dynamic model in favour of paternalistic progressivism founded on conformity, class complacency and snobbery towards its own medium. But if it offered a far paler antecedent to the essay film than the Soviet montage tradition, it nevertheless represents an important stage in the evolution of the essay-film form, for reasons not unrelated to some of those rather staid qualities.

The Soviet montagists had created a vision of modernity racing into the future at pace with the social and spiritual liberation of its proletarian pilot-passenger, an aggressively public ideology of group solidarity. The Grierson school, by contrast, offered a domesticated image of an efficient, rational and productive modern industrial society based on interconnected but separate public and private spheres, as per the ideological values of middle-class liberal individualism.

The Soviet montagists had looked to forge a universal, ‘pure’ cinematic language, at least before the oppressive dictates of Stalinist socialist realism shackled them. The Grierson school, evincing a middle-class disdain for the popular and ‘low’ arts, sought instead to purify the sullied medium of cinema by importing extra-cinematic prestige: most notably Night Mail (1936), with its Auden -penned, Britten -scored ode to the magic of the mail, or Humphrey Jennings’s salute to wartime solidarity A Diary for Timothy (1945), with its mildly sententious E.M. Forster narration.

Night Mail (1936)

What this domesticated dynamism and retrograde pursuit of high-cultural bona fides achieved, however, was to mingle a newfound cinematic language (montage) with a traditionally literary one (narration); and, despite the salutes to state-oriented communality, to re-introduce the individual, idiosyncratic voice as the vehicle of meaning – as the mediating intelligence that connects the viewer to the images viewed.

In Night Mail especially there is, in the whimsy of the Auden text and the film’s synchronisation of private time and public history, an intimation of the essay film’s musing, reflective voice as the chugging rhythm of the narration timed to the speeding wheels of the train gives way to a nocturnal vision of solitary dreamers bedevilled by spectral monsters, awakening in expectation of the postman’s knock with a “quickening of the heart/for who can bear to be forgot?”

It’s a curiously disquieting conclusion: this unsettling, anxious vision of disappearance that takes on an even darker shade with the looming spectre of war – one that rhymes, five decades on, with the wistful search of Marker’s narrator in Sans soleil, seeking those fleeting images which “quicken the heart” in a world where wars both past and present have been forgotten, subsumed in a modern society built upon the systematic banishment of memory.

It is, of course, with the seminal post-war collaborations between Marker and Alain Resnais that the essay film proper emerges. In contrast to the striving culture-snobbery of the Griersonian documentary, the Resnais-Marker collaborations (and the Resnais solo documentary shorts that preceded them) inaugurate a blithe, seemingly effortless dialogue between cinema and the other arts in both their subjects (painting, sculpture) and their assorted creative personnel (writers Paul Éluard , Jean Cayrol , Raymond Queneau , composers Darius Milhaud and Hanns Eisler ). This also marks the point where the revolutionary line of the Soviets and the soft, statist liberalism of the British documentarians give way to a more free-floating but staunchly oppositional leftism, one derived as much from a spirit of humanistic inquiry as from ideological affiliation.

Related to this was the form’s problems with official patronage. Originally conceived as commissions by various French government or government-affiliated bodies, the Resnais-Marker films famously ran into trouble from French censors: Les statues meurent aussi (1953) for its condemnation of French colonialism, Night and Fog for its shots of Vichy policemen guarding deportation camps; the former film would have its second half lopped off before being cleared for screening, the latter its offending shots removed.

Night and Fog (1955)

Appropriately, it is at this moment that the emphasis of the essay film begins to shift away from tactile presence – the whirl of the city, the rhythm of the rain, the workings of industry – to felt absence. The montagists had marvelled at the workings of human creations which raced ahead irrespective of human efforts; here, the systems created by humanity to master the world write, in their very functioning, an epitaph for those things extinguished in the act of mastering them. The African masks preserved in the Musée de l’Homme in Les statues meurent aussi speak of a bloody legacy of vanquished and conquered civilisations; the labyrinthine archival complex of the Bibliothèque Nationale in the sardonically titled Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) sparks a disquisition on all that is forgotten in the act of cataloguing knowledge; the miracle of modern plastics saluted in the witty, industrially commissioned Le Chant du styrène (1958) regresses backwards to its homely beginnings; in Night and Fog an unprecedentedly enormous effort of human organisation marshals itself to actively produce a dreadful, previously unimaginable nullity.

To overstate the case, loss is the primary motor of the modern essay film: loss of belief in the image’s ability to faithfully reflect reality; loss of faith in the cinema’s ability to capture life as it is lived; loss of illusions about cinema’s ‘purity’, its autonomy from the other arts or, for that matter, the world.

“You never know what you may be filming,” notes one of Marker’s narrating surrogates in A Grin Without a Cat, as footage of the Chilean equestrian team at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics offers a glimpse of a future member of the Pinochet junta. The image and sound captured at the time of filming offer one facet of reality; it is only with this lateral move outside that reality that the future reality it conceals can speak.

What will distinguish the essay film, as Bazin noted, is not only its ability to make the image but also its ability to interrogate it, to dispel the illusion of its sovereignty and see it as part of a matrix of meaning that extends beyond the screen. No less than were the montagists, the film-essayists seek the motive forces of modern society not by crystallising eternal verities in powerful images but by investigating that ever-shifting, kaleidoscopic relationship between our regime of images and the realities it both reveals and occludes.

— Andrew Tracy

1.   À propos de Nice

Jean Vigo, 1930

Few documentaries have achieved the cult status of the 22-minute A propos de Nice, co-directed by Jean Vigo and cameraman Boris Kaufman at the beginning of their careers. The film retains a spontaneous, apparently haphazard, quality yet its careful montage combines a strong realist drive, lyrical dashes – helped by Marc Perrone’s accordion music – and a clear political agenda.

In today’s era, in which the Côte d’Azur has become a byword for hedonistic consumption, it’s refreshing to see a film that systematically undermines its glossy surface. Using images sometimes ‘stolen’ with hidden cameras, A propos de Nice moves between the city’s main sites of pleasure: the Casino, the Promenade des Anglais, the Hotel Negresco and the carnival. Occasionally the filmmakers remind us of the sea, the birds, the wind in the trees but mostly they contrast people: the rich play tennis, the poor boules; the rich have tea, the poor gamble in the (then) squalid streets of the Old Town.

As often, women bear the brunt of any critique of bourgeois consumption: a rich old woman’s head is compared to an ostrich, others grin as they gaze up at phallic factory chimneys; young women dance frenetically, their crotch to the camera. In the film’s most famous image, an elegant woman is ‘stripped’ by the camera to reveal her naked body – not quite matched by a man’s shoes vanishing to display his naked feet to the shoe-shine.

An essay film avant la lettre , A propos de Nice ends on Soviet-style workers’ faces and burning furnaces. The message is clear, even if it has not been heeded by history.

— Ginette Vincendeau

2. A Diary for Timothy

Humphrey Jennings, 1945

A Diary for Timothy takes the form of a journal addressed to the eponymous Timothy James Jenkins, born on 3 September 1944, exactly five years after Britain’s entry into World War II. The narrator, Michael Redgrave , a benevolent offscreen presence, informs young Timothy about the momentous events since his birth and later advises that, even when the war is over, there will be “everyday danger”.

The subjectivity and speculative approach maintained throughout are more akin to the essay tradition than traditional propaganda in their rejection of mere glib conveyance of information or thunderous hectoring. Instead Jennings invites us quietly to observe the nuances of everyday life as Britain enters the final chapter of the war. Against the momentous political backdrop, otherwise routine, everyday activities are ascribed new profundity as the Welsh miner Geronwy, Alan the farmer, Bill the railway engineer and Peter the convalescent fighter pilot go about their daily business.

Within the confines of the Ministry of Information’s remit – to lift the spirits of a battle-weary nation – and the loose narrative framework of Timothy’s first six months, Jennings finds ample expression for the kind of formal experiment that sets his work apart from that of other contemporary documentarians. He worked across film, painting, photography, theatrical design, journalism and poetry; in Diary his protean spirit finds expression in a manner that transgresses the conventional parameters of wartime propaganda, stretching into film poem, philosophical reflection, social document, surrealistic ethnographic observation and impressionistic symphony. Managing to keep to the right side of sentimentality, it still makes for potent viewing.

— Catherine McGahan

3. Toute la mémoire du monde

Alain Resnais, 1956

In the opening credits of Toute la mémoire du monde, alongside the director’s name and that of producer Pierre Braunberger , one reads the mysterious designation “Groupe des XXX”. This Group of Thirty was an assembly of filmmakers who mobilised in the early 1950s to defend the “style, quality and ambitious subject matter” of short films in post-war France; the signatories of its 1953 ‘Declaration’ included Resnais , Chris Marker and Agnès Varda. The success of the campaign contributed to a golden age of short filmmaking that would last a decade and form the crucible of the French essay film.

A 22-minute poetic documentary about the old French Bibliothèque Nationale, Toute la mémoire du monde is a key work in this strand of filmmaking and one which can also be seen as part of a loose ‘trilogy of memory’ in Resnais’s early documentaries. Les statues meurent aussi (co-directed with Chris Marker) explored cultural memory as embodied in African art and the depredations of colonialism; Night and Fog was a seminal reckoning with the historical memory of the Nazi death camps. While less politically controversial than these earlier works, Toute la mémoire du monde’s depiction of the Bibliothèque Nationale is still oddly suggestive of a prison, with its uniformed guards and endless corridors. In W.G. Sebald ’s 2001 novel Austerlitz, directly after a passage dedicated to Resnais’s film, the protagonist describes his uncertainty over whether, when using the library, he “was on the Islands of the Blest, or, on the contrary, in a penal colony”.

Resnais explores the workings of the library through the effective device of following a book from arrival and cataloguing to its delivery to a reader (the book itself being something of an in-joke: a mocked-up travel guide to Mars in the Petite Planète series Marker was then editing for Editions du Seuil). With Resnais’s probing, mobile camerawork and a commentary by French writer Remo Forlani, Toute la mémoire du monde transforms the library into a mysterious labyrinth, something between an edifice and an organism: part brain and part tomb.

— Chris Darke

4. The House is Black

(Khaneh siah ast) Forough Farrokhzad, 1963

Before the House of Makhmalbaf there was The House is Black. Called “the greatest of all Iranian films” by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who helped translate the subtitles from Farsi into English, this 20-minute black-and-white essay film by feminist poet Farrokhzad was shot in a leper colony near Tabriz in northern Iran and has been heralded as the touchstone of the Iranian New Wave.

The buildings of the Baba Baghi colony are brick and peeling whitewash but a student asked to write a sentence using the word ‘house’ offers Khaneh siah ast : the house is black. His hand, seen in close-up, is one of many in the film; rather than objects of medical curiosity, these hands – some fingerless, many distorted by the disease – are agents, always in movement, doing, making, exercising, praying. In putting white words on the blackboard, the student makes part of the film; in the next shots, the film’s credits appear, similarly handwritten on the same blackboard.

As they negotiate the camera’s gaze and provide the soundtrack by singing, stamping and wheeling a barrow, the lepers are co-authors of the film. Farrokhzad echoes their prayers, heard and seen on screen, with her voiceover, which collages religious texts, beginning with the passage from Psalm 55 famously set to music by Mendelssohn (“O for the wings of a dove”).

In the conjunctions between Farrokhzad’s poetic narration and diegetic sound, including tanbur-playing, an intense assonance arises. Its beat is provided by uniquely lyrical associative editing that would influence Abbas Kiarostami , who quotes Farrokhzad’s poem ‘The Wind Will Carry Us’ in his eponymous film . Repeated shots of familiar bodily movement, made musical, move the film insistently into the viewer’s body: it is infectious. Posing a question of aesthetics, The House Is Black uses the contagious gaze of cinema to dissolve the screen between Us and Them.

— Sophie Mayer

5. Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Still

Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1972

With its invocation of Brecht (“Uncle Bertolt”), rejection of visual pleasure (for 52 minutes we’re mostly looking at a single black-and-white still) and discussion of the role of intellectuals in “the revolution”, Letter to Jane is so much of its time as to appear untranslatable to the present except as a curio from a distant era of radical cinema. Between 1969 and 1971, Godard and Gorin made films collectively as part of the Dziga Vertov Group before they returned, in 1972, to the mainstream with Tout va bien , a big-budget film about the aftermath of May 1968 featuring leftist stars Yves Montand and  Jane Fonda . It was to the latter that Godard and Gorin directed their Letter after seeing a news photograph of her on a solidarity visit to North Vietnam in August 1972.

Intended to accompany the US release of Tout va bien, Letter to Jane is ‘a letter’ only in as much as it is fairly conversational in tone, with Godard and Gorin delivering their voiceovers in English. It’s stylistically more akin to the ‘blackboard films’ of the time, with their combination of pedagogical instruction and stern auto-critique.

It’s also an inspired semiological reading of a media image and a reckoning with the contradictions of celebrity activism. Godard and Gorin examine the image’s framing and camera angle and ask why Fonda is the ‘star’ of the photograph while the Vietnamese themselves remain faceless or out of focus? And what of her expression of compassionate concern? This “expression of an expression” they trace back, via an elaboration of the Kuleshov effect , through other famous faces – Henry Fonda , John Wayne , Lillian Gish and Falconetti – concluding that it allows for “no reverse shot” and serves only to bolster Western “good conscience”.

Letter to Jane is ultimately concerned with the same question that troubled philosophers such as Levinas and Derrida : what’s at stake ethically when one claims to speak “in place of the other”? Any contemporary critique of celebrity activism – from Bono and Geldof to Angelina Jolie – should start here, with a pair of gauchiste trolls muttering darkly beneath a press shot of ‘Hanoi Jane’.

6. F for Fake

Orson Welles, 1973

Those who insist it was all downhill for Orson Welles after Citizen Kane would do well to take a close look at this film made more than three decades later, in its own idiosyncratic way a masterpiece just as innovative as his better-known feature debut.

Perhaps the film’s comparative and undeserved critical neglect is due to its predominantly playful tone, or perhaps it’s because it is a low-budget, hard-to-categorise, deeply personal work that mixes original material with plenty of footage filmed by others – most extensively taken from a documentary by François Reichenbach about Clifford Irving and his bogus biography of his friend Elmyr de Hory , an art forger who claimed to have painted pictures attributed to famous names and hung in the world’s most prestigious galleries.

If the film had simply offered an account of the hoaxes perpetrated by that disreputable duo, it would have been entertaining enough but, by means of some extremely inventive, innovative and inspired editing, Welles broadens his study of fakery to take in his own history as a ‘charlatan’ – not merely his lifelong penchant for magician’s tricks but also the 1938 radio broadcast of his news-report adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds – as well as observations on Howard Hughes , Pablo Picasso and the anonymous builders of Chartres cathedral. So it is that Welles contrives to conjure up, behind a colourful cloak of consistently entertaining mischief, a rueful meditation on truth and falsehood, art and authorship – a subject presumably dear to his heart following Pauline Kael ’s then recent attempts to persuade the world that Herman J. Mankiewicz had been the real creative force behind Kane.

As a riposte to that thesis (albeit never framed as such), F for Fake is subtle, robust, supremely erudite and never once bitter; the darkest moment – as Welles contemplates the serene magnificence of Chartres – is at once an uncharacteristic but touchingly heartfelt display of humility and a poignant memento mori. And it is in this delicate balancing of the autobiographical with the universal, as well as in the dazzling deployment of cinematic form to illustrate and mirror content, that the film works its once unique, now highly influential magic.

— Geoff Andrew

7. How to Live in the German Federal Republic

(Leben – BRD) Harun Farocki, 1990

Harun Farocki ’s portrait of West Germany in 32 simulations from training sessions has no commentary, just the actions themselves in all their surreal beauty, one after the other. The Bundesrepublik Deutschland is shown as a nation of people who can deal with everything because they have been prepared – taught how to react properly in every possible situation.

We know how birth works; how to behave in kindergarten; how to chat up girls, boys or whatever we fancy (for we’re liberal-minded, if only in principle); how to look for a job and maybe live without finding one; how to wiggle our arses in the hottest way possible when we pole-dance, or manage a hostage crisis without things getting (too) bloody. Whatever job we do, we know it by heart; we also know how to manage whatever kind of psychological breakdown we experience; and we are also prepared for the end, and even have an idea about how our burial will go. This is the nation: one of fearful people in dire need of control over their one chance of getting it right.

Viewed from the present, How to Live in the German Federal Republic is revealed as the archetype of many a Farocki film in the decades to follow, for example Die Umschulung (1994), Der Auftritt (1996) or Nicht ohne Risiko (2004), all of which document as dispassionately as possible different – not necessarily simulated – scenarios of social interactions related to labour and capital. For all their enlightening beauty, none of these ever came close to How to Live in the German Federal Republic which, depending on one’s mood, can play like an absurd comedy or the most gut-wrenching drama. Yet one disquieting thing is certain: How to Live in the German Federal Republic didn’t age – our lives still look the same.

— Olaf Möller

8. One Man’s War

(La Guerre d’un seul homme) Edgardo Cozarinsky , 1982

One Man’s War proves that an auteur film can be made without writing a line, recording a sound or shooting a single frame. It’s easy to point to the ‘extraordinary’ character of the film, given its combination of materials that were not made to cohabit; there couldn’t be a less plausible dialogue than the one Cozarinsky establishes between the newsreels shot during the Nazi occupation of Paris and the Parisian diaries of novelist and Nazi officer Ernst Jünger . There’s some truth to Pascal Bonitzer’s assertion in Cahiers du cinéma in 1982 that the principle of the documentary was inverted here, since it is the images that provide a commentary for the voice.

But that observation still doesn’t pin down the uniqueness of a work that forces history through a series of registers, styles and dimensions, wiping out the distance between reality and subjectivity, propaganda and literature, cinema and journalism, daily life and dream, and establishing the idea not so much of communicating vessels as of contaminating vessels.

To enquire about the essayistic dimension of One Man’s War is to submit it to a test of purity against which the film itself is rebelling. This is no ars combinatoria but systems of collision and harmony; organic in their temporal development and experimental in their procedural eagerness. It’s like a machine created to die instantly; neither Cozarinsky nor anyone else could repeat the trick, as is the case with all great avant-garde works.

By blurring the genre of his literary essays, his fictional films, his archival documentaries, his literary fictions, Cozarinsky showed he knew how to reinvent the erasure of borders. One Man’s War is not a film about the Occupation but a meditation on the different forms in which that Occupation can be represented.

—Sergio Wolf. Translated by Mar Diestro-Dópido

9. Sans soleil

Chris Marker, 1982

There are many moments to quicken the heart in Sans soleil but one in particular demonstrates the method at work in Marker’s peerless film. An unseen female narrator reads from letters sent to her by a globetrotting cameraman named Sandor Krasna (Marker’s nom de voyage), one of which muses on the 11th-century Japanese writer  Sei Shōnagon .

As we hear of Shōnagon’s “list of elegant things, distressing things, even of things not worth doing”, we watch images of a missile being launched and a hovering bomber. What’s the connection? There is none. Nothing here fixes word and image in illustrative lockstep; it’s in the space between them that Sans soleil makes room for the spectator to drift, dream and think – to inimitable effect.

Sans soleil was Marker’s return to a personal mode of filmmaking after more than a decade in militant cinema. His reprise of the epistolary form looks back to earlier films such as  Letter from Siberia  (1958) but the ‘voice’ here is both intimate and removed. The narrator’s reading of Krasna’s letters flips the first person to the third, using ‘he’ instead of ‘I’. Distance and proximity in the words mirror, multiply and magnify both the distances travelled and the time spanned in the images, especially those of the 1960s and its lost dreams of revolutionary social change.

While it’s handy to define Sans soleil as an ‘essay film’, there’s something about the dry term that doesn’t do justice to the experience of watching it. After Marker’s death last year, when writing programme notes on the film, I came up with a line that captures something of what it’s like to watch Sans soleil: “a mesmerising, lucid and lovely river of film, which, like the river of the ancients, is never the same when one steps into it a second time”.

10. Handsworth Songs

Black Audio Film Collective, 1986

Made at the time of civil unrest in Birmingham, this key example of the essay film at its most complex remains relevant both formally and thematically. Handsworth Songs is no straightforward attempt to provide answers as to why the riots happened; instead, using archive film spliced with made and found footage of the events and the media and popular reaction to them, it creates a poetic sense of context.

The film is an example of counter-media in that it slows down the demand for either immediate explanation or blanket condemnation. Its stillness allows the history of immigration and the subsequent hostility of the media and the police to the black and Asian population to be told in careful detail.

One repeated scene shows a young black man running through a group of white policemen who surround him on all sides. He manages to break free several times before being wrestled to the ground; if only for one brief, utopian moment, an entirely different history of race in the UK is opened up.

The waves of post-war immigration are charted in the stories told both by a dominant (and frequently repressive) televisual narrative and, importantly, by migrants themselves. Interviews mingle with voiceover, music accompanies the machines that the Windrush generation work at. But there are no definitive answers here, only, as the Black Audio Film Collective memorably suggests, “the ghosts of songs”.

— Nina Power

11.   Los Angeles Plays Itself

Thom Andersen, 2003

One of the attractions that drew early film pioneers out west, besides the sunlight and the industrial freedom, was the versatility of the southern Californian landscape: with sea, snowy mountains, desert, fruit groves, Spanish missions, an urban downtown and suburban boulevards all within a 100-mile radius, the Los Angeles basin quickly and famously became a kind of giant open-air film studio, available and pliant.

Of course, some people actually live there too. “Sometimes I think that gives me the right to criticise,” growls native Angeleno Andersen in his forensic three-hour prosecution of moving images of the movie city, whose mounting litany of complaints – couched in Encke King’s gravelly, near-parodically irritated voiceover, and sometimes organised, as Stuart Klawans wrote in The Nation, “in the manner of a saloon orator” – belies a sly humour leavening a radically serious intent.

Inspired in part by Mark Rappaport’s factual essay appropriations of screen fictions (Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, 1993; From the Journals of Jean Seberg , 1995), as well as Godard’s Histoire(s) de cinéma, this “city symphony in reverse” asserts public rights to our screen discourse through its magpie method as well as its argument. (Today you could rebrand it ‘Occupy Hollywood’.) Tinseltown malfeasance is evidenced across some 200 different film clips, from offences against geography and slurs against architecture to the overt historical mythologies of Chinatown (1974), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and L.A. Confidential (1997), in which the city’s class and cultural fault-lines are repainted “in crocodile tears” as doleful tragedies of conspiracy, promoting hopelessness in the face of injustice.

Andersen’s film by contrast spurs us to independent activism, starting with the reclamation of our gaze: “What if we watch with our voluntary attention, instead of letting the movies direct us?” he asks, peering beyond the foregrounding of character and story. And what if more movies were better and more useful, helping us see our world for what it is? Los Angeles Plays Itself grows most moving – and useful – extolling the Los Angeles neorealism Andersen has in mind: stories of “so many men unneeded, unwanted”, as he says over a scene from Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts (1983), “in a world in which there is so much to be done”.

— Nick Bradshaw

12.   La Morte Rouge

Víctor Erice, 2006

The famously unprolific Spanish director Víctor Erice may remain best known for his full-length fiction feature The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), but his other films are no less rewarding. Having made a brilliant foray into the fertile territory located somewhere between ‘documentary’ and ‘fiction’ with The Quince Tree Sun (1992), in this half-hour film made for the ‘Correspondences’ exhibition exploring resemblances in the oeuvres of Erice and Kiarostami , the relationship between reality and artifice becomes his very subject.

A ‘small’ work, it comprises stills, archive footage, clips from an old Sherlock Holmes movie, a few brief new scenes – mostly without actors – and music by Mompou and (for once, superbly used) Arvo Pärt . If its tone – it’s introduced as a “soliloquy” – and scale are modest, its thematic range and philosophical sophistication are considerable.

The title is the name of the Québécois village that is the setting for The Scarlet Claw (1944), a wartime Holmes mystery starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce which was the first movie Erice ever saw, taken by his sister to the Kursaal cinema in San Sebastian.

For the five-year-old, the experience was a revelation: unable to distinguish the ‘reality’ of the newsreel from that of the nightmare world of Roy William Neill’s film, he not only learned that death and murder existed but noted that the adults in the audience, presumably privy to some secret knowledge denied him, were unaffected by the corpses on screen. Had this something to do with war? Why was La Morte Rouge not on any map? And what did it signify that postman Potts was not, in fact, Potts but the killer – and an actor (whatever that was) to boot?

From such personal reminiscences – evoked with wondrous intimacy in the immaculate Castillian of the writer-director’s own wry narration – Erice fashions a lyrical meditation on themes that have underpinned his work from Beehive to Broken Windows (2012): time and change, memory and identity, innocence and experience, war and death. And because he understands, intellectually and emotionally, that the time-based medium he himself works in can reveal unforgettably vivid realities that belong wholly to the realm of the imaginary, La Morte Rouge is a great film not only about the power of cinema but about life itself.

Sight & Sound: the August 2013 issue

In this issue: Frances Ha’s Greta Gerwig – the most exciting actress in America? Plus Ryan Gosling in Only God Forgives, Wadjda, The Wall,...

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DVDs and Blu Ray

Buy The Complete Humphrey Jennings Collection Volume Three: A Diary for Timothy on DVD and Blu Ray

Humphrey Jennings’s transition from wartime to peacetime filmmaking.

Buy Chronicle of a Summer on DVD and Blu Ray

Jean Rouch’s hugely influential and ground-breaking documentary.

Further reading

Video essay: The essay film – some thoughts of discontent

Kevin B. Lee

The land still lies: Handsworth Songs and the English riots

The world at sea: The Forgotten Space

What I owe to Chris Marker

Patricio Guzmán

His and her ghosts: reworking La Jetée

Melissa Bradshaw

At home (and away) with Agnès Varda

Daniel Trilling

Pere Portabella looks back

John Akomfrah’s Hauntologies

Laura Allsop

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The 66 best documentaries of all time

Get real with our ranked list of the best documentaries of all time, from groundbreaking political exposés to culture-changing concerts

Magnolia Pictures

We’re living in the era of peak documentary. That’s different from a golden age of documentary, mind you. Yes, with the content avalanche of streaming services, it seems like film studios are churning out more docs than ever before, and that’s produced quite a few good ones. But the rush has also created a visual and narrative sameness, with many docs having all the artfulness of a corporate training video.

All that is to say that creating a truly great, lasting documentary requires a lot more than stringing together a few talking heads with bits of archival footage. The best docs don’t just tell true stories: they aim to make us understand the world around us and the people who live in it, and sometimes even rethink our ideas of ourselves. From David Byrne in an oversized suit to Andy Warhol staring at the Empire State Building for eight hours, here are our picks for the best documentaries ever made.

Written by Joshua Rothkopf, Cath Clarke, Tom Huddleston, David Fear, Dave Calhoun, Phil de Semlyen, Andy Kryza, David Ehrlich and Matthew Singer

Recommended:

✅ The 20 best movies based on true stories 🎸 The 19 best musical documentaries to rock out to 🤘 10 unforgettable concert films to watch from home 🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time

Been there, done that? Think again, my friend.

Best documentaries of all time

1.  shoah (1985).

The past is never past; in bringing the Holocaust to life in his towering nine-and-a-half-hour masterpiece, director Claude Lanzmann would stick solely to the present.  Shoah  is composed of the reflections of Polish survivors, bystanders and, most uneasily, the perpetrators. The memories become living flesh, and an essential part of documentary filmmaking finds its apotheosis: the act of testifying. Our top choice was an obvious one. 

2.  Sans Soleil (1983)

• Documentaries

Chris Marker's enthralling, globehopping essay is perhaps the finest first-person documentary, one that can leave you rivetingly unmoored. Ostensibly, we're following a world traveler as he journeys between locations, from San Francisco to Africa, from Iceland to Japan. A female narrator speaks over the images as if they were letters home ("He wrote me...") even though the episodes play out right in front of us. Each viewer is bound to have their own favorites: The playful, near-subliminal opening shot of three Icelandic girls walking down a rural road; the Japanese temple dedicated to cats (a very Marker place to visit); the illuminating aside on Hitchcock's Vertigo. The doc feels like a diary that's being written, reread and transposed to celluloid simultaneously, reinventing itself from moment to moment. You'll be mesmerized.

3.  The Thin Blue Line (1988)

We now take it for granted that documentaries employ re-creations of events, borrow the narrative thrust of fiction and tiptoe into the realm of the poetic. When Errol Morris introduced those techniques into his true-crime tale of a murdered Dallas police officer, however, the effect was galvanizing—and undeniably game-changing. Structured like a whodunit thriller, Morris's case study proved that documentaries could become popular hits, and ended up exonerating an innocent man. But the filmmaker was also crafting a meta-statement about the concept of truth itself, and it treats what could have been a typical investigative film into a real-life  Rashomon . He'd pushed the nonfiction form into bold, exciting territory: Once he'd crossed that line, a legion of other filmmakers followed.

4.  Night and Fog (1955)

Any discussion of Holocaust documentaries must include Alain Resnais's sober, deeply affecting half-hour short. A survivor, Jean Cayrol, authored the omnipresent narration, spoken in detached tones over imagery of an empty and decrepit Auschwitz decades after the ovens cooled. Resnais's camera glides over the landscape as if searching for clues to an unsolvable mystery, while photographs of Nazi medical experiments and their sickening results attest to atrocities that can't possibly be fathomed in full. The film has the feel of a ghost story where the dead, despite their eerie silence, beckon the living to preserve their memory. It will move you to tears—and beyond.

5.  Harlan County U.S.A. (1976)

Very often, we're reminded of the virtues of looking honestly and openly, without judgment. And if a documentary can do this, it's special. But there must be room for social justice, central to the impulse to pick up a camera in the first place. Barbara Kopple's staggeringly dense record of a Kentucky coal-mine strike is the ultimate example of crusading art: a chronicle of personal pain and sacrifice as ingrained as the soot in these workers' palms. Duke Power Company drove its employees to the brink of ruination, an existence plagued by black-lung disease, insufficient wages and squalid housing. When productivity ground to a halt, pickers found themselves targeted by armed thugs. Kopple captures it all, bringing the drama to a head while finding room for the rich local culture of bluegrass.

6.  Dont Look Back (1967)

Fans of Bob Dylan will always treasure the way this movie captures their hero at his pop-messiah apex, but even those who don't dig Mr. Zimmerman recognize D.A. Pennebaker's portrait as a groundbreaking work. It invented the fly-on-the-wall rockumentary, following the singer-songwriter as he lounges in hotel rooms and banters with buddies; the illusion of having an all-access pass to a musician's inner life starts here. But the doc's true significance lies in the way it nails a celebrity culture that was just starting to become cannibalistic. Reporters attack Dylan, rabid fans want a piece of him, and everything is reduced to an info-overload blur. The times would be a-changin' for both the media and this 26-year-old messenger very soon.

7.  The War Game (1965)

A masterpiece of what-if storytelling, Peter Watkins's chilling featurette depicts the aftermath of a British nuclear war from a you-are-there perspective. Using scientific research, government statistics, and testimonies on the damage done in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Watkins presents manufactured scenes of suburban mayhem under the guise of an emergency news report. Fires rage, children expire, and England is turned into a barren wasteland; no one had used the fake-documentary format to such an extent before, or with such urgency since. Originally made for the BBC, Watkins's wake-up call was quickly banned by the network for being too harsh, yet it still nabbed a Best Documentary Oscar in 1966. Forty-five years later, it remains a high mark for employing vrit styles to construct something much more perverse and profound than your typical cautionary tale.

8.  Nanook of the North (1922)

Today, Robert Flaherty's arctic slice of life is criticized: His Inuit subjects, made curious by the bulky camera, couldn't help but act a little. Scenes of igloo building and parenting were staged. Our strapping hero, accustomed to hunting with a gun, was gently urged to revert to his ancestors' spears. (He was also asked to pretend that a female friend of the director was his onscreen wife.) These points are not quibbles. But the greater truth of Flaherty's groundbreaking study can't be denied: Forevermore, documentaries would be committed to the social notion of bringing distant cultures closer (however compromised). So if we wish  Nanook  were more truthful, it's because it makes us want to better understand the world, a profound achievement for cinema.

9.  Roger & Me (1989)

Michael Moore made his spectacular debut with this enraging look at the closing of a GM plant in Flint, Michigan. It's a comic cri de coeur against auto-industry exec Roger Smith, who Moore hilariously attempts to confront about Flint's economic downturn. But it's also an affectionate look at the director's depressed hometown: On his journey, he talks with such colorful characters as Bob Eubanks ("Flint's most famous native son") and Rhonda Britton, an eccentric neighbor who sells rabbits for "pets or meat." A brash and brazen new talent had clearly arrived.

10.  Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

The modernizing Soviet Union swirled around filmmaker Dziga Vertov, who, working with his brilliant editor wife, Elizaveta, decided to capture chaotic urban life in Ukraine. There would be no script, no sound, so hostile was Vertov to narrative. Instead, he would turn his "kino eye" into a hungry maw, one that would cheerfully devour men and women at work, gnashing the image into innovative split-screen and double exposures, breaking the bonds of time and causality. His avant-garde movie, still a stunning piece of futurism, was the entire spirit of the revolution condensed to a single hour. It will inspire as long as there are eyes to watch.

11.  Salesman (1968)

Follow a quartet of real-life Willy Lomans as they peddle Bibles to working-class stiffs, in the Maysles brothers' bleak picture of the American dream circa the late '60s. No film has better captured the drudgery and desperation of the men who live day to day, dollar to dollar, door to door.

12.  Grizzly Man (2005)

Werner Herzog's "ecstatic truth" methodology—in which reporting the facts is secondary to finding deeper emotional undercurrents—is on full display in his portrait of Timothy Treadwell, a wildlife enthusiast killed by a bear he adored. Nature and chaos, obsession and madness—the auteur's thematic preoccupations are all here, in a form that's somehow more moving than Herzog's fictional counterparts.

13.  Hearts and Minds (1974)

It's naïve to think that any documentary can stop a war, but if one decisively damned an outcome, it's Peter Davis's mighty, merciless take on Vietnam. A fatuous American general destroys his own credibility ("The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does the Westerner") while we watch the graves being dug.

14.  Crumb (1994)

In this one-of-a-kind portrait, Terry Zwigoff takes us deep into the home life of underground comic artist Robert Crumb. Though known for his salacious images of plump females, Crumb comes off as one of the more normal people onscreen alongside troubled siblings Max and Charles. Zwigoff's film never condescends—this is a dysfunctional family we all can empathize with.

15.  Apollo 11 (2019)

Todd Douglas Miller’s jaw-dropping space odyssey straps viewers to the side of the thundering Apollo 11 rocket as it careers into, and beyond, the Earth’s atmosphere in a spectacular doc that makes great use of hitherto unseen NASA footage. The mission, of course, successfully plonked two Americans on to the Moon’s surface and then unplonked them again, thereby winning that leg of the space race with the Soviet Union, but there’s nothing triumphalist in Miller’s thrilling recreation – just a lot of quiet professionalism, teamwork and fearless men in helmets. When it gets into space and the 70mm footage does its thing, it makes you wish you’d actually followed up on that childhood ambition to become an astronaut. 

16.  Titicut Follies (1967)

Frederick Wiseman's no-holds-barred look at the horrors inside a prison for the criminally insane set the standard for vrit indictments, and not even a 24-year ban on public screenings stopped Wiseman from forcing accountability. Those who praise the power of the camera to effect change rightfully consider this a landmark.

17.  13TH (2016)

Ava DuVernay’s searing, righteously angry doc – named after the slavery-abolishing Thirteenth Amendment – argues that incarceration has become the new slavery in America. And with a wildly disproportionate Black prison population and corporations using it for free labour, the evidence is irrefutable. DuVernay’s line-up of experts (including activists and historians like Angela Davis and Henry Louis Gates Jr) presents it with ferocious clarity. 13th is essential viewing: one of those eye-opening documentaries that will change the way you see the world in an instant, even if the world stubbornly refuses to change in its wake. 

18.  Stop Making Sense (1984)

No band balanced surrealism and funkiness quite like Talking Heads, and Jonathan Demme manages to capture them at the absolute zenith of their abilities. All things considered, it’s probably still the greatest concert film ever, as memorable for the aesthetics – the famous big suit, frontman David Byrne’s flippy-floppy dance moves – as the musical virtuosity. 

19.  Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991)

This spellbinding behind-the-scenes doc by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper dishes all the dirt about the making of Francis Ford Coppola's  Apocalypse Now  (1979). Bad weather, heart attacks, temperamental stars and a ballooning budget—it's amazing a turkey didn't result. For that, Coppola would have to wait until  One from the Heart.

20.  The Times of Harvey Milk (1984)

Only an unrelenting homophobe could come away unmoved by Rob Epstein's Academy Award--winning documentary about the groundbreaking San Francisco politician assassinated by a bigoted colleague. It's both an angry film and a compassionate one—a true watershed in the gay-rights struggle.

21.  Lake of Fire (2006)

Filmed in dramatically crisp black and white yet far from didactic, Tony Kaye's landmark examination of the smoldering battleground of abortion leaves no conviction untested. Renowned libertarians reveal uncertain hearts; pro-lifers squirm in the cool eye of the lens. Kaye shows it all, as well as footage of the procedure itself; we must watch it.

22.  Paris Is Burning (1991)

Along with Madonna’s ‘Vogue,’ Jennie Livingston’s landmark documentary brought drag culture into the mainstream, and critics have been debating its impact ever since. Did exposing a transgender, predominantly Black and Latinx scene to straight, white audiences help or hurt the queer community at large? Does it matter that Livingston herself was a white outsider? What of the minority filmmakers who’d documented the ballroom world before her but couldn’t find funding, distribution or press attention? All those questions are worth asking, even 30 years later. But the discussion surrounding Paris is Burning does not diminish the vitality of the film itself – on its own, it remains a testament to lives lived out loud and the power of allowing marginalised people to speak for themselves. 

23.  Gimme Shelter (1970)

It’s probably an oversimplification to describe The Rolling Stones’ disastrous free concert at the Altamont Speedway in Northern California on December 6, 1969, as the event that killed the ’60s utopian dream for good, but Albert and David Maysles’ documentary makes it clear why it’s remembered as exactly that. The brothers’ emotionally-removed, cinéma vérité approach makes it come across like a waking nightmare – especially for Mick Jagger, who’s shown watching the footage of the band’s biker security guards murdering a Black audience member with a look of shell-shocked horror across his face.

24.  Hoop Dreams (1994)

Steve James's chronicle of two inner-city Chicago kids obsessed with basketball balances a microscopic look at their lives with a macro-examination of the social forces around them. It's less about what happens on the court than how class, race and community affect everything off the blacktop.

25.  Collective (2020)

In a just world, this gripping Romanian doc would have beaten Netflix’s cutesy The Octopus Teacher to Oscar glory. Then again, if it were a just world this exposé of state-sponsored corruption probably wouldn’t exist. Surprisingly, it is a team of sports journalists who uncover a medical scandal that needlessly cost the lives of dozens of victims of Bucharest’s Colectiv nightclub in 2015. In the spirit of all good conspiracy thrillers, they tug on a thread that leads to the higher echelons of government. This startling, Spotlight -like thriller is a local story with sadly universal resonance.

26.  High School (1968)

Frederick Wiseman's examination of a Philadelphia school is so subtle in its social critique that you might think it's merely about education. But remember what was going on in America at the time: Suddenly, the authority figures stamping out individualism and the frustrated kids being force-fed bankrupt values don't seem so innocuous.

27.  Empire (1964)

It's eight hours of the Empire State Building in a single shot, with no sound. But call Andy Warhol's minimalist masterpiece "boring" at your own peril. The sunlight fades. A Manhattan evening blooms. Architecture becomes mythic. Warhol's notion of iconic repetition gains power. Admit it: You wish you had thought of this.

28.  In the Year of the Pig (1968)

Premiering less than a year after the Tet Offensive, Emile de Antonio's scathing indictment of the Vietnam War excels at using the contradictory statements of the military brass, troops and politicians against them. Both Michael Moore and  The Daily Show  owe this muckraking screed a major debt.

29.  Bowling for Columbine (2002)

Whether or not you agree with his approach, Michael Moore has been right more often than not – and he’s never been more right than he was in diagnosing America’s gun addiction. Way back when school shootings didn’t all blend into one horrific blur, Moore was drilling into the root causes of the 1999 Columbine massacre in suburban Colorado, with a similar mix of righteous anger and irreverent humour that was then coming to flower on The Daily Show. The segment in which Moore escorts two shooting survivors to Kmart and demand refunds for the bullet fragments still lodged in their bodies is gonzo propaganda at its boldest.

30.  “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat” (1896)

An essential piece of cinema history, the Lumire brothers' 50-second film is an unedited shot of a locomotive pulling into a provincial French station. It's often credited as the first movie exhibited for a paying audience; several spectators reportedly dove for cover, convinced the train would break through the screen. Even at this early date, the impact of cinema was enormous.

31.  Man on Wire (2008)

On an early, gray morning in August 1974, tightrope-walker Philippe Petit stepped out into an impossible void, the space between the Twin Towers, and danced for an hour. No other film, fictional or otherwise, more fully restores—poetically, with antic humor—our city's loss as does James Marsh's stunner.

32.  The Gleaners & I (2000)

In her playful cine-essay, Agnès Varda reflects on the mythic French gleaners—field hands who traditionally clean up after harvests—and interviews homeless scavengers of the present day. Her thoughts on the passage of time and her own mortality turn a slight anthropological profile into a profound meditation on life.

33.  Capturing the Friedmans (2003)

Like most families, the Friedmans of Great Neck took video of themselves in their moments of joy and celebration. Unlike most clans, however, this one would be torn apart by sexual abuse, incest and a criminal conviction. They left the cameras rolling, even as their lives unraveled; director Andrew Jarecki shaped the found footage into a heartbreaker.

34.  For Sama (2019)

Unrelenting, emotional, and visceral in a way that will leave you a little wobbly, this astonishing doc catapults you into Aleppo’s bomb-damaged buildings and dust-shrouded corridors to take shelter from Syrian and Russian air attacks alongside filmmaker Waad Al-Kateab, her doctor husband and the young baby to whom the film is dedicated. Co-directed by Brit Edward Watts, it’s a tapestry of unforgettable moments and a shakycam memoir of life in a dying city. It’s not always easy viewing but the defiance and determination at its core is seriously inspiring to witness

35.  Grey Gardens (1975)

Meet the Beales, "Big Edie" and "Little Edie," former socialites who live in a run-down mansion with lots of cats and no running water. This mesmerizing Maysles-brothers doc inspired a sequel consisting of unreleased footage, an HBO film and even a Broadway musical. Who knew that two isolationist eccentrics could so powerfully capture the public imagination?

36.  Woodstock (1970)

The Woodstock Music and Art Fair was the defining cultural event of the 1960s, and Michael Wadleigh’s chronicle of those three days of ‘peace and music’ solidified the concert as the apex of the hippie utopian dream. That part is mostly bullshit, of course – there were multiple sexual assaults, two deaths and numerous institutional lapses that put more attendees’ lives at risk. But goddamn, that performance footage. Rock’n’roll may currently be going the way of jazz, but Jimi Hendrix's scorching rendition of the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ will still singe your eyebrows.

37.  Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (2004)

Dysfunction in rock ’n’ roll is nothing new. Most of the time, though, the public sees it play out in passive-aggressive press quotes, or the occasional onstage fistfight. In the case of metal giants Metallica, they opted to work out their growing interpersonal issues through group therapy – and, for reasons that can only be chalked up to the same hubris that had them squabbling over guitar solos and suing their own fans for piracy in the first place, allowed a documentary crew to film the proceedings. The result is a fascinating look at the alienating effects of massive success and what happens when an act gets so big it starts to operate more like a corporation than a band. It’s also hilarious: sure, there’s nothing funny about James Hetfield’s addiction problems, but the scene where drummer Lars Ulrich repeatedly screams ‘fuck!’ in his face is proof that This Is Spinal Tap wasn’t such a ‘mockumentary’ after all.

38.  The Sorrow and the Pity (1969)

Sorrow and pity: perfectly reasonable reactions to the Holocaust. Yet Marcel Ophls's staggering indictment of French collaboration with Nazi Germany is after an emotion far more insidious—something close to shared national shame. A decade after the movie's initial release, it still couldn't be aired on Paris's televisions.

39.  The Up Series (1964–2019)

Simple hook: Fourteen British schoolchildren would be interviewed every seven years, well into adulthood. Nine installments later, the late Michael Apted's frequently heartbreaking series still provides profound insight into the unpredictable paths that life can take.

40.  Sherman's March (1986)

Ross McElwee wanted to make a feature retracing the destructive Civil War march of General William Tecumseh Sherman. But a traumatic breakup refocused things: He'd still follow the path, but would look for romantic attachment along the way. This strikingly perceptive doc is so intimate, it hurts.

41.  Koyaanisqatsi (1982)

Highway traffic swirls in time-lapse photography, the sun rises and sets, and swarms of people cruise up escalators like hot dogs on a conveyer belt. Viewers still debate whether Godfrey Reggio's "pure film" amounts to more than a fuzzy anti-industrial screed. But the shots—and Philip Glass's seismically important score—are hypnotic.

42.  Burden of Dreams (1982)

Les Blank offers a warts-and-all look at the problems that plagued Werner Herzog's tow-the-boat-over-the-mountain epic,  Fitzcarraldo . Inclement weather and a war between Peru and Ecuador ground filming to a halt—but egotistical star Klaus Kinski made all complications seem quaint.

43.  Waltz with Bashir (2008)

Using animation to navigate the mental fog of war, Ari Folman’s groundbreaking film about searching for suppressed memories of his time as a teenage soldier in Lebanon gave documentarians a workaround for exploring subjects where archival footage and dramatic recreations won’t suffice. It’s already proven influential: 2021’s Flee  took a similar approach to the refugee experience and was nominated in three Oscar categories, including both Best Documentary Feature and Best Animated Feature. 

44.  Point of Order (1964)

Emile de Antonio tears into political fearmonger Senator Joseph McCarthy with righteous rage and footage of the infamous Army-McCarthy hearings. "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" lawyer Joseph Welch asked during the trials, and De Antonio's political epitaph provides the answer: Not a shred.

45.  The Fog of War (2003)

Errol Morris loves giving kooks a forum, but with this collection of "lessons," the filmmaker ceded the spotlight to a much more divisive American figure: former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the architect of the Vietnam War. What he doesn't say about his part in history is almost as telling as what he does.

46.  Monterey Pop (1968)

The first major rock festival of the '60s gave birth to the first major concert film of the era, with D.A Pennebaker paying as much attention to a burgeoning sense of a counterculture as he does to the music itself (though the footage of the Who, Otis Redding and Jimi Hendrix setting his guitar on fire, to name three, is epochal). Something was indeed brewing; Pennebaker lets us see the pot being stirred.

47.  The Battle of Chile (1975–79)

Patricio Guzmn's three-part doc offers a comprehensive, 360-degree view of Augusto Pinochet's rise to power, as seen through the eyes of everybody from Marxist peasants to the military brass who staged the coup. The combination of big-picture history lessons and newsreel immediacy continues to inspire lefty documentarians and frontline filmmakers.

48.  All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022)

A documentarian has a few options for tackling America's OxyContin crisis and the story of its first family, the Sacklers.  Citizenfour  director Laura Poitras picks the least obvious, but most impactful option. Skipping anything investigative or procedural, she instead adopts legendary New York photographer Nan Goldin, herself a recovering oxy addict, as a symbol of resistance to the Sackler's reputation-washing patronage of the arts. It's two enthralling stories for the price of one: a venal, vastly culpable family and the guerilla activist who takes the fight to them. 

49.  F for Fake (1973)

Here's yet more evidence that Orson Welles didn't just disappoint after  Citizen Kane . Toward the end of his working career, the feisty director mounted this sly, quietly groundbreaking study of the art of lying, one that flits from hoaxer Clifford Irving to Welles's own fake alien invasion,  The War of the Worlds.

50.  Dig! (2004)

Oasis vs Blur. Michael Jackson vs Prince. Biggie vs Tupac. All great artistic rivalries, but in terms of sheer entertainment value, none of them has shit on The Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Director Ondi Timoner spent seven years tracking the divergent careers of the two then-little-known psych-rock compatriots, as the former signed to a major label and built an international following and the latter engaged in persistent self-sabotage, eroding their relationship from mutual admiration to bitter resentment. There are onstage fistfights, drugs, arrests, broken sitars and dialogue that would've been cut from This Is Spinal Tap  for being too ridiculous. It’s a masterclass in rock’n’roll insanity populated with characters you couldn’t make up, because no one would believe they could exist.

51.  Triumph of the Will (1935)

Reality is always shaped by the documentarian—even the most respectful one makes a choice with every shot. Here, then, is cinema's grandest piece of propaganda, to remind us not only of the terror of fascism but of the power of the image. Leni Riefenstahl would never escape the legacy of her Nuremberg rally.

52.  The Look of Silence (2015)

Joshua Oppenheimer's 2012 documentary  The Act of Killing  was a radical, disquieting thing: a bizarre forum for Indonesia's genocidal leaders (still feared 50 years after their anti-Communist purge) to recreate their murders as fantasy skits. This unforgettable follow-up, anchored by the presence of an emboldened optician haunted by his brother’s death, is even more staggering.

Looking for more documentaries?

Check out the 19 best documentaries on netflix.

Dive into reality from the comfort of your couch with our select list of the best documentaries on Netflix streaming

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The Best Essay Films, Ranked

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Check Out Liv Tyler's Best Movies Before She Returns in Captain America: Brave New World

11 character interactions we want to see in avengers: doomsday, 10 distracting cameos that ruined the movie.

In literature, an essay is a composition dealing with its subject from a personal point of view. The pioneer of this genre, 16th-century French writer and philosopher Michel de Montaigne, used the French word "essai" to describe his "attempts" to put subjective thoughts into writing. Deriving its name from Montaigne’s magnum opus Essays and the literary genre in general, essay films are defined as a self-reflexive form of avant-garde, experimental, sort of documentary cinema that can be traced back to the dawn of filmmaking.

From early silent essay films, like D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera , to in-depth explorations from the second half of the 20th century, these are some of the best essay films ever made, ranked.

8 A Corner in Wheat

The 14-minute short A Corner in Wheat (1909) is considered by many to be the world's earliest essay film. Directed by filmmaking pioneer D. W. Griffith, this shot follows a ruthless tycoon who wants to control the wheat market. A powerful portrayal of capitalistic greed , A Corner in Wheat is a bold commentary on the contrast between the wealthy speculators and the agricultural poor. It is simply one of the best early short films.

7 Two or Three Things I Know About Her

Described by MUBI as "a landmark transition from the maestro’s jazzy genre deconstructions of the 60s to his gorgeous and inquisitive essay films of the future" (such as Histoire(s) du cinéma , Goodbye to Language , The Image Book ), 1967's Two or Three Things I Know About Her is Jean-Luc Godard’s collage of modern life.

Related: The Best Jean-Luc Godard Films, Ranked

The story of 24 hours in the life of housewife Juliette (Marina Vlady), who moonlights as a prostitute, is only a template for the filmmaker’s social observation of 1960s France, sprinkled with references to the nightmares of the Vietnam War. Whispering in our ears as narrator, Godard tells us much more than two or three things about "her," referring to Paris rather than Juliette.

6 F for Fake

Orson Welles’ 1973 essay film F for Fake focuses on three hoaxers, the notorious art forger Elmyr de Hory who had a talent for copying styles of noted painters; his biographer Clifford Irving whose fake "authorized biography" of Howard Hughes was one of the biggest literary scandals of the 20th century; and Welles himself with his famous War of the Worlds hoax. One of the best Orson Welles films , F for Fake investigates the tenuous lines between forgery and art, illusion and life.

5 News from Home

An unforgettable time capsule of New York in the 1970s, News from Home features Belgian film director Chantal Akerman reading melancholic, sometimes passive-aggressive letters from her mother over beautiful shots of New York, where Akerman relocated at the age of 21. Released in 1976, after the filmmaker’s breakthrough drama Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles , News from Home makes plain the disconnection in family, while New York and the young artist’s alienating come more and more to the front.

4 As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty

Jonas Mekas, the godfather of American avant-garde cinema, made one of the most personal, but at the same time one of the most universal films ever. It is his 2000 experimental documentary As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty . Compiled from Mekas' home movies from 1970-1999, this nearly five-hour essay film shows the loveliness of everyday life. Footage of what Mekas calls "little fragments of paradise," the first steps of the filmmaker’s children, their happy life in New York, trips to Europe, and on and on, are complemented by Mekas’ commentary. It is a poetic diary about nothing but life.

3 Sans Soleil

Directed by Chris Marker, king of the essay film , 1983’s Sans Soleil ( Sunless ) follows an unseen cameraman named Sandor Krasna, Marker's alter ego, who journeys from Africa to Japan, "two extreme poles of survival." The 100-minute poetical collage of Marker’s original documentary footage, clips from films and television, sequences from other filmmakers, and stock videos comes complete with the voice of a nameless female narrator, who reads Krasna's letters that sum up his lifetime's travels.

Like Marker's French New Wave masterpiece La Jetee , Sans Soleil reflects on human experience, the nature of memory, understanding of time, and life on our planet. It is pure beauty.

Made when the filmmaker, Derek Jarman, was dying from AIDS-related complications that rendered him partially blind and capable only of experiencing shades of blue, the great experimental film Blue from 1993 is like no other. Jarman’s 79-minute final feature consists of a single shot of one color — International Klein Blue. Against a blank blue screen, the iconic director interweaves a medley of sounds, music, voices of four narrators (Jarman himself, the chameleonic Tilda Swinton , Nigel Terry, and John Quentin), the filmmaker’s daydreams, adventures of Blue, as a character and color, diary-like entries about Jarman’s life and current events, names of his lovers and friends who had died of AIDS, fragments of poetry, and much more.

Related: 8 Must-Watch Movies From LGBTQ+ Filmmakers

A deeply personal goodbye and a sort of self-portrait, this essay film is dedicated to Yves Klein , the artist who mixed this deep blue hue and said, "At first there is nothing, then there is a profound nothingness, after that a blue profundity".

1 Man with a Movie Camera

Dziga Vertov, one of cinema’s greatest innovators, believed that the "eye" of the camera captures life better than the subjective eye of a human. In the 1920s, he started looking for cinematic truth, showing life outside the field of human vision through a mix of rhythmic editing, multiple exposures, experimental camera angles, backward sequences, freeze frames, extreme close-ups, and other "cinema eye" techniques. This is how Vertov’s best-known film, 1929’s Man with a Movie Camera , was made. This narrative-free essay shows the kaleidoscopic life of Soviet cities. An avant-garde urban poem, Man with a Movie Camera makes clear what the beauty of cinema is.

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The 52 Best Documentaries of the 21st Century

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We live in strange times. This young century has been defined by harrowing disasters both natural and man-made, political tribalism, and existential threats to the future of the planet. What better time for documentary filmmaking ?

Not only do they reveal our world to us, but they shape how we view it, and the early years of the 21st century have proven that to be more true than ever before. On one hand, digital technology has infinitely expanded our range of vision, and some of the modern era’s most essential docs have been shot on consumer-grade equipment like iPhones and GoPro cameras. On the other hand, these tools haven’t just granted us new ways of seeing, they’ve also galvanized our desire to look, which in turn has stoked an unprecedented degree of interest in the documentary format on the whole.

Truth has never been so much stranger than fiction than it is today, and the movies show us why . They include personal essays and shocking exposés, touching character studies and sprawling portraits of communal resilience. They feature the cats of Istanbul, the bears of Alaska, and gorillas of the Congo. They document injustices and complex family bonds. Above all, they teach us to see the world around us in new ways. Here are the 52 best documentaries of the 21st century.

With editorial contributions by David Ehrlich, Eric Kohn, Jude Dry, Kate Erbland, Christian Blauvelt, Alison Foreman, and Zack Sharf.

[Editor’s note: This list was first published in July 2017 and has been updated multiple times since.] 

52. “Kokomo City” (2023)

Smith often shoots the women from below, placing herself on the floor at their feet, so they hover like queens above the camera. Sometimes, she’ll use a painful anecdote to narrate an erotic photoshoot on a bed, showing the girls luxuriating in their femininity. She interviews a few trans-attracted men, too, and cuts their energetic sermons with footage of a graceful male ballet dancer. The film’s electrifying final shot feels like both a provocation and a celebration; a full-throated embodiment of the bravado and beauty we’ve just been entrusted to witness. May audiences be humble enough to recognize the privilege.  —JD

51. “Four Daughters” (2023)

50. “Mr. Bachmann and His Class” (2021)

Maria Speth proves herself a cinematic heir to Frederick Wiseman with this 217-minute “fly on the wall” depiction of about six months in the classroom of an elementary school for immigrant children in a small German town. 64-year-old Dieter Bachmann is not a perfect teacher, but an exceptionally kind and empathetic one. There are various culture clashes among the children, all hailing from very different backgrounds, and some kinder-crises, but this classroom could practically be a model for a future where our differences are respected and we can all get along together. Watching the film is a kind of Zen experience in hope and tranquility. Not one disconnected from the history of its setting either: Bachmann tells the kids about how their town hosted slave labor during the Third Reich. Through her long takes, Speth creates a deep immersion in the classroom, like you’re part of their conversations too. While it unfolds, you’ll experience something magical: you’ll see the world again as if through the eyes of a child.  —CB

49. “13th” (2016)

DuVernay aligns many historical details into an infuriating arrangement of statistics and cogent explanations for the evolution of racial bias in the United States, folding in everything from D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” to the war on drugs. The broad scope is made palatable by the consistency of its focus, and the collective anger it represents.

Visually, the movie offers little more than the standard arrangement of talking heads, archival footage, and animated visual aids, but that’s all it takes to make its incendiary statements resonate across time. The documentary, which followed DuVernay’s feature hits like “Selma” and her early, music-focused documentary works, consolidates some 150 years of American history to show how the country’s current problems with race didn’t happen overnight. It’s required viewing that only grows more essential with each passing day. —EK

48. “All These Sleepless Nights” (2016)

Unfolding like a plotless reality show that was shot by Emmanuel Lubezki, this lucid dream of a movie paints an unmoored portrait of a city in the throes of an orgastic reawakening. From the opening images of fireworks exploding over downtown Warsaw, to the stunning final glimpse of Marczak’s main subject — Krzysztof Baginski (playing himself, as everyone does), who looks and moves like a young Baryshnikov — twirling between an endless row of stopped cars during the middle of a massive traffic jam, the film is high on the spirit of liberation. More than just a hypnotically hyper-real distillation of what it means to be young, “All These Sleepless Nights” is a haunted vision of what it means to have been young. —DE

47. “No Home Movie” (2016)

Of course, “No Home Movie” belongs to a more specific tradition of experimental cinema, both from Akerman’s own oeuvre and many others. But it has a unique rhythm that demands patient viewers and rewards them for their efforts. No matter the depressing undertones, it’s a spectacular parting gift. —EK

46. “Twenty Feet from Stardom” (2013)

Morgan Neville’s Oscar winning documentary “20 Feet From Stardom” hits you like an explosion of joy that’s impossible to shake. What it lacks in narrative innovation it more than makes up for in emotion. Neville spotlights the behind-the-scenes lives of some of the most famous backup singers in music, including Darlene Love, Judith Hill, Merry Clayton, Lisa Fischer and Táta Vega.

45. “Amy” (2015)

Asif Kapadia’s primary skill as a documentarian is his ability to assemble miles upon miles of archival footage into coherent, insightful, and often deeply emotional looks at singular lives. For his much-hyped follow-up to 2010’s exceptional “Senna,” Kapadia turned his eye to one of the modern pop culture’s most exposed — and most misunderstood — stars, using his “Amy” to unpack the tragic rise and fall of singer and songwriter Amy Winehouse.

The British chanteuse’s story had ostensibly been told before, splashed across tabloid pages and gossip blogs, but Kapadia uses his film to find the real person underneath the rumors and lies. What “Amy” does so compellingly is take its audience inside Winehouse’s wild life without judgement or fear, exposing both her flaws and her greatest assets, and showing off her immense talent at every turn. It’s a heartbreaker, because it has to be, because it is , but it’s also a rewarding examination of a life taken too soon, cut too short, and silenced too early. —KE

44. “Kedi” (2016)

One interviewee argues that the relationship between cats and people is the closest we might get to understanding what it’s like to interact with aliens. If so, “Kedi” goes a long way towards making first contact. Then again, dog people may find themselves in the dark. —EK

43. “The Central Park Five” (2012)

An infuriating look at one of the most offensive, racially-motivated cases in modern history, “The Central Park Five” provides a welcome exception to the usual Ken Burns routine. Part of its distinction comes from the other names associated with the project: Burns co-directed the movie with his daughter Sarah Burns and her husband David McMahon; the subject matter is partly derived from Sarah Burns’ book “The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of a City Wilding.” But there’s still a sense that the proverbial “Ken Burns effect” takes on new meaning — rather than zooming in on old images, Burns magnifies neglected facts to reveal a horrific miscarriage of justice.

42. “After Tiller” (2013)

A Kansas physician whose deep belief in reproductive rights led him to become the medical director of Women’s Health Care Service at a time when it was one of the only three clinics in America that was willing to provide late term abortions, George Tiller was repeatedly targeted by right-wing extremists before his eventual assassination in 2009. Per its title, Martha Shane and Lana Wilson’s remarkable “After Tiller” plunges into the politically fraught health crisis that its namesake left behind as it follows the trials and tribulations (and bittersweet mercies) of the four doctors who vowed to continue Tiller’s work in the face of grave danger.

41. “Searching for Sugar Man” (2012)

When 1970s Mexican-American singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez faded from view, he’d never had much visibility in the first place. Typically known only as “Rodriguez,” the musician’s gentle pop tunes and activist spirit came through in a handful of albums that were barely noticed in the U.S. However, “Searching for Sugar Man,” documentarian Malik Bendjelloul’s remarkable chronicle of Rodriguez’s neglect on his home turf and unexpected stardom in South Africa, compellingly argues for his place in the canon of great American rock stars, whether or not he wants the spot.

The director makes a convincing case for Rodriguez as a phantom rock star, no less valid than Bob Dylan, but never validated by the marketplace. “Rodriguez, as far as I’m concerned, never happened,” a former producer sighs, but the truth is more spectacular: Rodriguez simply made peace with his professional failings, and gained popularity without the aid of the industry. He was a hero who never chased the spotlight. —EK

40. “Minding the Gap” (2018)

Bing Liu’s “Minding the Gap” captures the transportive power of skateboarding — its power to take people out of their lives, even when they aren’t necessarily going anywhere — better than just about any other film ever made, but it would be terribly reductive to think of it as a “skateboarding film.” For Liu, the activity seems more like a means to an end than anything else. And his unforgettable documentary feature debut, which was filmed over the course of a decade, poignantly articulates all the ways in which that’s always been true for himself and his two closest friends.

39. “Faya Dayi” (2021)

Jessica Beshir’s acclaimed debut feature embeds itself in Harar, a city in Eastern Ethiopia. There, several communities exist that practice the custom of chewing khat, a plant that can induce hallucinations, for spiritual and religious rituals. “Faya Dayi” explores in stark black and white the impact that the plant has on the community. Beshir’s documentary premiered at Sundance in 2021, and was added to the Criterion Collection a year later. —WC

38. “Virunga” (2014)

Orlando von Einsiedel’s Oscar-nominated documentary is a riveting, up-close look at the ongoing battles between Congolese park rangers and poachers in Virunga National Park, a UNESO World Heritage Site in the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In the years since its release, the movie has been optioned for a narrative feature adaptation by Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way with a script by Barry Jenkins. It’s easy to see why Hollywood would show interest: In addition to a dramatic backdrop with clear heroes and villains, the movie also features lovable apes.

37. “Summer of Soul” (2021)

It’s hard to think of a single documentary in history that’s more of a surefire crowd pleaser than “Summer of Soul.” Questlove’s directorial debut investigates the political and cultural forces that created the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival: a month-long series of concerts in New York’s Mount Morris Park. The event is often nicknamed Black Woodstock, and the beautiful, unearthed and restored footage of the performances — from legends like Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, and Sly and the Family Stone — puts the musical talent of the festival on full display; it’s hard not to stand up and cheer during Simone’s astonishing set, in particular.

If incredible music was all “Summer of Soul” had to offer, it’d be a good documentary; what makes it a great one is the context that Questlove provides, through newsreel footage and interviews with performers, about how the Civil Rights movement led to the festival, how it celebrated Black pride and unity, and how the erasure of the event from history was an erasure of Black history. The Harlem Cultural Festival is an astonishing achievement that needs to be remembered, and “Summer of Soul” helps ensure it’ll never be forgotten. —WC

36. “Dick Johnson Is Dead” (2020)

The concept could easily devolve into the stuff of a twee exercise in navel-gazing, but in so boldly confronting the many faces of death that are always watching us from the shadows, Johnson’s film is able to revel in the fullness of life at the same time that it threatens to slip away forever. —DE

35. “Capturing the Friedmans” (2003)

In 2003, Andrew Jarecki’s “Capturing the Friedmans” quickly became a landmark achievement in the history of non-fiction film, snatching up a Grand Jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival, generating massive buzz and heated controversy in the wake of its release, and eventually landing an Oscar nomination. The filmmaker’s dark investigation into the pedophilia charges against the late Great Neck resident Arnold Friedman and his teenage son Jesse, partially told through the family’s uncomfortably intimate home movies from the ’80s, captured the dissolution of an American family in extraordinary detail.

34. “The Mole Agent” (2020)

There’s a certain immersive thrill that comes from documentaries that hide themselves, and “The Mole Agent” epitomizes that appeal. Chilean director Maite Alberdi’s delightful character study unfolds as an intricate spy thriller, with a sweet-natured 83-year-old widower infiltrating a nursing home at the behest of a private detective. The plan goes awry with all kinds of comical and touching results, so well assembled within a framework of fictional tropes that it begs for an American remake. But as much as such a product might appeal to companies hungry for content, it would be redundant from the outset, because “The Mole Agent” is already one of the most heartwarming spy movies of all time — a rare combination of genres that only works so well because it sneaks up on you. —EK

33. “American Factory” (2019)

“American Factory” takes off two years into the factory’s arrival, as over 1,000 people have been employed by the glassmaker and optimism runs high. The company’s hawkish leader, the beady-eyed billionaire Chairman Cao Dewang, arrives at the facility beaming with pride — but it doesn’t take him long to start micromanaging every facet of the plant, leaving his English-speaking senior staff agape. As Cao wanders the grounds with a translator in tow, “American Factory” shifts from an optimistic portrait of a Chinese rescue mission to a dispiriting comedy of errors, like an episode of “The Office” for fans of “The World Is Flat.”

While the movie finds a natural end point, the saga of Fuyao Glass America is far from over. The payoff leaves something to be desired, but understandably so, as the very existence of this documentary sets the stage for a new phase of factory life unlikely to smooth out its troubles anytime soon. —EK

32. “Weiner” (2016)

31. Procession (2021)

Therapy is often an uncomfortable subject to watch on film, but the unconventional counseling seen in “Procession” is downright devastating to witness. Robert Greene’s Netflix documentary profiles six middle-aged men who all survived child sexual abuse from Catholic priests and clergy members, as they write and direct filmed reenactments of their trauma as part of a drama therapy exercise. The film weaves between the shorts the men develop and the emotionally grueling process of shooting them, and both the fiction and reality sections reveal substantial layers of how childhood abuse stays with and molds you. But the friendships and support the survivors develop add a touch of lightness to the devastating story; Greene isn’t afraid to leave in questions about the ethics of his doc in the final edit, and the film doesn’t try to swing for uplift or claim that the men are completely healed, but you get the sense they come out of the experience better than they started. —WC

30. “City Hall” (2020)

29. “Fire at Sea” (2016)

Gianfranco Rosi’s riveting non-fiction drama takes place on the Italian island of Lampedusa, where thousands of migrants are rescued from Africa throughout the year. (Others aren’t so lucky.) While the bracing footage of rescue efforts are enough to make the movie a terrifying peek beyond the headlines, Rosi compliments them with the portrait of Pietro Bartolo, a kindly doctor who treats new arrivals to the island and speaks to the lonely, DIY efforts involved in addressing a problem when the broader system falls short of solving it. Rosi juxtaposes these moments with the carefree exploits of a young boy who lives on the island, a stand-in for the innocence that much of the world experiences in relation to this global crisis. It’s harrowing filmmaking with a razor-sharp message. —EK

28. “Leviathan” (2012)

The footage they brought back to dry land is borderline hallucinatory, as viewers are plunged into a grey-blue word of frigid terror, every image overwhelmed by the raw elemental power of the world’s most indifferent work environment. The glimpses from inside the ship are almost as harrowing, as cock-eyed shots of a foul mess hall indicate that the ship’s crew are capable of creating a hellscape of their own. There’s vérité and then there’s vérité , and “Leviathan” remains a shining (if shivering cold) example of the latter — the film is such a transportive and tactile experience of working the high seas that it feels like it should end with a paycheck. —DE

27. “Kate Plays Christine” (2016)

Casting actress Kate Lyn Sheil as Chubbuck, taking her down to the coast, and goading her to get into character, Greene’s characteristically self-reflexive and increasingly hypnotic film wedges fact against fiction until the two are subsumed by each other under the haze of the Florida sun. Richer, more compelling, and more aggressive than anything Greene had made before, “Kate Plays Christine” leverages a morbid historical footnote into an essential documentary about the ethics of exhuming the dead on screen. —DE

26. “Honeyland”

Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov’s two-time Oscar nominee “Honeyland” is a bitter and mesmerically beautiful documentary that focuses on a single beekeeper as though our collective future hinges on the fragile relationship between her and her hives.

But Hatidze Muratova is no ordinary apiarist. In fact, she’s apparently the last of Macedonia’s nomadic beekeepers, although — like every other bit of context in this strictly observational film — that detail is never made explicit. It doesn’t need to be: The more time we spend watching Muratova stick her bare hands into natural stone nests and sing old folk songs to her buzzing swarms, the more obvious it becomes that she’s one-of-a-kind.

When Hussein Sam, his wife, and their seven kids drive into Muratova’s neck of the woods in the film’s opening minutes, they bring a powder-keg of a plot conflict along with them. By reflecting Muratova’s relationship with her hives against the social contract that she’s formed with her mother — and that binds Hussein to his family — Kotevska and Stefanov shine a light on what the bees have always told us: They survive by serving each other. And if they ever disappeared completely, people would only have themselves to blame. —DE

25. “Don’t Leave Me” (2013)

If Jim Jarmusch made a movie about two alcoholic friends hanging out in the woods, it might look something like the Dutch documentary “Don’t Leave Me” (“Ne Me Quitte Pas”). Directors Sabine Lubbe Bakker and Niels van Koevorden’s hilariously touching portrait of bitter men drowning their sorrows in booze is the ultimate buddy comedy with brains. Shot in the isolated forests of Wallonia, in French-speaking southern Belgium, it manages a fascinating naturalistic tone that’s infectiously lighthearted without obscuring the downbeat quality of its subjects’ lives.

24. “Citizenfour” (2014)

“I am not the story,” says Edward Snowden to documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald in “Citizenfour,” but like Snowden himself, there’s nothing simple about that statement. Poitras’ bracing look at the former National Security Agency contractor, whose intel about government surveillance launched a firestorm of global inquiries following his exodus from the country in 2012, gives us everything we already knew about Snowden and his findings in a tightly-wound package — while hinting at a fascinating bigger picture filled with new information. “Citizenfour” would be a remarkable experience even if were simply a behind-the-scenes look at the biggest government leak in modern history, but Poitras also happens to be a terrific filmmaker, transforming Snowden’s paranoid world into a microcosm of our uncertain, fragmented times. —EK

23. “Man on Wire” (2008)

Marsh presents Petit as a death-defying dreamer who views the world as his playground, an eccentric who’s willing to risk his life in order to restore some of its wonder, and his unbridled enthusiasm is deeply infectious (the most incredible part of Petit’s story might be that Werner Herzog didn’t tell it first). Where other people once saw a target, and where people now typically see a graveyard, Petit saw Manhattan’s most iconic monuments as his destiny, built only so that he could dance from one to the other on an August morning in 1974. Balancing his film as carefully as his subject balances his feet, Marsh’s thrilling doc looks back into the 20th century in order to soften the most grievous stain of the 21st. —DE

22. “Collective” (2020)

Its initial hero emerges from an unlikely place: Sports Gazette reporter Catalin Tolontan and colleague Mirela Nega run the phones with an aggressive work ethic that would leave Woodward and Bernstein in awe, but it’s not just their story; Nanau makes the bold decision later on to switch focus to new minister of health Vlad Voiculescu, who’s tasked with leading a transparent overhaul of Romania’s dysfunctional medical system, even as he faces pushback at every turn. Juggling this dense assemblage of strategy sessions under the looming cloud of a national election, the movie provides a sobering window into the nature of democratic ideals within the swirling machine of systemic corruption. But it’s too fast-paced and too complex to feel like a pity party. “Collective” demonstrates the potential for moral courage to endure, under even the most dire efforts to snuff it out. No matter who runs the show, the work goes on. Let’s not forget that. —EK

21. “All That Breathes” (2022)

20. “Cameraperson” (2016)

Kirsten Johnson opens “Cameraperson” with a note describing the project as “my memoir,” but it’s safe to say there’s never been a memoir quite like this one. Cobbling together footage from her 25 years of experience as a documentary cinematographer, “Cameraperson” offers a freewheeling overview of the people and places Johnson has captured over the course of a diverse career. More than that, the two dozen projects showcased here alongside original footage confront the process of creation. This is a collage-like guide to a life of looking.

Johnson’s credits range from risky exposés such as “Pray the Devil Back to Hell” and “Citizenfour” to lighter fare like last year’s New Yorker cartoon portrait “Very Semi Serious,” all of which surface in this dense global survey. But the disparate subject matter congeals around her implied presence in every scene. Soviet film theorist Dziga Vertov would surely approve of Johnson’s approach — an alternate title could be “Woman With a Movie Camera” — since it turns the idea of the camera into a vessel for studying the world. Though much of the material in “Cameraperson” is old, Johnson has undeniably created something refreshing and new. —EK

19. “Gunda”

Devoid of music or any other obvious artifice, “Gunda” neither aims to document animal consciousness or anthropomorphize it. Instead, Kossakovsky’s fascinating non-narrative experiment burrows into the center of his subject’s nervous system, meeting the creatures on their own terms in a remarkable plea for empathy that only implores carnivores to think twice by implication. —EK

18. “At Berkeley” (2013)

Frederick Wiseman has made 11 documentaries since the start of the 21st century, and any one of them could have earned a spot on this list — he may be well into his ’80s, but the vérité legend is still at the very top of his game, and his gift for rendering massive institutions on a human scale has only grown more acute over time. Of all his recent work, however, “At Berkeley” stands alone. As massive and sprawling as anything Wiseman has ever made, this four-hour portrait of life on the famous university campus might seem daunting at first, but it quickly blossoms into a fascinating and accessible non-fiction epic about the sheer magnitude of sustaining a school of that size.

17. “Waltz with Bashir” (2008)

Ari Folman’s tortured masterpiece is a difficult thing to classify, and not just because an animated documentary sounds like such a contradiction of terms. No, “Waltz with Bashir” is such a strange bird because it exists on the highly contested border between reality and imagination — it doesn’t belong to fact or fiction, but rather the hazy middle ground of memory.

First and foremost a performative act of remembering, the film follows Folman as he thinks back on his time as a 19-year-old soldier on the Israeli side of the 1982 Lebanon War and tries to shine some light into the voids that have since formed in the darkest recesses of his mind. Visiting his old war buddies, shooting their conversations on HD video, and then layering those encounters in a dream-like skin of Flash animation, Folman transforms a guilt-stained memoir into a singular portrait of history and all the ways in which it haunts us. Any number of films have been called “unforgettable,” but “Waltz with Bashir” examines what that distinction really means, and in doing so becomes one of the few films to genuinely earn it. —DE

16. “Fire of Love” (2022)

15. “Exit Through the Gift Shop” (2010)

From the moment elusive street artist Banksy appears on camera in “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” something seems fishy. With his face obscured by shadows and his real voice rendered unrecognizable by mechanical distortion, Banksy remains the mysterious figure he has always been. In “Exit,” the context of his anonymity shifts from public vandalism to cinema, an equally appropriate venue for creative tomfoolery. (Other critics have aptly compared it to Orson Welles’s 1974 essay film “F for Fake.”) Although the movie ostensibly tells a true story, much of what appears on screen raises the possibility of a trickster behind the scenes, expanding its allure.

14. “Grizzly Man” (2005)

It’s interesting that, after Werner Herzog had already been churning out essential cinema for more than 30 years, this was the movie that turned the German iconoclast into a household name (and sparked his eventual transmutation into an internet meme). Maybe it’s because self-fashioned bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell was the perfect Herzog hero, a fatally sincere eccentric whose hubris led him to defy nature at his own peril and convince himself that the world could reciprocate his love for it. Maybe it’s because his best friend was an adorable fox. Or maybe it’s because “Grizzly Man” contains one of the ultimate Herzog moments, a scene that brilliantly encapsulates so much of what there is to love about one of the most fiendishly gifted self-mythologizer in movie history.

13. “Bowling for Columbine” (2002)

Michael Moore’s shtick has definitely started to wear a little thin over the years, and recent efforts like “Where to Invade Next” and his election quickie “Michael Moore in Trumpland” have helped to cement the impression that the documentary world has outgrown the filmmaker whose work made it so appealing to the masses. Once upon a time, however, Moore was something of a blue-collar visionary, and his “aw shucks” everyman appeal still felt like it could pierce through the veil of America’s biggest problems by addressing them with a careful mixture of humor, outrage, and accessibility. If “Bowling for Columbine” remains his most urgent film, it’s not only because our country’s gun epidemic continues to go unchecked, but also because the shaggy firebrand has never been so indignant, nor armed with such a concrete argument.

From antagonizing Kmart to “ambushing” Charlton Heston and strolling through idyllic Canadian suburbs in order to illustrate America’s trigger-happy paranoia, Moore’s rhetoric is characteristically cartoonish, but it all contributes to a bulletproof case against a toxic culture of fear that grows deadlier by the day. —DE

12. “Senna” (2010)

11. “I Am Not Your Negro” (2016)

“I Am Not Your Negro” operates on many levels at once: It’s not only a fresh vessel for James Baldwin’s own analysis of black life in America, but a platform for his assessment of other great thinkers who informed his views. Raoul Peck, an undervalued Hatian filmmaker who has shifted between narrative and documentary projects for nearly 30 years, uses a remarkable foundation for this sweeping exploratory piece: a 30-page manuscript Baldwin wrote in 1979, as part of an uncompleted book project that delved into the lives of Medger Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. All three activists died before they turned 40; Baldwin worked alongside, then outlived, all of them.

The movie injects Baldwin’s voice through a voiceover performance by Samuel L. Jackson that’s one of his very best performances in ages, while Peck shifts between archival footage of his four subjects (including Baldwin) and contemporary moments to throw the timeless resonance of Baldwin’s words. It’s at once a perceptive history lesson and a resurrection. —EK

10. “The Look of Silence” (2015)

Intimate where “The Act of Killing” was flamboyant, and deeply bereft where Oppenheimer’s previous documentary was largely shellshocked, “The Look of Silence” is an eye-opening addendum to an atrocity that might be forgotten by now if not for the people who are still listening for its echoes. —DE

9. “Stories We Tell” (2013)

Until she made “Stories We Tell,” Sarah Polley was best known as an actress and narrative filmmaker, but this personal documentary consolidates all of Polley’s talents by blending intimacy and intrigue to remarkable effect. Part of the reason why “Stories We Tell” works so well is that at first it doesn’t seem like it should. Setting up interviews with her father, Michael, in addition for various family and friends, Polley embarks on an account of her actor-mother Diane, who died of cancer when Polley was still a child. While obviously heartfelt, the drama lacks an immediate hook for those unacquainted with Polley’s personal history, and she doesn’t back away from it. “Who the fuck cares about our family?” her sister asks, establishing a challenge that Polley cautiously navigates for the first 45 minutes before reaching a point where the allure is self-evident.

8. “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts”

America has been through a lot of traumas in the 21st century, from 9/11 to Donald Trump and the pandemic. No filmmaker has addressed them all with more pointed insight than Spike Lee. However, none of his timely projects has done more for magnifying sorrow, loss, and the resilience of communal spirit than this sprawling HBO documentary, a definitive look at the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina on the impoverished, mostly Black residents of New Orleans. With Terence Blanchard’s mournful score as its guide, “Levees” spend its four hours tracking every angle on the disaster through the eyes of the people most impacted by the damage.

7. “Time” (2020)

When an investor pulled out of their planned hip-hop clothing store in 1997, Louisiana couple Sibil “Fox Rich” Richardson and her husband Rob felt they had no choice but to hold-up a branch of the Shreveport Credit Union. It didn’t go well. Fox was sentenced to 19 years in jail, while Rob was given 65. Upon being released after 36 months in order to raise the couple’s six children, Fox began documenting their lives on grainy MiniDV so that Rob could watch his family grow up from behind bars. Almost two decades later, as the prospect of Rob’s early release began to seem possible, filmmaker Garrett Bradley began editing Fox’s footage into some of her own.

6. “Faces Places” (2017)

Agnès Varda, then 88 years old, may have been losing her eyesight when she partnered with the street artist JR for “Faces Places” in 2017, but her creative vision had never been clearer. And while this enormously funny, life-affirming, and altogether wonderful film would prove not to be her last — the summative “Varda by Agnès” followed in 2019, premiering just a few months before her death — it is nevertheless haunted by wistful notions of finality and impermanence.

5. “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” (2022) 

Nan Goldin was born to have a documentary made about her. The photographer and activist is the type of singular presence — flinty but warm, witty and insightful, radical and dedicated to her causes — that makes for a good lead, and “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” is a perfect portrait of the woman and her work. Interspersed with sections, told in Goldin’s narration and her photography work, chronicling her background and involvement in AIDS activism, Laura Poitras’ documentary centers itself around Goldin’s ongoing work during the opioid crisis, as she targets those responsible for the overprescription of OxyContin and the art world that continues to support them. Both Goldin’s past and her current campaign make for fascinating stories, and as told by the woman herself, they’re rousing celebrations of fighting against the injustices around you. —WC

4. “Flee” (2021) 

The animation serves a few purposes for the film: it helps keep Amin anonymous even as he shares his story with the world, but the dreamy, slippery art style and the occasional forays into abstraction are perfect for the story, portraying the fear, nostalgia, and longing within Amin’s account of the past. Once you watch “Flee,” you might wonder if most  documentaries should be animated.  —WC

3. “O.J.: Made in America” (2016)

Ezra Edelmen’s monolithic, eight-hour documentary contextualizes O.J. Simpson’s place in American history, crafting an indisputable argument as to why the Juice’s celebrity — and his crimes — have made him the perfect lens through which to comprehensively explore the role that race continues to play in this country. It’s no secret that Simpson’s murder trial was never just about the deaths of two innocent people, but this incredibly well-sourced and hypnotically compelling time capsule does a brilliant job of locating the iconic event in a continuum of oppression.

2. “This Is Not a Film” (2011)

By striking him down, the Iranian government made Jafar Panahi stronger than they could have possibly imagined. Already one of his country’s leading filmmakers before he was baselessly arrested for crimes against and sentenced to house arrest, Panahi took full advantage of his confinement, and proved that some artists are at their best when backed into a corner. Famously smuggled to Cannes on a USB stick that was buried inside a cake, “This Is Not a Film” is perhaps cinema’s greatest example of turning lemons into lemonade. Most of the movie consists of Panahi walking around his Tehran apartment with an iPhone in his hand, the great director growing stir-crazy as he talks through the script for his next project (eventually going so far as to diagram the sets on his floor), listens to the fireworks outside, and chats with the little boy who comes by to take out the trash.

1. “The Act of Killing” (2013)

Joshua Oppenheimer’s horrific look at the reverberations of the Indonesian genocide of the 1960’s adopts a terrifying perspective and never flinches: The filmmaker cedes screen time to the practitioners of military torture and lets them reenact their accomplishments. At once subversive and powerfully inquisitive, the movie probes the essence of evil by giving it the floor, and lets its vile subjects convict themselves.

“The Act of Killing” is one of the most unsettling movies ever made in part because it’s so audacious, allowing its subjects to produce exuberant musicals and fantasy productions glorifying their efforts as if dragging us into the center of their psychosis. Oppenheimer doesn’t exactly come up for air, but he does find a memorable road to getting real, when one of the men finally grapples with the horrific nature of his deeds and words fail him. By that point, audiences can relate. —EK

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The secret history of the essay film

Charting the resurgence of ‘sort of documentaries’ to celebrate chris marker, king of the essay film.

“Essay films are arguably the most innovative and popular form of filmmaking since the 1990s,” wrote Timothy Corrigan in his notable 2011 book,  The Essay Film . True, perhaps, but mention of the genre to your average joe won’t spark the instant recognition of today’s romcoms, sci-fis and period dramas. The thing is, essay films have been around since the dawn of cinema: they emerged not long after the  Lumière brothers  recorded the first ever motion pictures of Lyonnaise factory workers in 1894, yet their definition is still ambiguous.

They are similar to documentary and non-fiction film in that they are often based in reality, using words, images and sounds to convey a message. But according to Chris Darke – co-curator of the Whitechapel Gallery’s current retrospective  of the great essay filmmaker Chris Marker – it is “the personal aspect and style of address” that makes the essay film distinct. It is this flexibility that has appealed to contemporary filmmakers, permitting a fresh, nuanced viewing experience.

Geoff Andrew, a senior programmer at the BFI who helped curate last year’s landmark essay film season, explained, “they are sort of documentaries, sort of non-fiction films.” The issue is that some filmmakers try to provide an objective point of view when it is just not possible. “There’s always somebody manipulating footage and manipulating reality to present some sort of message.” Andrew continued, “So, in a way, all documentaries are essay films.”

But the essay film is particularly resurgent these days, with filmmakers like Michael Moore , Werner Herzog , and Nick Broomfield  molding the genre in their own ways. Their popularity isn’t just due to incendiary topics like men getting eaten by bears as in Herzog’s Grizzly Man  and high school massacres as in Moore’s Bowling for Columbine ; essay films are capable of compelling beauty. Now, with the Whitechapel Gallery ’s retrospective of the late Frenchman, Chris Marker , arguably the greatest essay filmmaker there’s ever been, we take a look at the essay film’s secret history.

1909  -  D. W. Griffith ’s   A Corner in Wheat

Considered by some to be the first essay film ever, A Corner in Wheat  is a little subversive thorn in the side of the man. Lasting only 14 minutes, it tells the tale of a ruthless crop gambler who amasses riches by monopolising the wheat market, exploits the agricultural poor, and is promptly killed under a pile of his own grain. Think twice, greedy capitalists.

1929  -   Dziga  Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera

“The film drama is the opium of the people,” proclaimed Soviet film pioneer  Dziga Vertov , “down with Bourgeois fairy-tale scenarios.” He was the most radical of his fellow Soviet filmmaker compatriots, and Man with a Movie Camera  was his masterpiece. In it, he tried to create an “international language of cinema” through a beguiling mix of jump cuts, split screens and superimpositions. Vertov’s idea was to uncover the artifice of filmmaking, with one scene of the film depicting a cameraman inside a giant beer.

1940  -  Hans Richter’s The Film Essay

The term “essay film” was originally coined by German artist Hans Richter, who wrote in his 1940 paper, The Film Essay : “The film essay enables the filmmaker to make the ‘invisible’ world of thoughts and ideas visible on the screen... The essay film produces complex thought – reflections that are not necessarily bound to reality, but can also be contradictory, irrational, and fantastic.” So while World War II was blazing away, a new cinema was born.

1982  - Chris  Marker’s Sans Soleil

You know that this brilliant, freewheeling travelogue is something special when it suggests that Pac-Man is “a perfect graphic metaphor for the human condition.” It takes in anti-colonial struggles, sumo wrestling, a volcanic eruption in Iceland, the antiquities of the Vatican, Marker’s love of cats and more. An unnamed female narrates a circuitous journey from Africa to Japan, in an engaging style never seen before. Some might say he laid down a marker.

1993  -  Derek Jarman’s Blue

Diagnosed with HIV and beginning to lose his eyesight, Jarman  decided to turn his illness into his art. Although the premise of nothing but a dim, blue background accompanied by voiceovers for 79 minutes might not seem enthralling, it really is. Jarman recalls memories of his past lovers, and his current life of endless pill-popping, with a poignant score by Brian Eno  and Simon Fisher Turner .

1998 - Jean -Luc  Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema

Comprised of hundreds of clips of films, music and poetry, this eight part series – that took over a decade to make – remained a secret seen only at a precious few film festivals thanks to the gargantuan amount of rights needed to be cleared. Histoire(s) du cinema is an epic of free association whose central theme is voyeurism, since Godard believes that cinema consists of a man looking at a woman. Harriet Andersson , topless and alluring on a beach in Ingmar Bergman ’s Monika , is one of many examples.

2004  -  Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11

The most successful documentary at the US box office ever, Fahrenheit 9/11  is a prime example of the essay film’s wild popularisation (it also won the Palme d’Or  at Cannes). Michael Moore ’s swipe at the Republican jugular was a classic example of the essay filmmaker’s prominence, outrightly mocking President George W. Bush and questioning the fairness of his election. Disney refused to distribute the film, and the rest is history.

2010  -  Errol Morris’ Tabloid

Tabloid is the outrageous story of a former Miss Wyoming, Joyce McKinney, who was alleged to have kidnapped an American mormon missionary living in England, handcuffed him to a bed in a Devonshire cottage and made him a sex slave. The woman claimed she was saving the man from a cult, but then fleed to Canada wearing a red wig, where she posed as part of a mime troupe. As ever, Errol Morris  deftly offers alternate explanations, which led to McKinney suing him after the release of the film.

2014  -  Hito Steyerl’s How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educationa l

After touring galleries of the world and a recent stint at the ICA, Hito Steyerl ’s How Not To Be Seen made waves as “an art for our times”. It is a disembowelling satire that mocks the idea that it we can become invisible and have genuine privacy, in this digital age. If we want to disappear, it suggests, we should become poor, or hide in plain sight, or get “disappeared” by the authorities.

Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat is on until 22 June at  Whitechapel Gallery

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Stream These Three Great Documentaries

This month’s picks include a personal essay on tobacco, an experimental look at pieces of the Berlin Wall and a chronicle of a revolt in Wukan, China.

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By Ben Kenigsberg

The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we’ll choose three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.

‘Bright Leaves’ (2004)

Stream it on Amazon (with a Fandor subscription) , Kanopy and Ovid .

The personal-essay documentary is a mode that might seem like navel-gazing, but Ross McElwee ( “Sherman’s March” ) has a way of making his investigations of himself and of his family disarming, accessible and profound. In “Bright Leaves,” McElwee, a longtime Boston-area resident (he teaches filmmaking at Harvard ), returns to his native North Carolina for a “periodic transfusion of Southernness.” After the Civil War, his great-grandfather John Harvey McElwee made a killing growing a variety of tobacco called bright-leaf tobacco. But he may have been cheated out of his fortune by a rival, James Buchanan Duke (for whose father Duke University was named). McElwee learns from a cousin that a major film, “Bright Leaf” (1950), starred Gary Cooper as a tobacco manufacturer possibly based on their great-grandfather.

While John Harvey McElwee didn’t achieve lasting success, McElwee is troubled that his forebear may have made a substantial contribution to tobacco addiction worldwide. In voice-over, McElwee reflects on the fact that his grandfather, father and brother all became doctors: “John Harvey McElwee may not have left my ancestors any money, but by helping to hook the local population on tobacco, he did leave behind a sort of agricultural-pathological trust fund.” The filmmaker examines tobacco’s contradictory place in the state’s culture. On one hand, those bright leaves are a source of beauty and a treasured economic institution. On the other, he visits patients who have been hooked on a product that his great-grandfather helped popularize. (In a darkly funny running joke, two of McElwee’s friends — a couple — repeatedly vow on camera to quit smoking but never manage to do so.)

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The 64 Best Documentaries of All Time

These essential films document crime, celebrity, the justice system, and more.

Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. We may earn a commission from these links.

You’ll find music-world documentaries featuring Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain along with a deep dive into New York’s ballroom scene. Eager for more of an adventure? Try Paris Is Burning and Free Solo. If you’re simply looking for a true-crime story, we’ve provided plenty of options here. (We highly recommend O.J: Made in America .)

Without further ado, here are the sixty-four best documentaries of all time, in no particular order.

Grizzly Man

Grizzly Man is a beautiful, harrowing film by director Werner Herzog about the life and death of Timothy Treadwell. He was killed—along with his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard—while camping in Alaskan brown-bear territory. Herzog intercuts interviews with Treadwell’s surviving friends and other locals from the area with footage shot by the survivalist himself. Treadwell had extensive video captured from his years of camping among the bears. It’s a must-watch.

Gates of Heaven

Errol Morris’s first-ever feature film examines the pet-cemetery business, featuring a peculiar family that operates one. He also interviews several grieving pet owners about their recent losses. It’s a strange but stirring movie that uses this odd subject matter to start some fascinating conversations about mortality.

Watch on YouTube

Encounters at the End of the World

In Encounters at the End of the World , Werner Herzog explores several research stations in Antarctica, interviewing the people who work there. Since most of us will never get to see our southernmost continent, the area Herzog navigates truly feels like an alien world. Complete with his signature narration, this really is one of the great documentaries about a captivating environment.

14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible

This epic mountaineering doc stars the Nepali climber Nirmal Purja —and the team around him—as he attempts to scale all eight-thousand-meter peaks in the world. It’s a gripping story, sure, but the filmmaking makes you feel like you’re with Purja every step of the way. Hell, he and his team even rescue a stranded climber.

Watch on Netflix

Holy Hell is a chilling documentary about the filmmaker Will Allen, who embedded in the United States cult Buddhafield. The film looks at the cult's members with a uniquely personal and empathetic perspective that we haven’t seen in many other cult-themed documentaries.

Watch on Tubi

Shirkers is an investigative documentary that tracks something totally unexpected. It’s a road movie that the director and her friends shot in Singapore—before her American filmmaking mentor left the country with all of the 16mm film. Director Sandi Tan takes us on a sad but lovely journey, and it’s one of the best documentaries about young creativity ever made.

Jodorowsky’s Dune

We’ve seen documentaries about challenging film-production experiences, but what about a preproduction doc for a film that never saw the light of day? Jodorowsky’s Dune is an endlessly engrossing look at the development process through the eyes of cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky. The director takes us through his conception of a massively ambitious Dune adaptation involving music from Pink Floyd, art from H.R. Giger, and what-if cast members such as Salvador Dalí, Mick Jagger, and Orson Welles.

Watch on Amazon Prime Video

The Beatles: Eight Days a Week—The Touring Years

Eight Days a Wee k takes you back to the height of bowl-cut Beatlemania, with gorgeously restored archival footage of the band’s touring years—from the crew hitting the road in 1962 to the final concert in San Francisco in 1966.

Watch on Hulu

Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond

Even if you haven’t seen Jim Carrey’s performance as Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon , this is an excellent behind-the-scenes film about Carrey’s process. He developed a deep relationship with the character and had trouble separating himself from it. Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond is a perfectly balanced combination of modern interviews, footage from the Man on the Moon set, and great moments from Kaufman’s career.

The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley

Alex Gibney’s documentary chronicles the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes’s former blood-testing company, Theranos, leading to fraud charges for the young founder. The film is a great examination not just of the ambitious entrepreneur behind Theranos but also of the employees, investors, whistleblowers, and journalists involved.

Watch on Max

Fire of Love

Fire of Love boasts some of the most epic archival footage of any documentary out there, recounting the love story of the volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft—who were pioneers of studying lava flows up close.

Watch on Hulu Watch on Disney+

Stories We Tell

Director Sarah Polley, who won a screenwriting Oscar for 2022’s Women Talking , turns the camera on herself and her family history for this 2012 documentary. The result is more profound and mind-blowing than you might expect. This is an absolute must-see—and it’s available for anyone to watch for free on YouTube Movies.

This explosive 2020 documentary provides an account of the FBI’s investigation and harassment of Martin Luther King Jr. in an attempt to lessen his influence on the civil-rights movement. It was all exposed in newly declassified documents—and MLK/FBI interviews with historians and figures involved in the situation.

Particle Fever

This incredible science documentary focuses on Switzerland’s Large Hadron Collider—where theoretical physicists attempt to get ambitious physics experiments up and running. Particle Feve r is a phenomenal achievement in communicating scientific theories, somehow making the process of following the collider’s experiments extremely thrilling and watchable.

Watch on The Roku Channel Watch on YouTube

March of the Penguins

Not only was March of the Penguins a legitimate cultural phenomenon when it debuted in 2005, it’s one of the greatest nature documentaries the world has ever seen, too. Seriously: Who thought the weird, waddling mating season of the penguin could make us tear up? Oh, and before we forget, March of the Penguins features the holy grail of a twenty-first-century documentary: narration by none other than Morgan Freeman.

Watch on Amazon Prime Video Watch on Apple TV+

When We Were Kings

Some sports buffs might disagree, but When We Were Kings is to Muhammad Ali as The Last Dance is to Michael Jordan. That is: If you need a reminder of the boxing legend’s greatness (both as an activist and an athlete), look no further than the day-by-day account of his trip to Kinshasa, Zaire, for the “Rumble in the Jungle” with George Foreman.

Watch on The Criterion Channel

Minding the Gap

History will look kindly upon the Academy for giving Minding the Gap an Oscar nomination back in 2018. In filming his best friends over a period of twelve years, Bing Liu conceived a heartbreaking coming-of-age story that punches hard — and will stick with you for years after you’ve seen it (even if you remember it only for its stellar skateboarding photography). Or at least until Liu, who is primed to become a legitimate filmmaking star, premieres his next effort.

Won't You Be My Neighbor?

If there’s one documentary on this list that will have you involuntarily bawling your eyes out, it’s Won’t You Be My Neighbor? The documentary profiles late children’s television star Fred Rogers , whose show, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, affected millions of young (and old!) lives.

If you like it when your documentaries make you sweat , then hey, Free Solo will have you heading for the shower afterward. The film chronicles rock climber Alex Honnold’s ascent to the top of the treacherous El Capitan in Yosemite National Park ... without ropes, harnesses, any of that pesky protective stuff. So yeah! Watching Free Solo is the equivalent of sixty minutes of sitting in a sauna.

Watch on Disney+ Watch on Amazon Prime Video Watch on Hulu

The Last Waltz

Back in the seventies, Martin Scorsese captured Canadian rock group the Band’s final show. The performance included appearances from Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, and Joni Mitchell, making for an all-timer of a concert film.

Watch on Amazon Prime Video Watch on Tubi

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9/11, 20 Years Later: 17 Essential Documentaries to Watch

Men hold Taliban flags in a still image from the July 2021 special report "Leaving Afghanistan," one of 17 essential documentaries from FRONTLINE's two decades of covering 9/11 and its aftermath.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Al Qaeda operatives carried out the deadliest terror attacks on America in the country’s history, killing nearly 3,000 people and injuring thousands more.

Today the complex legacy of the attacks and the U.S.’s ensuing “war on terror” is still unfolding, from the bloody conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond to division and distrust at home.

As the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks approaches, these 17 documentaries — selected from two decades of extensive FRONTLINE reporting — probe that fateful day, investigate the cascade of decisions that followed and trace the lasting impact on America and the world.

Together, these films chronicle the intelligence failures that preceded and followed Sept. 11; the toll of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on civilians there, as well as on U.S. troops; the CIA’s use of torture; the deployment of a secret surveillance apparatus within the U.S.; the rise of ISIS; and an erosion of the American public’s trust in the U.S. government and democratic institutions that continues to this day.

These films are now streaming below, as part of our digital collection and on the PBS Video app — several for the first time in years. Many are available to watch on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel, with more films added biweekly through Sept. 11, 2021.

The Man Who Knew (2002)

Among those who died when the twin towers fell on 9/11 was a former FBI counterterrorism agent who was convinced the U.S. should kill Osama bin Laden before Al Qaeda attacked America. John O’Neill had led a six-year fight to track down and prosecute Al Qaeda operatives around the world, but he was a controversial figure inside the agency. Filmmakers Michael Kirk and Jim Gilmore chronicled O’Neill’s struggle to convince the FBI to pay attention to the threat posed by Al Qaeda before he died in an attack carried out by that very organization.

In Search of Al Qaeda (2002)

In December 2001, as American forces blasted mountain hideouts in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan, hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters fled, seemingly disappearing into thin air. Martin Smith, Marcela Gaviria and Scott Anger traveled to the Gulf of Oman, into the border regions and cities of Pakistan, and on to Saudi Arabia and Yemen to investigate what happened to Al Qaeda. Where did its members find sanctuary? Had the network been scattered and rendered ineffective — or were they regrouping and planning more attacks?

Truth, War & Consequences  (2003)

Martin Smith and Marcela Gaviria traced the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq back to the days immediately following 9/11, when then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered a special intelligence operation to quietly begin looking for evidence that would justify a war to remove Iraq’s leader Saddam Hussein from power. The film asked tough questions about the George W. Bush administration’s claims that Hussein posed an imminent threat to the Western world and traced how inadequate planning for the post-Hussein era created conditions for continuing violence.

Beyond Baghdad (2004)

In the summer of 2003, as violence against the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq spiked, the top U.S. administrator there, L. Paul Bremer, told Martin Smith the press needed to go outside the capital city to see the progress being made in the country. Accepting Bremer’s challenge, Smith, Marcela Gaviria and Scott Anger crossed Iraq, taking a hard look at the social and political realities. The film revealed a seriously fractured country, where modest successes in nation-building had been offset by widespread interethnic and sectarian violence.

The Soldier’s Heart (2005)

A 2004 U.S. Army-commissioned study found that one in six veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was suffering from PTSD. Yet fear had kept many from seeking help. Filmmaker Raney Aronson-Rath, now FRONTLINE’s executive producer, explored how, for some, the return home could be as painful as war itself and asked whether the U.S. government was doing enough to help.

Obama’s War (2009)

Martin Smith and Marcela Gaviria traveled across Afghanistan and Pakistan to see firsthand how President Barack Obama’s counterterrorism strategy was unfolding. In addition to interviewing top U.S. commanders on the ground, the film team embedded with a Marine company in Helmand, then the most lethal battlefield in the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. FRONTLINE found the Marines trying to act as armed diplomats, attempting to build trust for badly needed economic development .

Kill/Capture (2011)

Following the May 2011 death of Osama bin Laden, Dan Edge and Stephen Grey investigated the United States’ campaign of targeted killing. The filmmakers made contact with Taliban leaders and the U.S. Special Forces targeting them in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, examining reports of civilian casualties. The documentary raised questions about long-term consequences and whether, after almost 10 years of war, the U.S. could leave Afghanistan.

United States of Secrets (2014)

When the National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden downloaded and leaked tens of thousands of documents about a secret, extensive U.S. government surveillance program, it sparked a fierce debate over privacy, technology and democracy in the post-9/11 world. In this two-part series, FRONTLINE traced the lengths taken to hide the program from the public.

Part 1, “The Program,” from Michael Kirk, Jim Gilmore and Mike Wiser, explored a massive domestic-surveillance dragnet designed to disrupt terrorist attacks before they occurred that relied on the warrantless collection of millions of phone records, including those of American citizens.

Part 2, “Privacy Lost,” from Martin Smith, investigated the ways Silicon Valley played a role in the NSA’s dragnet and how tech giants reacted when the government asked them to turn over data on millions of ordinary Americans.

Losing Iraq (2014)

As ISIS burst onto the world stage and seized vast swaths of territory in Iraq more than two years after President Obama pulled U.S. troops out, Michael Kirk, Jim Gilmore and Mike Wiser traced how the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, its aftermath and decisions by the Bush and Obama administrations contributed to Iraq reaching that point.

The Rise of ISIS (2014)

Reporting from Iraq as U.S. airstrikes against ISIS began, Martin Smith examined the buildup of unheeded warnings, failures and missed opportunities that allowed Al Qaeda in Iraq to become ISIS. From Smith and Linda Hirsch, the film offered a revelatory look at how ISIS grew, gained strength in Syria, and how it developed and funded its brutal strategy.

Secrets, Politics and Torture (2015)

The story of the fight over the CIA’s controversial “enhanced interrogation” methods, now widely described as torture, used on detainees at U.S.-operated black sites. Based on declassified documents and interviews with key political leaders and CIA insiders, this film from Michael Kirk, Mike Wiser and Jim Gilmore unspooled dueling versions of history: one laid out by the CIA, which maintained its program was successful in combating terrorism, and one by the Senate, whose investigation found the program to be brutal, mismanaged and ineffective.

The Secret History of ISIS  (2016)

How was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, once a small-time criminal, able to build the foundation for the brutal terrorist organization that would become ISIS? Michael Kirk, Mike Wiser and Jim Gilmore examined how Zarqawi developed what would become the ISIS playbook under the U.S. government’s nose. The film also explored how a successor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, followed Zarqawi’s method to make ISIS even more powerful.

Taliban Country (2020)

Najibullah Quraishi, a journalist born and raised in Afghanistan, provided an on-the-ground look at the Taliban’s resurgence in the country and the threat posed by ISIS in this film with Jamie Doran — the team also behind 2015’s ISIS in Afghanistan . Quraishi interviewed Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s chief negotiator in peace talks with the Trump administration, pressing Baradar on how the Taliban would exercise its power if the U.S. left and whether the group had moderated its hardline policies toward women and girls.

Once Upon a Time in Iraq (2020)

The story of the Iraq War and its aftermath, told by those who lived through it — from a woman who was 6 years old when coalition troops entered Baghdad to a cadet in the Iraqi army who survived an ISIS massacre that killed 1,700 of his peers. In this two-hour documentary from James Bluemel, Iraqis shared their personal accounts of life under Saddam Hussein, the U.S.-led invasion of their country and the subsequent years of chaos.

Leaving Afghanistan   (2021)

With President Joe Biden ordering the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan after nearly 20 years of war, Najibullah Quraishi returned to report with Jamie Doran on the Taliban’s advance, Iran’s ambitions and rising fears of sectarian civil war in an increasingly unstable country.

In the Shadow of 9/11 (2021)

This two-hour film from Dan Reed explored the case of the Liberty City Seven, a group of Black men from Miami accused of planning an Al Qaeda plot to blow up U.S. buildings. Their indictment marked the federal government’s first major post-9/11 counterterrorism sting within the U.S., although the men had no weapons and never communicated with anyone from Al Qaeda. The film raised questions about the FBI’s use of informants and offered a window into the desperate search to confront the terror threat at home.

America After 9/11 (2021)

From Michael Kirk, Mike Wiser, Philip Bennett, Jim Gilmore and Gabrielle Schonder, this two-hour documentary traces the U.S. response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the devastating consequences across four presidencies. Drawing on new interviews and dozens of documentaries Kirk and his team have made in the years since 9/11, the film re-examines the decisions that ushered in an era of fear, division and mistrust, exposing the roots of the Jan. 6 insurrection and the ongoing challenge 9/11 poses for the U.S. president and the country.

In addition to streaming above, as part of our digital collection and on the PBS Video app — several for the first time in years — many of these documentaries are available to watch now on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel, with more films added biweekly through Sept. 11, 2021. 

Patrice Taddonio , Senior Digital Writer , FRONTLINE

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Best Documentary Essay Examples & Topics

Watching documentaries is a great way to learn new things. These are films that shape and interpret facts for education and entertainment of their viewers. It has several social functions, which are to record, preserve, and reveal, and persuade. This form of motion films also aims to entertain and educate.

If you are struggling to write a good documentary essay, our experts have combined some helpful tips for you here. So, no need to worry.

First and foremost, you should find a topic . Focus on something you are genuinely passionate about. Think about the cause that matters to you: maybe it’s climate change, slavery, environmental cause, ocean pollution, or perhaps it’s something else. It is essential to find something that speaks to you. This way, you won’t struggle with composing your paper.

You can also find a list of essay topics for your documentary research below, checking our samples. Yet, to pick the right idea, we first need to understand what film types are available.

There are several genres of documentaries:

• Expository documentaries. Such films present objective information with a ubiquitous presence. The filmmaker usually does not appear on the screen.
• Poetic documentaries. They rely heavily on images and music rather than narration. That is to say, there is little verbal communication with the audience.
• Essayistic documentaries. These movies feature an essay-like narration. The filmmaker relies both on speech and on the images to make their point.
• Observational documentaries. They try to demonstrate an objective record of some activity. It almost does not have music and narration and tries to present the event as-it-is.
• Participatory documentaries. The films are the complete opposite of observational ones. The filmmaker is an active participant in the movie. They appear on the screen and communicate the subject.
• Performance documentaries. These movies feature a dramatic performance. It can be a concert, a play, or another performance event recorded in the form of a documentary.
• Interview films. These are the records of a conversation between two or more people. It relies on communication on-screen to deliver the message rather than on images and music.
• Dramatization. This type recreates an event using actors to bring the viewer to the event. Some argue that it is not a form of documentary.
• Mixed documentaries. The films use different modes and techniques. It can combine poetic, expository, interview modes at the same time.
• Animation films. Such movies are standard, too, and their most distinctive feature is the use of animation to present the material.

As for your documentary essay assignment, you can be asked to work with any documentary. Let’s figure out what tasks you will need to fulfill beforehand.

Not everyone understands the difference between a movie review and a movie analysis when watching movies and writing essays about the material. Sometimes these two terms are used interchangeably. Nevertheless, when it comes to grading and evaluating the paper, this difference is essential.

• A film review essay is a “consumer-oriented” judgment that aims to recommend (or not) a movie. One can find documentary review essay examples in the newspapers, websites, or online databases.
• An analysis of the film usually offers an interpretation and an evaluation of the movie. Some film theory is generally used as a framework to analyze and interpret the feature.

You can center your documentary essay assignment around not only a specific film but an entire genre of documentaries. You might be asked to write about a specific topic or an aspect of one movie in depth. Let’s try to see how it works!

When you are asked to write an essay about a documentary, there are expectations. You will need to analyze specific elements in one film or a few.

No matter what your assignment is, we are here to help you nail it! Here is a short guide on how to write a documentary essay:

• Watch the documentary (and take notes) . We highly recommended watching the film several times before you start writing anything. Throughout this process, you should take notes to recall essential elements later on. Schematically express your ideas and arguments.
• Choose your perspective. You need to understand the approach you will be using. However, your position should be supported by the examples and ideas from the film. Search for what others think and say on a similar issue and compare it to your thoughts.
• Pick what to discuss. After that, you need to start collecting the examples and ideas from the movie that support your viewpoint. All these elements should eventually connect to the main focus of your paper. You can try to do some additional research but do not forget to return to the movie continually.
• Outline your essay. The outline will help you stay within the word limit. This way, you’ll structure your thoughts and ideas on the paper before you start your essay. Plus, you will remain close to the intended format while writing.
• Write it! Start with a brief introduction about the documentary and your thesis statement at the end of it. Then, evaluate the film, developing your arguments logically. In your conclusion, restate your position on the matter and list the critical points discussed.

Thank you for reading this article till the very end! We hope you found it helpful. Share this page with those who need our help. For your inspiration, you can check the list of documentary essay examples below.

• The roles of documentaries in culture
• The history of documentary film
• Documentary and propaganda
• Documentaries with and without words: compare and contrast
• Narration styles in modern documentaries
• Pseudo-documentary as a genre
• The role of documentary films in education
• Ethnographic film and its role in social science
• Documentary in the era of social-media platforms
• The ethics of documentary film

376 Documentary Essay Examples

“the corporation” a film by mark achbar, jennifer abbott and joel bakan, the corporation documentary essay: reflection paper on the 2003 movie, themes in ava duvernay’s “13th”.

• Words: 1181

“The American Factory”: Plot and Issues Portrayed

• Words: 1069

Smartest Guys in the Room

• Words: 1969

Scene Analysis from “Finding Dawn” by Christine Welsh

• Words: 1120

“Forks Over Knives” Documentary and Its Influence

“factory city: eupa”: how the documentary can be helpful, film review “see what i’m saying: the deaf entertainers documentary”, “babel” and “super size me”: documentaries analysis.

• Words: 2286

“Sicko” a Documentary by Michael Moore

“supreme revenge: battle for the court”: documentary analysis.

• Words: 1378

“Commanding Heights: The Battle of World Economy” Documentary

• Words: 1842

“Battle of the Brains: The Case for Multiple Intelligences” by BBCW

Fela kuti: music is the weapon.

• Words: 1393

The 2008 Banking Crisis in the Documentary “Inside Job”

• Words: 1412

“Capitalism: A Love Story” by Michael Moore

• Words: 1723

Reflection Paper: “Blood Diamonds-The True Story” by Schmuddelginger

“the game changers” documentary by james cameron.

• Words: 1669

The Documentary “Waiting Room”

What the bleep do we know (2004).

• Words: 3663

The Documentary “The Human Element” by James Balog

• Words: 1740

Hot Coffee Documentary

“the 13th” documentary directed by ava duvernay, the documentary “the american nurse” by carolyn jones, a girl in the river (2015): facilitating change in the community.

• Words: 1204

“Refrigerator Mothers”: Documentary Analysis

The century of the self: video summary, “mount everest: into the death zone” documentary, “the corporation” documentary analysis, documentary: “the journey of man, a genetic odyssey”, the speaking in tongues documentary overview.

• Words: 1396

“A Beautiful Mind” Directed by Ron Howard

• Words: 1682

Finding Dawn (2006): Violence Against Indigenous Women

• Words: 1072

“Let’s Talk About Sex” and “Sex & Sexuality”: Summary and Themes

Mcdonald’s ethics in super-size me documentary, terms and conditions may apply documentary, “the supreme court: home to america’s highest court” documentary, suicide: “the bridge” documentary by e. steele, hbo documentary risky drinking, the documentary “age 7 in america” by phil joanou, documentary “the medicated child” by marcela gaviria, justice in errol morris’s the thin blue line film.

• Words: 2805

The Documentary Film “Flow: For Love of Water”

Themes in “i am” documentary by tom shadyac, the documentary “supplements and safety”, 21st century hackers – documentary review, the documentary “triumph of the nerds”, “banksy’s exit through the gift shop” documentary, a state of mind: film analysis.

• Words: 1200

Planet Earth in the Documentary “Pole to Pole”

• Words: 1127

Film Analysis on The Inside Job Movie by Charles Fergusson

The “after the mayflower: we shall remain” documentary, the “who’s counting” documentary on economics, “when the levees broke” by spike lee, the documentary “inequality for all”, documentary movie analysis: “jesus camp”, “an inconvenient truth” by al gore documentary, the fog of war by robert s. mcnamara documentary, the film baraka and its spiritual reflections, the movie life and debt.

• Words: 1359

Newsom’s The Mask You Live In Documentary Review

The great hack documentary by amer & noujaim.

• Words: 1192

“Born into Brothels” Documentary Analysis

“the crooked e: the unshredded truth about enron” film, jobs & technology: “in the age of ai” documentary, “wal-mart: the high cost of low price” by robert greenwald.

• Words: 1047

The Documentary “Taboo: Blood Bonds”

Jero: a balinese trance séance documentary.

• Words: 1122

The Film “We Were Soldiers”

• Words: 1202

The Movie “Color of Fear”

Waiting for superman, documentary film “the big one” by michael moore, “examined life”, cornel west – summary and analysis, the “they call us monsters” film analysis.

• Words: 1116

“Mickey Mouse Goes to Haiti” by the National Labor Committee

Documentary review: kony 2012, gillo pontecorvo’s “battle of algiers”, frantz fanon’s “concerning violence” and hannah arendt’s “reflection on violence”.

• Words: 1673

“Bus 174” Children: Oppressed, Neglected, and Stigmatised

• Words: 1564

Flash Point History Documentary About the Black Death

• Words: 1097

Elizabeth Leiter’s The Abortion Divide Review

• Words: 1023

Arguments of “The Corporation” Documentary

The documentary “anthropocene: the human epoch”.

• Words: 1503

Human Consciousness: Mirror Self-Recognition Test

The documentary “murder to mercy: the cyntoia brown story”, the “central park five” documentary, “inside ayurvedic medicine”: representing the aspects of ayurveda, “the spirit of crazy horse”: the pbs documentary, “the house we live in” by california newsreel, frozen planet documentary in natural sciences, “baraka” by ron fricke, documentary film definition, “inside job” documentary by charles ferguson, the documentary “the lost libraries of timbuktu”.

• Words: 1254

The Documentary “Last Train Home”

• Words: 1385

Documentary Films Concept and Definition

• Words: 1356

“The 11th Hour” Environmental Documentary

“daughter from danang” a film by gail dolgin, “please vote for me”.

• Words: 1136

Why We Fight by Eugene Jarecki Documentary

Documentary “an inconvenient truth” by davis guggenheim, “helvetica” by gary hustwit, peace and conflict resolution in “the fog of war” movie, the summary of harvest of empire, no rest for the wicked, documentary “super size me”, the “kids behind bars” documentary review, “touching the void” by kevin macdonald, “a day without a mexican” mockumentary by s. arau, beyond the nuclear family, the film “in dreams awake” by e. commons, overview of documentary websites.

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“Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise” Documentary Analysis

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The Documentary “A Thousand Roads” by Chris Eyre

The “fyre festival” documentary by chris smith.

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Summary of “The T Word” Documentary by Laverne Cox

The “ten billion” documentary reaction, the documentary “scared straight 1999” by bob niemack, episode 1 of “unnatural causes” documentary, the rise of the mammals documentary.

The 50 Best Documentaries of All Time

1. Blackfish

2. Exit Through the Gift Shop

3. Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father

4. Grizzly Man

6. O.J.: Made in America

7. Free Solo

8. The Act of Killing

10. Hoop Dreams

11. Night and Fog

12. Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills

13. Man on Wire

14. Bowling for Columbine

15. The Thin Blue Line

16. George Harrison: Living in the Material World

17. Searching for Sugar Man

19. Inside Job

20. Won't You Be My Neighbor?

21. Armadillo

22. The Cove

23. They Shall Not Grow Old

25. Fantastic Fungi

More to explore, recently viewed.

The Best Documentaries of 2023

Here’s a brief history of documentary moviegoing.

In the 1960s, the documentary as we know it was being invented, but hardly anyone saw them. In the ’70s and ’80s, a new generation of masters — Barbara Kopple, Ken Burns, Errol Morris, Claude Lanzmann — came to the fore, and mainstream audiences began to take notice. In the ’90s, people at film festivals starting saying things like, “The documentaries are the best part!” And now?

We think of each of the films on this list as a kind of moviegoing adventure. Today, the sheer range of nonfiction film — the subjects, the styles, the voices — is extraordinary in its reach. Does that mean that we’re in a renaissance era? You might say that. But you could also say that when it comes to this form of filmmaking, the art of reality knows no season.

To see Variety’s collection of the best films of 2023, read here.

American Symphony

In Matthew Heineman’s lovely portrait of an artist and a marriage, Jon Batiste, with his inner light that doesn’t seem to have an off switch, comes across as the most ebullient performer in all of popular music. Yet he’s dealing with grim stuff behind the grin. His wife, Suleika Jaouad, is waging a war against recurring leukemia, and Batiste is having his own skirmishes with anxiety and panic attacks related to her illness, even as he’s making headlines as the surprise Grammy hoarder of 2022. “American Symphony” gets into some of the lesser battles Batiste is facing, like resentment from the classical world as he prepares the film’s title work for its world premiere at Carnegie Hall. The movie’s ultimate inconclusiveness feels like a feature, not a flaw: Music is forever, and so is chemo, in some cases. Holding those elements in balance is one way to create a symphony. —Chris Willman  

Not enough directors have capitalized on the ability of 3D to convey a sense of physical depth; fewer still have seized on the possibility of adding philosophical depth. Thank goodness, then, for Wim Wenders, whose tour-de-force 3D 6K portrait of the artist Anselm Kiefer is both rich in ideas and breathtaking in technical execution. We see Kiefer using flamethrowers to torch and distress his materials, and we experience the brutal beauty of molten metal destroying the surfaces Kiefer ladles it onto. The stereoscopy and sharp focus push our noses into the physical texture of the work, while also pulling us forward and backwards through time. Time is the film’s fourth dimension, as it presents each of Kiefer’s past selves overlapping, sometimes literally, with the images functioning as both eye and mind’s eye. —Catherine Bray

Beyond Utopia 

As you watch Madeleine Gavin’s staggering film, which is about what really goes on in North Korea, and about a handful of desperate souls who attempt to defect from there, you see life inside the totalitarian cult state — the full nightmare of the place — as never before. The filmmaker got ahold of forbidden footage that was smuggled out of the country. She uses it to make the case that North Korea is a place of such relentless terror that the only country it’s comparable to is Nazi Germany. But the film also chronicles, with footage shot on a cell phone, the attempt by five members of a family to leave this bad dream of a nation, and their escape story has a scary, suck-in-your-breath suspense. In recent years, North Korea’s nuclear weapons, with the mobster-autocrat Kim Jong Un in charge, have seized our attention. What we’ve forgotten about for too long is the North Korean people. For years, their misery has existed under a blackout. “Beyond Utopia” looks behind the wall and shines a light. —Owen Gleiberman  

Bobi Wine: The People’s President

The political activism of pop stars is, as a rule, on the restrained side. Yet for Ugandan singer Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu — better known to his adoring fans as Bobi Wine — there’s both everything and nothing to lose by getting more involved in national politics than most celebrities would dare. Entering a presidential election against corrupt, long-ruling incumbent Yoweri Museveni is, he knows, both a folly and a necessary stand to take in a country still reeling from the brutal military dictatorship of Idi Amin in the 1970s. Christopher Sharp and Moses Bwayo’s punchy, plainspoken film documents his journey with angry urgency and bitter gallows humor. At moments, the movie startles you with its immediacy, not least of all in the moving, spontaneous scenes of Wine’s young children grappling with his absence. — Guy Lodge

The Disappearance of Shere Hite

Nicole Newnham’s astonishing documentary is about who Shere Hite was — and about why we even have to ask. It‘s a beautifully made corrective to the amnesia that for decades surrounded Hite, the author of “The Hite Report,” a landmark 1976 survey on female sexuality that is still ranked as the 30th best-selling book in history. A former model with a gorgeous cloud of strawberry blonde hair, Hite had a casual, soft-spoken way of deploying words like “clitoris,” “penetration” and “masturbation” that, back then, seemed to make everyone uncomfortable but her. The film is put together with such visual verve that even its most prickly passages are compulsively enjoyable. But to what extent have we been gaslit into excising Hite’s place in feminist history? It’s hard to definitively say, though by the end of Newnham’s film we are unlikely ever to forget her again. —Jessica Kiang

The Eternal Memory

Dementia and neurodegenerative disease have been extensively portrayed onscreen. But Maite Alberdi’s film treats inexorably sad material with a lighter, more lyrical approach than most, focusing less on the day-to-day ravages of living with Alzheimer’s than on the slippery, transient concept of memory itself. Key to the film’s thesis is that its subject is Augusto Góngora, a veteran Chilean political journalist who labored through the 1970s and ’80s to bring the iniquities of the Pinochet regime to public consciousness, and later dedicated himself to conserving that national memory for future generations. Yet it’s the simple love story between Gongóra and his devoted wife and carer, former Chilean cultural minister Pauline Urrutia, that gives Alberdi’s film its spine and heart. The film is a powerful reminder of how our best efforts to keep and curate memories — for ourselves and others — can be thwarted by time. —GL     

Four Daughters

Kaouther Ben Hania’s gripping true story of a Tunisian mother whose two elder daughters joined ISIS is overlaid with fictional, self-analyzing elements. The real Olfa Hamrouni appears throughout the film, but she’s also played by the Egyptian-Tunisian star Hend Sabri. Were Olfa’s daughters, 16 and 15 at the time of their disappearance, eaten up by their overprotective mother, or were they consumed by the predatory wolves of religious fundamentalism, cultural indoctrination and ISIS itself? The film may operate better on a scene-to-scene basis than as a holistic narrative, yet its effect is cathartic — for the way it reveals Olfa as both sympathetic and repellent, charming and chilling — and also because we’re so unused to seeing this experimental an approach applied to the daily struggles of Arab women in a majority-Islamic North African country. The elliptical strategy of “Four Daughters” is to uncover some truths and leave others veiled. —JK   

Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project

The title teases galactic possibilities and plays with the concept of the unfinished work. One of the luminaries of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s into the 1970s, the now 79-year-old poet Nikki Giovanni continues to address the pain and joy, the anger and resilience of the descendants of the Middle Passage, who know much about uncertain and dangerous journeys. Michèle Stephenson and Joe Brewster’s beautifully crafted film takes us on an adventure, responding creatively to the call of its ingenious subject by touching on themes of aging, ailing and the oppressions with which she’s still reckoning. The filmmakers exhibit a soulful grasp of Giovanni’s poetry (voiced in the doc by executive producer Taraji P. Henson), but they also honor the untidy realities of the writer herself. —Lisa Kennedy   

De Humani Corporis Fabrica

It’s been nearly 30 years since the global franchise of Body Worlds exhibitions — collections of dissected and plastinated human cadavers — racked up ticket sales. That sense of revelation is recalled, without the circus-sideshow dimension, in Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s extraordinary documentary, which delves dizzyingly beneath the flesh to show organs, systems and actions that we know are inside us but tend to keep tidily out of mind. The movie takes us into the living, heaving, breathing body, using microscopes, ultrasounds and endoscopic and scialytic cameras to present its inner workings as vividly as any nonfiction film has managed. There’s a psychedelic spell to the imagery that suggests a state-of-the-art “Fantastic Voyage,” except that there’s no fantasy here: Every body probed is a real-life patient at once of several Parisian hospitals, their lives hanging in the balance as we gawk at their insides. —GL   

In the Court of the Crimson King

Can a band that seems to operate under rigidly precise conditions still produce music that sparks spontaneous ecstasy in listeners? The question might not seem unusual if it were a classical ensemble we were talking about, or the ballet. But Toby Amies’ film is about King Crimson and its natty genius of a leader, Robert Fripp, who’s as tough a taskmaster as anyone in the so-called finer arts. Amies gets the eight current members of the group on-camera, but he also goes back and interviews what we might think of as disgruntled ex-employees (notably Adrian Belew). It’s up to you whether you identify more with the many players who couldn’t hack the stress and got out or the ones who decided it was worth the high expectations and frayed nerves to remain in the court of prog-rock’s most enduring royalty. Fripp, almost always clad in a formal vest and necktie, is the ultimate English gentleman whose willingness to suffer fools even half-gladly is often being tested, not least by the filmmakers he commissioned to make this document. —CW

Judy Blume Forever

In Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok’s Crayola-bright documentary, the author Judy Blume is as sparky as ever in her mid-80s — and she has a game storytelling presence. The film encapsulates the trailblazing, still-rare appeal of her work, which presents adolescent social and sexual insecurities with both the uncanny recall of a child’s in-the-moment perspective and the reassuring wisdom of a grown-up who’s been through it all. “Come for the female masturbation, stay for the empowerment,” quips one interviewee. Yet anyone imagining Blume as a righteous, bra-burning feminist of the era may be surprised by the doc’s touching portrait of a young woman caught between demure domesticity and itching rebellion, her calling to write driven by the more repressed aspects of her upbringing in postwar suburban New Jersey. “Judy Blume Forever” is a study of one woman finding herself through the liberties of storytelling, though it’s also lent a stirring dimension by its focus on Blume’s work as an ardent correspondent to legions of fans. —GL

Kokomo City 

The title doesn’t refer to a real place. It’s more like a state of mind, invented by director D. Smith, who is Black and trans, to describe the space that her sisters occupy in the world. Theirs is an identity that is barely understood by the public and frequently misrepresented by the media, but is here defined by a handful of tell-it-like-it-is trans sex workers who offer snappy, whip-smart insights into their lives, dreams and the down-low dudes who adore them. In Smith’s unforgettable, format-defying, micro-budget doc, the t-girls spill the tea, totally reframing the conversation, opening up about the stuff that more mainstream trans-empowerment movies tell us should be off-limits, like their bodies and what they do in the bedroom. Smith’s subjects aren’t afraid to offend, but they’re irreverently eloquent in their assessment of how the world works, dishing on everything from image culture to what one of them, Daniella Carter, sees as the hypocrisy of her fellow Black people ­— one of the film’s key themes: “We all scream the narrative that we oppressed … but we’re the first motherfuckers to turn our nose up to the next person who wants to stand out and be different.” —Peter Debruge

Lakota Nation vs. United States

Jesse Short Bull and Laura Tomaselli’s unprecedented Native-issues essay film puts the question of Land Rights front and center in a lucid and uplifting way. Central among the film’s concerns are promises made, and later broken, by the United States in the peace treaty of Fort Laramie, which established the Great Sioux Reservation in 1868. The film explains how those 60 million acres were then taken away, how guns were confiscated and buffalo killed to force Natives into a European-style farming system, how Indigenous religions were outlawed and children were sent away to be Christianized in boarding schools. It also deconstructs how mainstream American media otherized the Natives, making “invasion look like self-defense.” Solutions don’t come easy when attempting to rectify decades of dehumanization and erasure, but “Lakota Nation” offers a clear-eyed look at some of the murkiest corners of American history. —PD  

Little Richard: I Am Everything 

The enthralling documentary that Little Richard deserves. Lisa Cortes’s movie understands, from the inside out, what a great and transgressive artist he was, how his starburst brilliance shifted the whole energy of the culture — but also how the radical nature of what he did, from almost the moment it happened, got shoved under the rug of the official narrative of rock ‘n’ roll. The documentary uses stunning archival footage to channel the electricity of Little Richard, and the eruptive glory of his volcanic gospel-on-amphetamines music still hits you like a revolution. Yet the movie also takes a deep dive into how Little Richard, a Black queer man who was not about to conceal who he was, intertwined the very DNA of rock ‘n’ roll with the perverse power of his identity. His story becomes the stirring and, in some ways, tragic tale of an artist so ahead of his time that even his own life couldn’t catch up with how he’d changed the world. —OG

Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros

It’s the quiet that strikes you in Frederick Wiseman’s languidly mesmerizing 240-minute documentary about one the world’s greatest restaurants. The film is a rejoinder to every image of cacophonous haute cuisine environments — clattering pans, hissing steam, chefs screaming invective — that’s been fed to us by “Hell’s Kitchen”-style reality shows and the propulsive drama of “The Bear.” The masters and staff of Le Bois Sans Feuilles, a three Michelin-star establishment in France’s Loire region, work with a hushed intensity of concentration. And that suits Wiseman, who explores every dimension of this culinary cathedral from the inside out. The astonishing plates on display resist “food porn” categorization, and it’s the human element of the restaurant that most interests Wiseman: a family business with a tradition of gastronomic innovation, here found at a compelling tipping point between father and son. —GL

Milli Vanilli

It’s one of the inside-out realities of our era that scandal, if you give it enough time, turns into myth. So it is with Milli Vanilli, the German-French R&B pop duo of the late ’80s and ’90s who, having sold close to 50 million records, were revealed to be a fake: a pair of lip-syncing Euro pretty boys who hadn’t sung a note on any of their hits or at any of their concerts. Luke Korem’s captivating and surprisingly moving documentary adds another, richer layer to the saga. It tells the Milli Vanilli story from the point-of-view of Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan themselves — especially, Fab, who unveiled himself to the filmmaker (Rob died in Los Angeles in 1998). We see how they started, why they struck their “deal with the devil,” and who, exactly, the devil was. Were they complicit in a deception that was sleazy and greedy? Yes. But by the end of the movie, a wide circle of influence has been implicated: the Svengali who pulled the strings, a music industry full of people who saw through the ruse yet rationalized it away, and, in a sense, the public itself. There’s no way that we could have known, yet the movie captures how the myth of Milli Vanilli now touches on the pathology of image-making that’s at the very core of pop music. —OG

The Mission

The world will never know what was going through 26-year-old Christian missionary John Allen Chau’s head when he was shot and killed by arrows off the coast of North Sentinel Island. Was he an evangelical martyr-hero who answered God’s calling and gave his life trying to convert a remote and hostile tribe? Or was he an arrogant and unprepared American, brainwashed by the church into undertaking a suicide mission? The filmmakers, Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine, reconstruct his story à la Herzog’s “Grizzly Man,” creating a haunting meditation on the very nature of missionary work. “The Mission” becomes a kind of philosophical quest in which wild ambition goes hand in hand with folly at the very limits of so-called civilization. —PD    

Money Shot: The Pornhub Story  

It’s not a movie about the cultural prominence or significance of porn in our time, though it does touch on key aspects of how pornography today is manufactured and consumed. Instead, Suzanne Hillinger’s documentary mostly tells the story of how Pornhub, the largest porn site in the world, became a lightning rod of controversy when it was accused of being a place that abetted sex trafficking and the sexual abuse of children. You’d think there wouldn’t be two sides to that issue. But “Money Shot,” in chronicling the war against Pornhub as led by activists like Laila Mickelwait and journalists like Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times, reveals what it means when porn evolves into a corporate entity. The film captures the ambiguity of the real Pornhub revolution, which is that every viewer of pornography is now viewed as a consumer . The dark message of the film is that in the no-boundaries world of the web, you can police a company like Pornhub but you can’t make what it’s selling go away. —OG

Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV  

There are a lot of people who know the name Nam June Paik, or even got to experience one or more of his video installations, yet still don’t know very much about him. Amanda Kim’s gorgeously crafted documentary does a splendid job of filling in what a visionary figure Paik was — the way he interfaced with people like John Cage, lived for years as a starving artist in New York and built his surrealist TV museum exhibits from the ground up, literally inventing an art form. Paik’s art had a let’s-try-it-on spirit that was cosmic but playful, and the opposite of pretentious. After all, he was creating high art… on television! And what’s most intoxicating about the film is that it becomes a supreme vehicle for experiencing the psychedelic majesty of Paik’s creations, which were driven by his obsession with finding the hidden soul of technology. In “Moon Is the Oldest TV,” Paik, who died in 2006, emerges as a figure both impish and daunting — the artist as explorer of uncharted terrain, with an almost mystical connection to the arsenal of electronic media he wielded like a plugged-in paintbrush. —OG

Orlando, My Political Biography

Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando: A Biography” is a centuries-spanning tale of a nobleman who, after a slumber of several nights, metamorphoses into a woman. And Paul B. Preciado’s docu-manifesto is an ode to the many Orlandos who walk the world. Playful, urgent and brilliantly innovative, the film is predicated on the notion that if society is a set and gender a performance, what better way to capture that than to revel in the very constructed nature of filmmaking? The movie’s aesthetic creates a trans cinematic archive that reaches back to images of Christine Jorgensen, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera — all to tell a mosaic of a collective story. —Manuel Betancourt

The London-born French filmmaker Claire Simon has amassed a body of work somewhat comparable to that of the American master Frederick Wiseman. Her latest outing, luxuriant in length but never less than eye-opening, immerses us in the interactions between female patients of all ages and the medical professionals in a French hospital, with typically compassionate and insightful results. Typical, that is, until Simon herself unexpectedly becomes one of her own subjects. Her personal journey is sketched in roughly the same number of scenes she dedicates to anyone else’s, so that she becomes one more strand in the film’s breathing, sometimes bleeding tapestry: just one of “Our Body’s” vital organs. What happens in the course of the film is sometimes tragic, often painful, but it is always instructive — demystifying and de-objectifying the female body, still the locus of so much secrecy and mystery. —JK     

The Plains 

Australian filmmaker David Easteal’s first feature is a striking docu-hybrid filmed almost exclusively inside a car during the peak-hour commute. The movie places viewers in the back seat to observe a middle-aged Melbourne lawyer, Andrew Rakowski, during his drive home from work over the course of a year. It’s remarkable how fresh and spontaneous the result feels. As we listen in on Rakowski’s phone conversations with his wife or his in-car chats with the filmmaker, a picture emerges of a man who is traveling long distances but feels like his life momentum has stalled. And yet the movie achieves the feat of making three hours fly by. —Richard Kuipers

Radical Wolfe

It was Tom Wolfe, more than anyone, who taught journalism to dance. Richard Dewey’s impeccably chiseled portrait, the story of how he did it, and the heights he rose to, makes for an irresistible watch. The tale of how Wolfe’s celebrated style came into being — the exclamation points!! The spontaneous but knowing word salad!! — is one for the ages, and the documentary tells it exquisitely. It also does a memorable job of exploring his strategy and achievement in writing “Radical Chic,” the New York magazine cover story in which he spent 20,000 words describing a party thrown by Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia, at their Park Avenue apartment to raise funds for the Black Panthers. (It’s as if Wolfe defined the concept of bourgeois political correctness and disemboweled it in the same moment.) The documentary is full of photographs and film footage of Wolfe, and we see how vital his floppy-haired-ironic-Southern-gentleman look was to the whole Wolfe mystique — the white suits that made him seem like he’d arrived from another planet. Yet Tom Wolfe was hipper than the hipsters, with feelers that allowed him to see all, and in 76 highly entertaining minutes “Radical Wolfe” packs in more or less everything you need to know about him. —OG    

Smoke Sauna Sisterhood

In Estonia, in a log-cabin sauna nestled in a pretty woods by a lake, a group of women gather on and off through the changing seasons to sweat out their secrets and heal each other with heat, talk and arcane sauna-based rituals. The small smoky miracle of the movie is that it creates something so intangible, so lyrical, from the absolutely elemental: fire, wood, water and lots of naked female flesh. We don’t necessarily get to know the women as individuals, despite how intimate and sometimes harrowing their shared stories are. Instead, the director, Anna Hints, lets their soft chatter narrate a kind of choral experience of modern womanhood, operating on the most practical yet optimistic of assumptions: that with the application of enough heat and fellowship, everything painful can be soothed and everything dirty can be made clean. —JK   

Squaring the Circle: The Story of Hipgnosis

Anton Corbijn’s documentary about Hipgnosis, the legendary 1970s album-cover design team, is full of great stories about how pop music’s most indelible visual form arrived at all that unforgettably strange imagery. Only Hipgnosis could shoot a photo of a cow against a blue sky, put it on a Pink Floyd cover (“Atom Heart Mother”), and make it look like an act of mysterious profundity on a level with the works of Magritte. The two main creatives of Hipgnosis were the late Storm Thorgerson, the prickly visionary of the pair, and Aubrey “Po” Powell, the long-suffering partner who oversaw the execution of Thorgerson’s insane ideas. “Squaring the Circle” is nothing if not a testament to absurdly high record-company budgets in the ’70s, which couldn’t all be spent on analog tape and blow. The movie doesn’t ask what transpired after the story abruptly ends, amid financial ruin and changing tastes in 1982. But it’s clear that Corbijn, well-known for his own album design work, is a true believer, just like all of us who grew up in a golden age of album art and lament that it was the pictures that got smaller. —CW

Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie

It’s a lot funnier and more entertaining than you might think. Michael J. Fox tells his own story in “Still,” which director Davis Guggenheim treats as “a Michael J. Fox movie” by remixing clips from the Emmy-winning actor’s career with cleverly restaged scenes from his private life. The “Family Ties” and “Back to the Future” star was one of the most beloved personalities of the 1980s, and though his personal story has been overshadowed by his struggle with Parkinson’s disease (diagnosed when he was just 29), Guggenheim’s upbeat, ultra-polished documentary reminds us what a peppy and relatable actor Fox was — and is. The film presents him as a trouper, focusing on how he fought to hide his symptoms for years, burying himself in his work so as not to face his handicap head-on. Today, Fox is a good sport, cracking jokes about his tremors. And looking back, he always made it look easy, coming across as laidback and cool even while secretly stressed. He never wanted to be the poster boy for Parkinson’s, but if Michael J. Fox could sell Pepsi to a generation, he realized it was within his power to raise awareness of the disease he’d been dealt. —PD  

Sam Green has crafted a documentary the likes of which you’ve never heard before. Meant to be watched with headphones, this unique, immersive, audio-driven essay film invites audiences to reconsider their relationship to sound: how it works, what it can do and the way that specific noises can unlock memories or spark entirely new ones. The director investigates the source of certain sounds (like a tree falling in the forest), though he’s generally more interested in how we receive them, literally and emotionally. The film has an uncanny quality, yet it wouldn’t be as rewarding if not for its human subjects, such as the experimental musician Annea Lockwood, who once set a piano on fire to hear how it would sound, or Nehanda Abiodun, an African American revolutionary, holed up in Cuba, for whom the 1979 disco song “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” opens a wormhole of memory. —PD

20 Days in Mariupol

Offering a refresher in outrage on Ukraine’s behalf, Mstyslav Chernov’s bleak but essential film is a nerve-jangling piece of on-the-ground combat reportage. It’s built around a team of Associated Press correspondents who traveled to the port city of Mariupol on Feb. 24, 2022, the day Vladimir Putin launched the war. They assumed that this key city, just 30 miles from the enemy border, would be an early objective — the hunch was correct. Within hours, the bombs began to fall; the documentary is a strikingly immediate record of citizens under siege. The grotesque injustice of the situation is reinforced by our periodically hearing Russian leaders’ flat denials that civilians are being targeted, even as we spend 90 minutes witnessing apartment buildings, hospitals, and more reduced to charred ruins. There’s no sermonizing, just a punishingly up-close look at the toll of modern warfare on a population. “What did we do to deserve this? What are these people guilty of?” a mother asks — questions to which there can be no answer. —Dennis Harvey

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10 of the Most Niche YouTube Video Essays You Absolutely Need to Watch

YouTube’s algorithm is designed to keep your eyeballs glued to video after video (after video, after video...). The dangers of this rabbit hole are well-documented . However, for every ideological radicalization enabled by YouTube, I like to think there’s at least one innocent, newfound pop culture obsession discovered at 3 a.m. via the greatest medium of our time: the Video Essay.

The genre of YouTube video essays is more interesting than it sounds. Sure, any piece of video content that advances a central thesis could be considered a “video essay.” But there are key components of video essays that elevate the genre into so much more than simply a YouTube version of a written article. Over the past few years, the term “YouTube video essay” has grown to evoke connotations of niche fascination and discovery. For creators, the field is highly competitive with strong personalities trying to get eyes on extremely in-depth analysis of a wide range of topics. The “niche” factor is especially important here. Ultimately, the hallmark of a good video essay is its ability to captivate you into watching hours of content about a subject matter you would have never expected to care about in the first place. Scary? Maybe. Fun? Definitely.

Whether you’re skeptical about the power of video essays, or you’re an existing fan looking for your next niche obsession, I’ve rounded up some of my personal favorite YouTube video essays for you to lean in and watch. This is not a comprehensive list by any means, and it largely reflects what the algorithm thinks (knows) I personally want to watch.

Other factors that influenced my selection process: The video essays needed to have a strong, surprising thesis—something other than a creator saying “ this thing good ” or “ this thing bad. ” These videos also stood out to me due to their sheer amount of thorough, hard-hitting evidence, as well as the dedication on the behalf of the YouTubers who chose to share with us hours upon hours of research into these topics.

And yes, I have watched all the hours of content featured here. I’m a professional.

Disney’s FastPass: A Complicated History

Let’s start strong with a documentary so premium, I can’t believe it’s free. Multiple articles and reviews have been dedicated to Defunctland’s video series about, well, waiting in line. I know what you’re thinking—the only thing that sounds more boring than waiting in line is watching a video about waiting in line. But Defunctland’s investigation into the history of Disneyland’s FastPass system has so much more to offer.

Class warfare. Human behavior. The perils of capitalism. One commenter under the video captures it well by writing “oddly informative and vaguely terrifying.” Since its launch in 2017, Kevin Perjurer’s entire Defunctland YouTube channel has become a leading voice in extremely thorough video essays. The FastPass analysis is one of the most rewarding of all of Defunctland’s in-depth amusement park coverage.

I won’t spoil it here, but the best part of the video is hands-down when Perjurer reveals an animated simulation of the theme park experience to test out how various line-reservation systems work. Again, no spoilers, but get ready for a wildly satisfying “gotcha” moment.

Personally, I’ve never had any interest one way or another about Disney-affiliated theme parks. I’ve never been, and I never planned on going. That’s the main reason I’m selling you on this video essay right off the bat. Defunctland is a perfect example of how the genre of video essays has such a high bar for investigative reporting, shocking analysis, and an ability to suck you in to a topic you never thought you’d care about.

Watch time : 1:42:59 (like a proper feature documentary)

THE Vampire Diaries Video

No list of video essays can get very far without including Jenny Nicholson , a true titan of the genre. Or, as one commenter puts it, “The power of Jenny Nicholson: getting me to watch an almost three hour long video about something I don’t care about.” I struggled to pick which of her videos to feature here, but at over seven million views, “THE Vampire Diaries Video” might just be Nicholson’s magnum opus. Once you break out the red string on a cork board, it’s safe to say that you’re in magnum opus territory.

I haven’t ever seen an episode of CW’s The Vampire Diaries , but since this video essay captivated me, I can safely say that I’m an expert on the show. Nicholson’s reputation as a knowledgeable, passionate, funny YouTuber is well-earned. She’s a proper geek, and watching her cultural analyses feel like I’m nerding out with one of my smartest friends. If you really don’t think The Vampire Diaries investigation is for you (and I argue that it’s for everyone), I recommend “ A needlessly thorough roast of Dear Evan Hansen ” instead.

Watch time : 2:33:19

In Search Of A Flat Earth

Did you think you could get through a YouTube video round-up without single mention of Flat Earthers? Wishful thinking.

“In Search of Flat Earth” is a beautiful, thoughtful video essay slash feature-length documentary. Don’t go into this video if you’re looking to bash and ridicule flat earth conspiracy theorists. Instead, Olson’s core argument takes a somewhat sympathetic gaze to the fact that Flat Earthers cannot be “reasoned” out of their beliefs with “science” or “evidence.” Plus, this video has a satisfying second-act plot twist. As Olson points out, “In Search of Flat Earth” could have an alternative clickbait title of “The Twist at 37 Minutes Will Make You Believe We Live In Hell.” Over the years,  Dan Olson of Folding Ideas has helped to popularize the entire video essay genre, and this one just might be his masterpiece.

Watch time : 1:16:16

The Rise and Fall of Teen Dystopias

Sarah Z is your go-to Gen Z cultural critic and explainer. The YouTuber brings her knack for loving-yet-shrewd analysis to dig into fandom culture, the YA book industry, and why the teen dystopia got beaten into the ground.

I’ve found that one of the most reliable video essay formulas is some version of “what went wrong with [incredibly popular cultural moment].” In the case of teen dystopias, it’s a fascinating take on how a generation of teen girls were drawn to bad ass, anti-establishment heroines, only to watch those types of characters get mass produced and diluted into mockery. But maybe I’m biased here; as the exact demographic targeted by the peak of The Hunger Games, Twilight, and Divergent, this cultural debrief speaks to my soul.

Watch time : 1:22:41

A Buffet of Black Food History

Food is an effective way to combine economic, cultural, and social histories–and Black American food history is an especially rich one. Food resonates with people, allowing us to connect with the past in a much more real way than if we were memorizing dates and locations from a textbook. Historian Elexius Jionde of Intelexual Media is a pro at taking what could be a standard history lesson and turning it into an interesting journey full of crazy characters and tidbits.

Most of the comments beneath the video are complaints that the video deserves to be so much longer. It’s jam-packed with surprising facts, fun asides, and, of course, tantalizing descriptions of the food at hand. Jionde even warns you right at the top: “Turn this video off right now if you’re hungry.”

Watch time : 22:39

The reign of the Slim-Thick Influencer

At this point, I’m assuming you know what a BBL is. Even if you aren’t familiar with the term (Brazilian butt lifts, FYI), then you’ve still probably observed the trend. Before big butts, it was thigh gaps. The pendulum swing of trending body types is nothing new. Curves are in, curves are out, thick thighs save lives, “skinny fat” is bad, and now, “slim thick” looms large. How do different body types fall in and out of fashion, and what effect does this have on the people living in those bodies?

Creator Khadija Mbowe identifies and analyzes a lot of the issues with how women’s bodies (especially Black women’s) are commodified, without ever blaming the bodies that are under fire. Mbowe handles the topic with grace and humor, even when discussing how deeply personal it is to them. If you’ve ever found yourself staring at a photo of an Instagram influencer, please do yourself a favor and watch this video essay.

Watch time : 54:18

Flight of the Navigator

Once again: I have been sucked into a video about a film that I have never seen and probably never will. Captain Disillusion, whose real name is Alan Melikdjanian, is another giant of the video essay genre, posting videos to a not-too-shabby audience of 2.29 million subscribers. Most of Captain Dissilision’s videos that I’d seen before this were of the creator debunking viral videos, exposing how certain visual effects were “obviously” faked. In this video, he turns his eye for debunking special effects not to viral videos, but to the 1986 Disney sci-fi adventure Flight of the Navigator.

This behind-the-scenes analysis of the Disney film is incredibly informative, tackling every instance when someone might ask, “ Hey, how did they manage to film that? ” It also touches upon the history of the special effects industry, something that deserves a little extra appreciation as CGI takes over every corner of movie-making.

Watch time : 41:28

The Failure of Victorious

YouTuber Quinton Reviews is dedicated to his craft, and I thank him for it. As you’ve certainly caught on to by now, you truly do not need to know anything about the show Victorious to enjoy an hours-long video essay that digs into it. What makes this video stand out is the sheer amount of content that this YouTuber both consumed and then created for us. Part of the video length—a whopping five hours—is due to the fact that every single episode of the Nickelodeon show is dissected. Another reason for the length is all the care that Quinton Reviews puts into providing context. And the context is what made me stick around: the failures of TV networks, the psychological dangers of working as child stars, and the questionable adult jokes that were broadcast to young audiences…if you’re at all interested in tainting your memory of hit Nickelodeon shows, this video is for you.

Watch time : 5:34:58 ( And that’s just part one. Strap in! )

Why Anime is for Black People

In this video Travis goes through the history of the “hip hop x anime” phenomenon, in which East Asian media permeates Black culture (and vice versa, as he hints at near the end). Although I am (1) not Black and (2) not an avid anime fan, I first clicked on this video because I’m a fan of comedian and writer Yedoye Travis. And yet—big shocker—I was immediately engrossed with the subject matter, despite having no context heading into it. Once you finish watching this video, be sure to check out Megan Thee Stallion’s interview about her connection to anime .

I haven’t run this part by my editor yet, but now would be a prime time to plug Lifehacker Editor-in-Chief Jordan Calhoun’s book, Piccolo Is Black: A Memoir of Race, Religion, and Pop Culture . Just saying.

Watch time : 18:34 (basically nothing in the world of video essays, especially compared to the five hours of Victorious content I binged earlier)

Efficiency in Comedy: The Office vs. Friends

I’m rounding out this list on a note of personal sentimentality. This is one of the first video essays that got me hooked on the format, mostly because I had followed creator Drew Gooden to YouTube after his stardom on Vine (RIP). This video is one of his most popular, combining comedy and math to pit two of the most popular sitcoms of all time in a joke-for-joke battle.

Gooden in particular stands out as someone who excels as both an earnest comic and a thoughtful critic of comedy. I appreciate his perspective as someone who knows what it’s like to work for a laugh and wants to get to the bottom of why something is or isn’t funny. This isn’t even one of Gooden’s best videos (I actually think his take on the parallels between Community and Arrested Development has a much stronger argument), but it’s a great example of the sort of perspective best situated to make video essays in the first place. Because what makes all these video essays so compelling is often the personality behind the argument. These aren’t investigative journalists or professional critics. They’re YouTubers. Really smart YouTubers, but still: These videos are born out of everyday people who simply have something to say.

I believe the modern YouTube video essay is uniquely situated to put cultural critique back into the hands of the average consumer—but only if that consumer is willing to put in the work to become a creator themselves.

Watch time : 17:36

Favoree's guide to YouTube

13 Best Video Essay YouTubers in 2024 According to Viewers

Tamara Indriana

First of all, what even is a video essay ?

The line between video essays and documentaries is often muddy. While both video essays and documentaries use audiovisual elements to convey ideas and narratives, they differ in their focus, narrative structure, visual style, and intended audience.

Video essays offer critical analysis and interpretation of visual media, while documentaries provide factual information on real-life events and experiences. One key tip to distinguish between the two is that documentaries focus on getting answers from primary sources , like conducting interviews.

Video essays have gained popularity in recent years, particularly on YouTube. The accessibility of digital editing tools and visual media makes it easier than ever for aspiring filmmakers, critics, and scholars to produce and share their own video essays with the world.

In this article, we have compiled a list of the best video essayists on YouTube. Join us as we unravel the intricacies of these digital storytellers who put their viewers on the edge of their seats.

If video essays are not your cup of tea and you’re looking for something more educational, check out our article on the best documentary YouTube channels .

13 Top Video Essay YouTube Channels in 2024

This list is compiled from the opinions of  Favoree  and  Reddit  users.

In no particular order:

1.  EmpLemon  – 1.2M Subscribers

Emplemon blends elements of documentary-style storytelling with humor and cultural critique. Through his videos, Emplemon tells stories about internet culture, dissecting its quirks with razor-sharp wit and insight.

His contents elicit a rollercoaster of emotions, from laughter at absurd internet phenomena to contemplation of the impact of online communities on society.

2.  ContraPoints  – 1.8M Subscribers

Natalie Wynn, better known as Contrapoints, makes incisive video essays about social topics. Initially gaining fame for providing leftist rebuttals to right-wing content, Wynn’s dark humor and elaborate productions captivate audiences.

While her style has evolved to include more intimate settings, Wynn’s content remains intellectually stimulating, featuring detailed philosophical discussions presented in a visually stunning manner.

Natalie is not only an icon for her video essays, she’s also one of the most influential Trans creators on YouTube .

3.  ColdFusion  – 4.7M Subscribers

ColdFusion is a prominent YouTube channel making high-quality videos on corporations and their scandals. The channel’s soothing narration style contributes to a relaxing viewing experience.

With professional editing and a focus on interesting subject matter, ColdFusion delivers compelling insights into the latest trends and developments shaping the world of business and technology.

Check out our article on the best economics YouTube channel if you’re interested in improving your financial knowledge!

4.  Wendigoon  – 3.4M Subscribers

Wendigoon’s exploration of horror and supernatural phenomena certainly gives viewers goosebumps. With a focus on topics like urban legends , paranormal encounters, and mysterious occurrences, Wendigoon delivers chilling narratives that leave viewers intrigued and unsettled.

The channel’s immersive storytelling and atmospheric visuals evoke a sense of unease, drawing audiences into the eerie world of the unknown. Wendigoon’s expertly crafted videos combine suspenseful narration with haunting imagery, creating an unforgettable viewing experience.

Can’t get enough of chilling true crime stories? Our article on the best true crime YouTube channels will help you find more creators to watch.

5.  hbomberguy  – 1.6M Subscribers

Hbomberguy is a highly respected YouTuber famous for his well-researched video essays. With a focus on various topics ranging from video games to social critiques of modernity, Hbomberguy delivers arguments backed by cited facts. His recent video that exposed Internet Historian has gotten the most attention and discourse.

Despite a sporadic upload schedule, his content is eagerly anticipated, offering deep dives into internet culture and thought-provoking analyses.

6.  Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell  – 21.8M Subscribers

Kurzgesagt is incredible at explaining complex scientific concepts and philosophical ideas in a simple way. Through stunning art and animation, Kurzgesagt brings these topics to life.

Covering a wide range of subjects from space exploration to biology, the channel’s videos are both educational and visually captivating, leaving viewers feeling inspired and enlightened. Kurzgesagt offers an immersive journey into the wonders of the universe, sparking curiosity and wonder in audiences worldwide.

7.  Fredrik Knudsen  – 1.2M Subscribers

A cult favorite, Fredrik Knudsen’s acclaimed series “Down the Rabbit Hole” investigates obscure corners of the internet and perplexing aspects of history.

Known for his unbiased and objective approach, Knudsen presents his subjects in a neutral manner, allowing facts to speak for themselves. His thought-provoking content offers insights into the complexities of human experiences and internet phenomena.

8.  blameitonjorge  – 1.7M Subscribers

Blameitonjorge is beloved for his videos centered around lost media, creepy events, and obscure topics. With a soothing and friendly voice, Jorge’s narration style is modest, respectful, and intelligently humorous, offering a refreshing contrast to typical list-making channels.

His videos cover a diverse range of subjects, including UFO sightings, nostalgia, horror movies, true crime, and Mexican urban legends, all presented with meticulous research and informative editing. Blameitonjorge’s efforts to uncover unanswered mysteries and controversies breathe new life into forgotten topics.

9.  Solar Sands  – 1.3M Subscribers

Solar Sands, an American YouTuber, specializes in video essays analyzing and reviewing art, culture, and archaeology. His long form contents concentrate on retrospectives on various aspects of artistic quality, including the history of low-resolution paintings in Minecraft and analyses of artists like Trevor Henderson .

Solar Sands’ content offers unusual insights into the world of art and culture, appealing to viewers interested in thought-provoking discussions and analyses.

10.  Philosophy Tube  – 1.5M Subscribers

Abigail Thorn, AKA Philosophy Tube, is a British YouTuber exploring philosophy, politics, and personal identity through theatrical presentations and insightful discussions. Abigail’s well-researched content creates a deeper understanding of complex topics and provides support for those grappling with personal identity.

Her inclusive and authentic approach transforms philosophical concepts into accessible narratives, while her openness about her transgender journey inspires self-acceptance in viewers. With a blend of academic rigor and theatrical flair, Philosophy Tube continues to educate and entertain her audiences.

Want a deeper understanding of philosophy without breaking the bank? Check out the best philosophy YouTube channels to learn more!

11. Super Eyepatch Wolf – 1.7M Subscribers

John Walsh, also known as Super Eyepatch Wolf , is an Irish YouTuber renowned for his analytical-style videos primarily focused on anime, with occasional forays into manga and video games.

Unlike many other anime YouTubers, his presentation style stands out for its calm and passionate delivery. His content resonates with audiences seeking thoughtful analysis and insightful commentary.

12. Folding Ideas – 920K Subscribers

Dan Olson or Folding Ideas is a YouTube channel offering long-form video essays on internet culture. From NFTs to nuggets, he makes any topic interesting and will leave you looking for more.

While the writing can occasionally seem overly clever, Dan Olson’s thoroughly researched insights provide valuable perspectives into tech grifts and other media. Despite only uploading every few months, the channel’s in-depth and insightful content is highly appreciated by viewers.

13. Jacob Geller – 1.2M Subscribers

Jacob Geller offers thought-provoking video essays that seamlessly blend topics such as video games, history, politics, and more. With a dark yet empathetic tone, Geller digs deep into philosophical, ethical, metaphysical, and psychological themes, using gaming as a springboard for discussions.

Whether discussing a specific video game mod or architectural design, Jacob’s talent shines through in his insightful videos, offering a deep exploration of video games with surprising depth.

Why are video essays important?

Video essays are important as they provide a platform for creators to offer nuanced interpretations and critical perspectives on various subjects. They serve as engaging educational tools, stimulating discussions and deepening understanding of visual media and cultural phenomena.

What are the benefits of video essays?

Video essays offer benefits such as fostering critical thinking, providing accessible and entertaining educational content, and offering a fresh approach to the analysis and exploration of visual media.

What’s the difference between a video essay and a documentary?

The difference lies in their focus, narrative structure, visual style, and intended audience. While video essays offer critical analysis and interpretation of visual media, documentaries provide factual information on real-life events and experiences, often by obtaining answers from primary sources through interviews.

Is video essay a genre?

Video essay is not a genre in the traditional sense. Rather, it is a format or style of content creation that can encompass a wide range of subjects and approaches, from film analysis to cultural critique.

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We’ll share a list of verified email contacts from active and relevant channels. More info here .

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• Best of the Year

The 10 best documentaries of 2022

From rock star sagas to pivotal historical moments and majestic volcanic eruptions

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Between social media and gossip sites, it certainly feels like we know everything we need to know about the rich and famous. And yet in 2022’s crop of outstanding documentaries, one dominant theme was celebrity intimacy. People who spend a lot of time in the public eye often lose control of their own story, as the press and the public push them into soap opera narratives filled with romances, betrayals, heroism, and villainy. In film after film in 2022, the celebs pushed back, taking us deep inside their mental-health issues and family traumas, and explaining how hard it is to make fans and critics happy all the time.

It’s possible to make a “10 best 2022 documentaries” list just from those movies: Jennifer Lopez: Halftime (about the stress of putting together a Super Bowl show), Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues (which tells a jazz hero’s story via his private archives), Lucy and Desi (a look back at one of TV’s most volatile couples), Nothing Compares (tracking the rise and fall of Sinéad O’Connor), The Return of Tanya Tucker (about a country-music legend reluctantly getting back to basics), Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me (a harrowing glimpse at a superstar’s performance anxieties), Spring Awakening: Those You’ve Known (in which the now-famous stars of a Broadway smash reflect on their youth), Stutz (in which Jonah Hill celebrates both his therapist and his own therapy), Sr. (Robert Downey Jr.’s simultaneous salute to his filmmaker father and lament for the drug-fueled lifestyle they once both led), and Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off (a study of athletic obsession).

As it happens, those all fell just short of the final cut on our list. But their spirit is represented by some of the list-makers below. More importantly, all these films (including the ones above) show how great documentary storytellers find original and illuminating angles on material we think we already know. Whether it’s celebrities, gun violence, systemic racism, addiction, or love, these movies made common problems feel new.

10. The Princess

The British royal family was in the news a lot in 2022, perhaps as much as they’ve been since the very public rise and fall of the romance between the current King Charles III and his late ex-wife, Diana Spencer. Ed Perkins’ surprisingly intense The Princess tells Diana’s story from her first introduction to the public as a bride-to-be to her later embrace of philanthropy and social activism — and then her eventual death while trying to flee relentless paparazzi. Using only news clips and home-movie footage, Perkins emphasizes the pressures of fame, evident in the constant questions and camera-clicks Diana faced. It’s a cautionary tale about what happens when the press and the public turn a real person into a fantasy character.

The Princess is streaming on HBO Max .

9. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Photographer Nan Goldin rose to prominence in the New York art world by documenting the communities she lived in throughout the ’70s and ’80s: the queer folks, the punks, the sex workers, and the political radicals. Laura Poitras’ documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is partly about how Goldin’s creative journey was shaped by living among misfits, artists who built their own scenes, then kept them going through the ravages of AIDS and drug addiction. But the movie is also about the stir the artist has caused as an activist by demanding that museums cut ties with the Sacklers, a well-heeled art patron family that made a lot of its fortune thanks to the opioid epidemic. Poitras insightfully connects these pieces of Goldin’s life, showing how grassroots organizing and radical honesty drive her.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is currently playing in limited theatrical release.

8. Is That Black Enough for You?!?

This thrilling fusion of cultural history and impassioned personal essay is the work of Elvis Mitchell, a veteran film critic who uses the heyday of 1970s blaxploitation movies like Super Fly and Foxy Brown as a way to dig deeply into the complicated history of Black representation in American cinema. Throughout Is That Black Enough for You?!? , clips from smash-hit action pictures like Shaft alternate with scenes from long-forgotten oddities, all interspersed with commentary by Black showbiz legends like Whoopi Goldberg and Samuel L. Jackson. But the main voice and perspective here belongs to Mitchell, whose vast cinema knowledge and experience allows him to find the larger meaning in even the smallest moments.

Is That Black Enough for You?!? is streaming on Netflix .

7. The Janes

The most obvious selling point for Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes’ thoughtful look back at abortion-rights history is that it’s suddenly relevant, given the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn its previous Roe v. Wade decision. But treating the film like homework would do a disservice to The Janes , which is less about abortion per se than it is about how feminism blossomed in the 1960s, thanks to underground networks that tried to elevate the secrets ladies whispered to each other and make them common knowledge. The surviving members of the clandestine Chicago health care organization JANE tell stories not just about connecting desperate women with helpful doctors, but about how they let those sisters know they weren’t alone.

The Janes is streaming on HBO Max .

6. 2nd Chance

Too many true-crime docs lately just play up the sordid details of sex, violence, and chicanery. And too many are split up into multiple parts in order to fill up programming hours on cable and streaming services. Ramin Bahrani’s strange, surprising 2nd Chance runs a refreshingly zippy 89 minutes, and though its story is full of death and conspiracies, it’s more of a pointed character sketch about a colorful bulletproof vest magnate who sold himself as a friend to law enforcement and the military while his company was putting lives at stake by cutting corners. Though often funny and gripping, this film is really about how we define “criminal,” and about the people we as a society — rightly or wrongly — consider worth saving.

2nd Chance is currently playing in limited theatrical release; it will be streaming in 2023 (date TBA) on Showtime Anytime .

5. Fire of Love

When French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft died on the job in 1991, they left behind a voluminous archive of notes, tapes, and photographs, which collectively offered insight into the decades they spent risking their lives to understand one of nature’s most dangerous phenomenons. But the Kraffts’ real legacy was their film and video footage, which captures eye-popping images of smoke and lava, dwarfing their fragile human figures. Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love sets those pictures — full of searing color and eerie landscapes, all abstract and alien — to a haunting score by Air’s Nicolas Godin and narration by Miranda July, turning this couple’s romantic adventures into something grandly cinematic.

Fire of Love is streaming on Disney Plus .

4. We Met in Virtual Reality

A welcome counterpoint to alarmist takes about alienation and extremism in the social media age, Joe Hunting’s lively animated documentary We Met in Virtual Reality considers the ways that interacting online has been beneficial to people with physical, neurological, psychological, or logistical limitations. Recorded entirely within the online community VRChat , the movie celebrates the real relationships that have developed within virtual spaces, hailing the creativity and bonhomie that has led users to build so many eye-catching gathering spaces populated by sexy and/or whimsically goofy human-animal hybrids.

We Met in Virtual Reality is streaming on HBO Max .

3. Descendant

Director Margaret Brown is best known for her nuanced nonfiction films about Southern culture, like her outstanding 2008 documentary The Order of Myths. For Descendant , Brown brought her cameras to a coastal Alabama community, where historians and amateur treasure-hunters were looking for an infamous shipwreck. In 2019, the discovery of the Clotilda — the last known slave transport vessel to reach American shores, arriving in the mid-19th century — sparked a lot of interest and conversation internationally. But for this film, what matters is that all the attention gave the Black Alabamans of “Africatown” a chance to reflect on how their ancestors’ stories have largely been erased from the historical record, leaving only folklore and anecdotes as the way the community preserves its truths.

Descendant is streaming on Netflix .

2. Riotsville, USA

In the late 1960s, civil unrest across America led to a national debate about possible solutions, and to two major initiatives — both covered in Sierra Pettengill’s remarkable and revelatory Riotsville USA . In one corner, a bipartisan commission studied the riots’ root causes, and found that the best way to reduce crime and violence would be to improve education, introduce job programs, and acknowledge institutional racism. In another corner, a coalition of military and law enforcement leaders constructed fake city blocks in the middle of nowhere and used them to train soldiers and officers to crack the skulls of hippies and ethnic minorities. Assembled almost entirely from archival film and TV clips, Pettengill’s film is set more than 50 years ago, but feels like it’s about the 2020s.

Riotsville, USA is available for purchase from Amazon , Apple , and Google Play.

1. Moonage Daydream

Don’t come to Brett Morgen’s sprawling, sensational cinematic experience Moonage Daydream expecting to learn the basic facts about the late pop star and experimental artist David Bowie. With the immense help of the Bowie estate — which gave the director access to a vast archive of audio and video — Morgen has produced a kaleidoscopic 140-minute movie, blending old film clips and cranked-up rock music into a dizzying swirl of sound and vision. The film frames its subject’s frequent metamorphoses as a performer and a public figure as the work of a brilliant actor, disappearing into the role of an eccentric celebrity as a way of entertaining his fans while keeping his real life and self partially shielded from view.

Moonage Daydream is available for rent or purchase on Amazon , Apple , and Google Play.

The best movies new to streaming this August

The 33 best movies on netflix right now, understanding the history of director’s cuts through 9 great examples.

Home — Essay Samples — Entertainment — Movies — Documentary

Essays on Documentary

What makes a good documentary essay topics.

When it comes to writing a compelling documentary essay, the topic you choose can make all the difference. A good documentary essay topic is one that is thought-provoking, engaging, and relevant to today's society. It should be something that sparks interest and inspires discussion.

To brainstorm and choose an essay topic, start by thinking about your own interests and passions. What are you curious about? What issues or topics do you feel strongly about? Consider the current events and social issues that are happening around you. It's important to choose a topic that is both relevant and meaningful to you.

When choosing a documentary essay topic, there are a few key things to consider. First, think about the audience you are writing for. What will they find interesting or important? Consider the scope of the topic and whether it can be effectively covered in an essay. Also, think about the potential impact of the topic and how it can contribute to a larger conversation.

A good essay topic is one that is unique, specific, and thought-provoking. It should be something that challenges the reader to think critically and consider different perspectives. Ultimately, a good documentary essay topic is one that inspires conversation and prompts readers to reflect on the world around them.

Best Documentary Essay Topics

• The impact of social media on mental health
• The rise of plant-based diets and the impact on the environment
• The influence of technology on modern relationships
• The history and impact of the Black Lives Matter movement
• The portrayal of women in the media
• The effects of climate change on indigenous communities
• The stigma surrounding mental illness in society
• The rise of fast fashion and its impact on the environment and labor practices
• The portrayal of LGBTQ+ individuals in mainstream media
• The effects of gentrification on urban communities
• The history and impact of the #MeToo movement
• The representation of race and ethnicity in the film industry
• The impact of mass incarceration on communities of color
• The portrayal of disability in the media
• The effects of globalization on traditional cultures
• The portrayal of mental illness in film and television
• The impact of immigration policies on families and communities
• The history and impact of the feminist movement
• The portrayal of aging and ageism in society
• The effects of social and economic inequality on communities

Documentary essay topics Prompts

• Explore the intersection of technology and mental health in today's society. How are social media and digital devices impacting our well-being?
• Investigate the effects of climate change on a specific indigenous community. How are they adapting to environmental changes and what are the long-term implications?
• Examine the portrayal of gender and sexuality in a specific film or television series. How does it reflect societal norms and expectations?
• Investigate the impact of a specific social justice movement on a local community. How has it sparked change and inspired activism?
• Explore the representation of a specific marginalized group in the media. How does it shape public perceptions and contribute to social attitudes and behaviors?

When it comes to choosing a documentary essay topic, the possibilities are endless. By selecting a topic that is meaningful, thought-provoking, and relevant, you can create a compelling and impactful essay that engages readers and sparks important conversations.

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A Hunting Ground: a Review of a Documentary on Sexual Abuses Cases in College Campuses

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A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a historical record".

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32 Documentaries With At Least A 90% Fresh Rating On Rotten Tomatoes

The best of the best.

I'm a documentary junkie. When I find myself with "nothing to watch," I usually default to a great film like the ones on this list of documentaries that have at least a 90% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes. There are probably more 100% "fresh" ratings on docs than any other genre on the site, so there are quite a few to choose from. Here are some of my favorites. 

When We Were Kings (1997) 98%

It took almost 25 years for When We Were Kings to be completed and it was well worth the wait. Filming took place during the legendary "Rumble in the Jungle" boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in 1974. With amazing footage and modern interviews with many of the reporters at the event, it brings to life not only the incredible fight but also Ali and Foreman as boxers and men. Mix in a few scenes of the incredible music festival held in conjunction with the fight (scenes that were later made into their own incredible concert film ) and what you get is an amazing film. 

Man On Wire (2008) 100%

French high-wire walker Philippe Petit has accomplished some of the most amazing - and terrifying - stunts of all time. His most famous came in 1974 when he walked on a tightrope between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York. Man on Wire chronicles the planning and the walk in amazing detail. It's NOT for the faint of heart though. 

Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010) 96%

Before Exit Through The Gift Shop , almost nothing was known about the graffiti artist Banksy. After the movie... we still don't know much about the artist, but we know a whole more about his art and why he does it. It's a mysterious documentary that tells you a lot but leaves you even more curious than before. 

The King Of Kong: A Fistful Of Quarters (2007) 97%

For the gamers in The King Of Kong: A Fistful Of Quarters , the battle to hold the high score on the classic game Donkey Kong is very serious. For those of us who get to watch, it's simply delightful. Often, the best documentaries are about heavy and important topics, but that's not the case here. It's just a fantastically made film about a wild story that doesn't have life-or-death consequences. 

Jodorowsky's Dune (2013) 98%

Documentaries about troubled or ill-fated movie productions are a popular sub-genre. One of the best is Jodorowsky's Dune , about a doomed adaptation of Frank Herbert's beloved book. Director Alejandro Jodorowsky was the first to take a swing at the movie, and it would have been a wild movie had it been made, certainly very different from the 2021 and 2023 releases . 

Bobi Wine: The People's President (2023) 100%

Nominated for a 2024 Oscar, Bobi Wine: The People's President is an amazing and intense look at Bobi Wine, a Ugandan musician-turned-politician, and his rise to a presidential candidate in the unstable country's politics. It's an uncompromising look at what it's like to buck the oppressive government in Uganda and it's both inspiring and horrifying. 

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Introducing, Selma Blair (2021) 100%

Praised for its unflinching look at what it's like to face and deal with multiple sclerosis, actress Selma Blair bravely let cameras film everything. Some of her lowest moments fighting the disease are laid bare for the world to see and it's incredibly hard to watch, yet immensely triumphant at times . Everyone should see this documentary. 

Searching For Sugar Man (2011) 95%

One of the most incredible stories in music history has to be that of Sixto Rodriguez. The singer/songwriter who went by the name Rodriguez was a huge star in South Africa for years, but he didn't know that for decades. Searching For Sugar Man tells his story, and brought his music to the rest of the world, including his native United States. 

The Thin Blue Line (1988) 100%

Hailed as possibly the greatest documentary of all time, The Thin Blue Line was innovative for many reasons, especially two things. Its use of re-enactments was controversial at the time but has since become a staple of the genre and it can be argued that without it, true crime documentaries that are so popular today wouldn't exist, or they would at least look very different. 

Roger And Me (1998) 100%

Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore is famous for his gonzo-style reporting and filmmaking and his first (and arguably best) film Roger And Me , introduced him to the world. It stays close to home for Moore and he confronts General Motors and its chairman Roger Smith over closing the auto plants in Moore's hometown of Flint, MI. 

Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2012) (99%)

Sushi is one of the most popular cuisines worldwide and Jiro Ono is one of its most celebrated chefs. Jiro Dreams of Sushi is an intimate look at Ono and his Tokyo restaurant and highlights the incredible amount of training and care that goes into making each piece of fish that Ono and his staff curate. 

Paris Is Burning (1991) 98%

One of the most important documentaries in the struggle for equal rights for transgender people is Paris Is Burning , which was released more than 30 years ago. It documents an annual runway show organized by early trans activist Paris Dupree, who appears in the film. 

Shoah (1985) 100%

There may be no harder movie to watch on this list than the legendary, heartbreaking, and horrifying Shoah . Considered the definitive documentary on the Holocaust and its survivors. The full version is 566 minutes and is often split into shorter episodes, as watching it all at once is almost too difficult to do. 

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991) 100%

Francis Ford Coppola 's masterpiece Apocalypse Now was famously one of the most troubled movie productions in Hollywood history. It's impossible to sum up just how many things went wrong and the fact that it was even completely, much less becoming what CinemaBlend calls the best war movie of all time , is a miracle. This documents the whole event. 

Grizzly Man (2005) 92%

Filmmaker Werner Herzog is one of the most unique voices, both literally and figuratively in movie history. Grizzly Man may be his most approachable film, but that doesn't mean it's easy to watch. It follows the story of Timothy Treadwell who would spend his summers camping in Alaska and studying the grizzly bears. It's a tragic story expertly told by a genius director. 

Senna (2010) 93%

You don't have to be a fan of Formula One or race car driving to love Senna . The movie is about legendary Brazilian driver Ayrton Senna. Senna is considered one of the greatest drivers of all time and was killed during a race in 1994, after winning back-to-back championships in 1991 and 1992. 

The Cove (2009) 95%

The Academy Award winner for Best Documentary, The Cove is one of the most important films made for activists trying to stop the slaughter of whales and dolphins by Japanese fishermen. It's not without its detractors, notably the fishermen and the Japanese government, which makes the doc fast-paced and exciting, as well as informative. 

Marley (2012) 96%

2024's Bob Marley: One Love was a surprise hit in early 2024, but if you want a better feel for who the legendary musician was, I suggest the 2012 documentary simply called Marley . It's an incredible look into the life and worldwide popularity of the Jamaican star, with interviews with many of the major players in his life. 

The Fog Of War (2003) 96%

Anti-war documentaries are not unique, but what truly sets The Fog Of War apart is the man who is arguably most responsible for the escalation of the War in Vietnam, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. The movie is essentially an in-depth interview with McNamara decades after the war ended. He expresses his regret and explains his decision-making in regards to the controversial war. 

Amy (2015) 96%

Amy Winehouse was an unbelievable talent and in her death, she's been celebrated even more than she was in life, which is very telling. The 2015 doc simply titled Amy tells the tragic story of the troubled singer. It covers the amazing heights of her music and success, and the sadness of her addiction, which caused her death. Winehouse's family has distanced themselves from the doc, though they have endorsed the 2024 biopic about the singer . 

The War Room (1993) 96%

A famous saying states that great documentaries are 50% luck and 50% filmmaker skill. The War Room has both. A great filmmaker in D.A. Pennebaker and the amazing story of a political dark horse in the 1992 Presidential election named Bill Clinton. Clinton was not expected to win, but Pennebaker chose to follow his campaign anyway, which of course was very successful. 

Wordplay (2006) 94%

If you want a fantastic documentary that isn't going to leave you feeling depressed or hopeless, check out Wordplay about the world of competitive crossword puzzle solving. It's quirky, charming, and wonderful and it won't leave you questioning human existence, but celebrating it. 

Blackfish (2013) 99%

Blackfish is, on its surface, a documentary about the death of an orca trainer killed by a whale at SeaWorld. It's really a deep examination of the practice of keeping the whales in captivity and training them to entertain tourists. The film had a huge impact on the practice, which SeaWorld has announced they are phasing out . 

Hoop Dreams (1994) 98%

One of the most popular documentaries of the 1990s is Hoop Dreams . Despite being more than 30 years old, it still feels relevant, not to mention some amazing storytelling. It follows the story of two inner-city Chicago high school basketball players playing prep ball and their dreams of playing in the NBA. 

The Decline of Western Civilization (1981) 100%

Penelope Spheeris is probably best known as the director of Wayne's World, but that wasn't her first foray into music movies. The Decline of Western Civilization is hailed as one of the best music docs of all time, capturing a pivotal moment in the history of punk and hardcore and Spheeris did an amazing job filming it. 

Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room (2005) 97%

The collapse of Enron may seem like it was a million years ago, but we're lucky such a great movie was made about the company's malfeasance because it's a lesson we need to learn over and over. Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room is the definitive documentary about the ills of corporate corruption. Greed is not good, despite what Michael Douglas says in Wall Street or other movies made about Wall Street . 

The Kid Stays in the Picture (2002) 91%

For many, the first time they learned about the crazy life of film studio executive Robert Evans was in the 2022 series The Offer about the making of The Godfather, but a couple of decades ago Evans narrated a great documentary about his life called The Kid Stays in the Picture . It's a unique presentation of his incredible life story told as photos from throughout his life flash across the screen. 

Flee (2021) 98%

The 2021 Danish documentary Flee is different from every other entry on this list. It's animated. An animated film is not what anyone expects for a documentary but Flee proves it can work and work dramatically. It tells the amazing true story of an Afgan refugee named Amin Nawabi. 

Capturing the Friedmans (2003) 97%

Another early example of a great true crime story is Capturing the Friedmans . The film tells the story of a father and son accused (and eventually convicted) of assault on children to whom they taught music. It's disturbing in many ways, not the least of which is how just charges like these affected everyone attached to the accused. It's powerful and influential. 

The Velvet Underground (2021) 98%

It was once said that only a few hundred people bought the first Velvet Underground album but all of them started bands. The Velvet Underground didn't sell many records but Lou Reed and company made a massive impact on rock and roll and art in general. The 2021 documentary tells the whole story, with interviews with the people closest to it, including band members John Cale and Mo Tucker. 

The Truffle Hunters (2020) 97%

If you love dogs and/or truffles, this is the movie for you. I love both and since I do, I loved this documentary about the men and their dogs that search for the elusive funguses in the Italian countryside. 

Citizenfour (2014) 96%

Whether you agree with what Edward Snowden did, or think he's a traitor, Citizenfour is a movie you have to see. It doesn't defend him, nor does it praise him. It's as honest a take as you'll find. Oliver Stone later made a movie about Snowden starring Joseph Gorden-Levitt, who himself looked at both the positive and negative coverage of the accused spy. 

Hugh Scott is the Syndication Editor for CinemaBlend. Before CinemaBlend, he was the managing editor for Suggest.com and Gossipcop.com, covering celebrity news and debunking false gossip. He has been in the publishing industry for almost two decades, covering pop culture – movies and TV shows, especially – with a keen interest and love for Gen X culture, the older influences on it, and what it has since inspired. He graduated from Boston University with a degree in Political Science but cured himself of the desire to be a politician almost immediately after graduation.

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Best documentaries streaming now on Prime Video

Sometimes real life is stranger than fiction, and sometimes it's just far more fascinating. If you're in the mood for a documentary that'll get your pulse pumping, your heart aching, or your mind running, you'll want to check out Prime Video.

Now streaming on Prime Video is a wealth of mesmerizing true stories, ranging from personal tales of trials and triumph to harrowing crime investigations to quirky and heart-warming explorations of unique creative vision.

Whether you're in the mood for something educational, emotional, or just downright wild, this list of top-notch documentaries has got you covered.

1. Man on Wire

Depicting the high wire artist Philippe Petit's mind-boggling 1974 walk on a wire between the Twin Towers in NYC, this doc from filmmaker James Marsh uses rare video footage of Petit's prep along with recreations of the event and current-day interviews with everyone involved to craft a heart-racing heist film. Winning every award within reach, up to and including the Oscar, the film memorializes not just Petit's stunt but also those buildings, and the legend of their monumental status. — Jason Adams, Contributing Writer

How to watch : Man on Wire is now streaming on Prime Video .

2. Phil Tippett: Mad Dreams and Monsters

The same man who gave us the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park gave us the holographic chess game in Star Wars , the killer bugs in Starship Troopers , and the terrifying Enforcement Droid in RoboCop . That man's name is Phil Tippett, and those are just four of the special effects wizard's credits that this 2019 documentary on the man features. It's all covered in the run up to the long, long, long -delayed release of his stop-motion surrealist masterpiece Mad God — mostly because Tippett could never bring himself to stop tinkering with it – which also gets a lot of much deserved love here. Anyway, we love it when behind-the-scenes cinematic craftspeople of note get their proper due, and Tippett's one of the most deserving there ever was or will be. A magician. — J.A.

How to watch : Phil Tippett: Mad Dreams and Monsters is now streaming on Prime Video .

3. Living With Chucky

The Child's Play franchise — meaning the slasher films starring Chucky the murderous doll that began in 1988 right up through the TV series that's currently in its third season — has been in the hands of the same people the entire time, save one spin-off reboot that we will not discuss. Namely, creator Don Mancini and his crew of delightful wackadoos. That's given the franchise not just a thematic throughline that the other '80s slasher franchises have lacked, but an actual personal one, since decades of relationships have bloomed behind the scenes. 

And that's the juice that this 2022 doc thrives on. For example, director Kyra Elise Gardner quite literally grew up with Chucky; her dad Tony has been working on make-up and puppeteering for all things Child's Play for decades. That personal touch gives this doc a sweetness and an intimacy, and maybe those are not the words you'd typically associate with a killer doll, but here we are. — J.A.

How to watch : Living With Chucky is now streaming on Prime Video .

4. Dior and I

While a look behind the scenes at the staging a fashion show can often induce terror, director Frédéric Tcheng's 2014 look at the first haute couture collection of Raf Simons for the legendary house is so awash in beauty that you hardly even notice any of that. Narrated via excerpts of Dior's autobiography, which was unpublished and only discovered at the start of the film's production, Dior and I is as intimate and exquisite as the garments themselves . — J.A.

How to watch : Dior and I is now streaming on Prime Video .

5. Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror

The Wicker Man. Midsommar. The Blair Witch Project. The Lighthouse . What do these seemingly disparate bunch of horror movies all have in common? They all belong to the scary subgenre of folk horror, which relies on natural environments and elements of folklore and myth to create nightmarish atmospheres. 

And if you're curious about them at all, boy oh boy, have I got the documentary for you!  Wildly informative at well over three hours, writer and historian Kier-La Janisse's 2021 doc will tell you everything you need to know about the past, present, and future of these films, scanning every corner of the globe. It's truly one of the most impressive documentaries on the subject of horror films ever crafted — an entire semester in one sitting. In addition to tons of great interviews and clips, you'll walk away with a list ten pages long of movies to watch. — J.A.

How to watch : Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror is now streaming on Prime Video .

6. One Child Nation

In China between the years 1979 and 2015, the government had a one-child policy; because of the surging population, families were "encouraged" to only have a single child. In Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang's 2019 documentary, they interviewed both the enforcers of that policy and the enforced-upon, and a picture of genuine horror emerges. 

The propaganda from the era seems downright goofy, but it had a chilling effect. Infanticide and human trafficking ran rampant. But the most moving parts of the doc are the ones seen from the ground level, especially from within Wang's family, where her own mother speaks of the terrible decisions she had to make. — J.A.

How to watch : One Child Nation is now streaming on Prime Video .

7. Nelly and Nadine

Looking for blossoms of hope within tales of the Holocaust can sometimes feel like a fool's errand, but Magnus Gertten's 2022 documentary about a love affair between two women who met in a concentration camp somehow manages that moving feat. Sylvie Bianchi spent most of her life too afraid to look into her grandmother Nelly's letters about her time in the female-only Ravensbrück camp. Once Sylvie does look into Nelly's letters, she discovers a a secret love story between her grandmother and another woman named Nadine. Somehow, these two women managed to find love amid all the horror, and years later they reunited and ran off to Venezuela to be together. It's astonishing stuff, and a reminder of how facing the worst imaginable thing will make the beauty in life shine all the brighter.  — J.A. 

How to watch : Nelly and Nadine is now streaming on Prime Video .

8. Grizzly Man

Werner Herzog has fully been a character for his 60-year-plus directing career. (See also the 1999 doc My Best Fiend , which is also currently streaming on Prime .) But it wasn't until this 2005 documentary that he truly became a brand unto himself — a voice iconic enough to inspire tributes and parodies far and wide, in addition to the occasional stunt-casting gig .  

That would be odd in and of itself, but it becomes deeply weird when you take into account the film's subject. Grizzly Man is actually a deeply serious cautionary tale about the conservationist Timothy Treadwell, who went to live among the bears of Alaska and ended up killed by the creatures he got too comfortable with — recording himself all the while. So go rewatch Grizzly Man , setting aside your best existentially somber Herzog impression for a minute, and immerse yourself in the director's meticulous reconstruction of Treadwell's life, work, and multiple follies. This is ultimately an extremely moving and often disturbing portrait of one man's overreach and the indifferent natural world biting back.

How to watch : Grizzly Man is now streaming on Prime Video .

9. I Am: Celine Dion

What better moment to spend some of your time with the Quebecois musical icon than now, in the wake of her triumphant return to the stage for the opening ceremonies of the Paris Olympics? As this 2024 doc makes clear , it was not at all an easy journey to that perch on the side of the Eiffel Tower, where she sang Edith Piaf's ballad "Hymne à l'amour" straight into the heavens. After her 2022 diagnosis with stiff-person syndrome, a rare neurological disorder that causes a person's muscles to seize up, she's been through the ringer. 

But in true Celine fashion, she refuses to be held back, and director Irene Taylor's film captures her in some deeply intimate and personal moments. There's nobody quite like Celine, whose humor and forthrightness will melt even the most cynical viewer's defenses. — J.A.

How to watch : I Am: Celine Dion is now streaming on Prime Video .

10. Gimme Danger

Gimme Danger is the definitive document of punk rock's origin point. The Stooges were so far ahead of their time they'd made three records and broken up before anybody could even realize what they'd done. Jim Jarmusch spent about ten years working on the doc, which comes to a head with their 2010 induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. And everybody still alive to tell the wild tale happily tells their version of it. Of course it's Iggy, who's spent several decades hogging the spotlight, who walks away with the show yet again. — J.A.

How to watch : Gimme Danger is now streaming on Prime Video .

11. Silver Dollar Road

After 2016's I Am Not Your Negro and 2021's Exterminate All the Brutes, it's safe to say that director Raoul Peck is one of the greats working today. 2023's Silver Dollar Road , which is based on the 2019 ProPublica article "Kicked Off The Land" by Lizzie Presser, triple underlines that statement. The film tells the ongoing multi-generational story of the Reels family, whose prime slice of waterfront property in North Carolina became the focus of some greedy real estate developers. In just 100 minutes, it manages to be both a beautiful portrait of a loving family and an infuriating excavation of American institutionalized racism at work. — J.A.

How to watch : Silver Dollar Road is now streaming on Prime Video .

Val Kilmer is one of the greats, without question. He's played Batman and The Doors frontman Jim Morrison. His performance in Tombstone as Doc Holliday is a frequently quoted cult hit that's inspired any number of memes. And he's Hollywood's best Moses to date, with his star turn in The Prince of Egypt , an animated retelling of the Passover story from 1998, far exceeding that of Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments .

In Val , the famed actor who largely fell out of public view in the mid-2010s as he battled throat cancer, bares his whole self. Kilmer himself created many of the home movies and behind-the-scenes clips featured in this Amazon Original documentary, and they're weaved together here to paint a picture of his life and career. Featuring narration from Kilmer's son Jack and words written by the actor himself, Val is about as personal as a biographical documentary can get. — Adam Rosenberg, Video Game Reporter

How to watch: Val is now streaming on Prime Video.

13. Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown

Released in 2014, the same year the late Chadwick Boseman starred as the Godfather of Soul in the biopic Get On Up , Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown plays like a fitting companion piece. But with an accomplished documentarian like Alex Gibney at the helm, Mr. Dynamite more than stands on its own.

Highlighted by a wealth of rare archival materials showing the funk and soul superstar during his early days, the film chronicles Brown's career from his time playing for Black audiences when the American Civil Rights movement was still taking shape, all the way into his mainstreamed blockbuster success. While Mr. Dynamite 's largely uncritical look falls short on chronicling Brown's later years, there are more than enough archival materials and fascinating revelations to sustain this two-hour trip through music history. — A.R.

How to watch: Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown is now streaming on Prime Video.

14. The Imposter

Bart Layton's retelling of the extremely curious 1997 case of the French conman Frédéric Bourdin presents us with one of those true stories that seems too baffling to believe – indeed, when the 2009 horror film Orphan stole this documentary's big revelation, it came to be considered one of the greatest horror movie twists of all time! But the twist is indeed based in truth, as Bourdin was able to impersonate a missing Texan boy and “happily reunite” with the boy’s family, even though he was several years older, had a French accent, and didn’t much look like the boy at all. The power of belief is a powerful force indeed. — J.A. How to watch: The Imposter is now streaming on Prime Video .

15. The Howlin' Wolf Story

Chester Burnett, the Howlin' Wolf himself: Hear that voice once, and you'll never forget it. Burnett's raspy, tortured growl is the sound of a freight train moaning at midnight , and it's just one piece of the portrait painted in filmmaker Don McGlynn's The Howlin' Wolf Story .

The legendary Chicago bluesman left an indelible mark on culture and rock music specifically, as the originator of what are now bona fide blues standards, like "Spoonful" and "Smokestack Lightnin'." This documentary recounts Burnett's early days spent learning under Charley Patton, his travels with Robert Johnson, his impact on the Rolling Stones (and music in general), and the larger-than-life energy he brought to every stage he set foot on as the Wolf. — A.R.

How to watch: The Howlin' Wolf Story is now streaming on Prime Video.

16. No No: A Dockumentary

No No: A Dockumentary has one hell of a powerful hook: Dock Ellis, the late Major League Baseball pro who is its subject, once pitched a no-hitter as a Pittsburgh Pirate while tripping his face off on LSD.

Wild as it is, that incident is, of course, just a moment in a much larger and more complex life. Director Jeffrey Radice assembles his picture of Ellis from interviews with friends, family, and former teammates, bolstering the production even further with a generous helping of archival materials — including words from Ellis himself.

No No is a thorough look at the man behind the moment. The documentary anchors itself in that moment only to highlight and heighten the life that led to and followed it. We come away with a deeper understanding of who Ellis was, the various forces that shaped his life, and the highs and lows that characterized his journey. — A.R.

How to watch: No No: A Dockumentary is now streaming on Prime Video.

17. American Movie

Celebrating the 25th anniversary of the greatest year for movies in modern history has proven a Herculean effort in 2024, but no such celebration is complete without giving some love to Chris Smith's classic and endlessly quotable documentary American Movie . The doc has Smith following around the low-budget Wisconsinite filmmaker Mark Borchardt as he tries, against literally all of the odds, to make a horror movie called Coven , which tells the tale of a sobriety support group that is in reality the front for a bunch of witches. 

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Borchardt is one of those subjects whom you just cannot look away from — and so too is his best friend Mike Schank and his uncle/financier Uncle Bill. They're a lovable, infuriating, and surprisingly ingenious bunch, under all the endless bungling. And so American Movie ends up in the same league of heartfelt odes to lo-fi creativity as Tim Burton's masterpiece Ed Wood , as well as being one of the funniest movies ever made. — J.A.

How to watch: American Movie is now streaming on Prime Video.

18. Hail Satan?

Co-founded by Lucien Greaves and Malcolm Jarry in 2013, The Satanic Temple is a non-theistic organization that pushes back whenever our First Amendment rights are being undermined by Christian zealots. One such example of TST's advocacy, which is at the heart of this 2019 doc, is a life-size Baphomet statue that was to be installed at the Oklahoma State Capitol as a rejoinder to a (misspelled) Ten Commandments monument funded by Rep. Mike Ritze in 2012.

Director Penny Lane drops us into their righteous fight with thoughtfulness and humor, illustrating that in the modern battle between good and evil, it's really the Satanists who are proving to be on the right side of history. — J.A.

How to watch: Hail Satan? is now streaming on Prime Video .

19. Fiddler: Miracle of Miracles

Even if you know every word to Broadway bangers like "If I Were a Rich Man" and "Tradition," there's still a good chance you don't know the full history and impact of the play from which they hail: Fiddler on the Roof .

This documentary from Max Lewkowicz examines the 1964 musical from Jerry Bock (music), Sheldon Harnick (lyrics), and Joseph Stein (book) and the difficult road it took to reach the stage — and eventually the big screen. Featuring interviews and insights from luminaries like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Harvey Fierstein, and director Norman Jewison, Fiddler is must-watch material for any fan of Broadway past and present. — A.R.

How to watch: Fiddler: Miracle of Miracles is now streaming on Prime Video.

20. Good Night Oppy

No matter how much you thought you wanted the titular star of Pixar's animated masterpiece WALL-E to be real, it's guaranteed to only be a fraction of how badly Good Night Oppy director Ryan White and his cast of NASA nerds wanted WALL-E to be real, because they set out with this movie to anthropomorphize the dickens out of their Mars rover called Opportunity. (Or "Oppy" for cutesy short.) While it is at times a bit much — like when listening to these serious scientists insist their hunk of metal doo-dads they've shipped 230 million miles away totally has a personality — Good Night Oppy doesn't lack for celestial splendor. And making the little can-do robot at its center the audience stand-in does often result in a true sense of the enormity of this mission, and the odds they all faced, both real and imagined. — J.A. How to watch: Good Night Oppy is now streaming on Prime Video .

21. Stories We Tell

Sarah Polley began acting when she was four years old, which is a story she tells with typical intelligence and emotional precision in her 2022 memoir Run Towards the Danger . But a full 10 years earlier, she told us a totally different story with her film Stories We Tell — the one about her parents, the secrets of her own birth, and about the ways her family processed and didn't process certain events and revelations over the years. The less said beforehand with regards to this movie's unfolding mysteries, the better. And if we're being absolutely forced to exist without her acting on-screen, this is further proof (alongside her other directorial efforts, Away From Her , Take This Waltz, and Women Talking ) that she's got more than enough magic to share from behind the screen. — J.A. How to watch : Stories We Tell is now streaming on Prime Video .

22. Judy Blume Forever

We personally have been celebrating "the year of Judy Blume" for decades. But it's hard to not make the case that 2023 – with the delightful adaptation of Blume's book Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret and this documentary both hitting screens – is a real big year for Blume-heads. And Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok's film on the author is thankfully attuned to Blume's endurance as much as her legacy, and so we get to hear as much on her thoughts about the world today as we do her career past. Seeing as how she's been on the front-lines of book bans and censorship for decades, there's no better authority. – J.A. How to watch : Judy Blume Forever is now streaming on Prime Video .

23. Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World

Music is awash with secret histories like the one explored in Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World. The documentary from co-directors Catherine Bainbridge and Alfonso Maiorana takes a look at the impact indigenous populations in America had on popular music.

In addition to Link Wray, the famed Shawnee singer/songwriter and guitarist whose most famous song serves as the film's title, Rumble profiles Jimi Hendrix, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Mildred Bailey, Redbone, and even formative blues legend Charley Patton, among others. — A.R.

How to watch: Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World is now streaming on Prime Video.

24. Between Me and My Mind

Director Steven Cantor's "slice of life" look at Phish frontman Trey Anastasio isn't going to turn any doubters into true believers, but it does offer a glimpse into the life of the guitarist and singer who fuels many of the band's creatively playful and often deeply nerdy antics.

While the film centers itself in a particular moment — a busy period in which Anastasio is finishing up the solo album Ghosts in the Forest as he prepares for Phish's 2018 run of New Year's Eve concerts at Madison Square Garden — it's not all about the music. This is a family affair that presents viewers with a glimpse into the subdued rocker's home life and off-stage history. Through that lens, we learn much about the way Anastasio thinks and approaches his work. — A.R.

How to watch: Between Me and My Mind is now streaming on Prime Video.

25. The Booksellers

If your toes curl during the scene in Beauty and the Beast where the Beast shows Belle his enormous library and she spins around so we can stare at the shelves of books going up, up, up into the rafters, then have we got the documentary for you! D.W. Young's 2019 doc (executive produced and narrated by Party Girl star and librarian icon Parker Posey) takes us into the world of rare and antiquarian book shops and book dealers in New York. Speaking with the people who run famed institutions like the Strand and the Argosy, as well as erudite authors and personalities like Fran Lebowitz and Gay Talese, you can practically smell the bookshop smell — you know, that sweet musty something — wafting off your screen as you watch. It'll make your best Belle fantasies come roaring back. — J.A. How to watch : The Booksellers is now streaming on Prime Video .   

26. Welcome to Chechnya

Focusing on LGBTQ refugees escaping from Chechnya, where they've been subject to government-sanctioned torture and murder, How to Survive a Plague filmmaker David France's harrowing 2020 doc follows its subjects' flight from their homeland using a wealth of modern tech, including cell phones and GoPros. But it's the film's usage of AI technology , in order to disguise the refugees' faces and preserve their anonymity, that proved revolutionary, showing that AI can actually be used for good in some instances ( rather than to just obliterate all artists' well-being , as has been the case as of late ). But that tech still never manages to outshine the very human and very scary stories at the film's heart — one which has only felt closer to home with time — and which should shake any decent person to their core. — J.A. How to watch: Welcome to Chechnya is now streaming on Prime Video .

Documenting Sibil Fox Richardson's 20-year battle to get her husband Rob out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary for a crime that he very much did commit, filmmaker Garrett Bradley pieced together Time using home movies that Richardson herself filmed over the years. What the two summon forth is a devastating critique of the prison industrial complex and the state-sanctioned gears that grind up families. Because, as the film's moving footage attests at every turn, Rob's guilt is not who he is, not as a man or a husband or a father. We are all so much more than the mistakes we make, and the system as it's designed is blind, cruel, and indifferent. Rob was granted clemency in 2018, 21 years after he was convicted as a first-time felony offender to 60 years in jail, with no possibility for parole or probation . — J.A.

How to watch: Time is now streaming on Prime Video .

UPDATE: Aug. 1, 2024, 11:33 a.m. EDT This list was first published on Aug. 1, 2020. It has since been updated to reflect the current streaming options.

Topics Amazon Prime Video Documentaries Streaming Watch Guides

Jason Adams is a freelance entertainment writer at Mashable. He lives in New York City and is a Rotten Tomatoes approved critic who also writes for Pajiba, The Film Experience, AwardsWatch, and his own personal site My New Plaid Pants. He's extensively covered several film festivals including Sundance, Toronto, New York, SXSW, Fantasia, and Tribeca. He's a member of the LGBTQ critics guild GALECA. He loves slasher movies and Fassbinder and you can follow him on Twitter at @JAMNPP.

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The 25 best documentaries on Max right now

The streamer carries a wide variety of docs, incredible true stories to astounding profiles.

Documentaries provide audiences with uncanny insight into topics that are well-known, niche, or in the gray area in between. It’s always a delight to watch a doc about a subject close to one’s heart, but the best documentaries are able to grab viewers and immerse them in a topic they previously had no interest in. These films can take us to different worlds or deeper into the worlds we already know.

Max has a particularly vast catalog of documentaries across a variety of subjects. The streamer offers classics, such as The Times of Harvey Milk (1984), plus more obscure and/or brand-new HBO offerings such as Faye: The Many Lives of Faye Dunaway and MoviePass, MovieCrash . Since the platform has no shortage of documentaries, we did our best to distill our list down to the best choices.

Read on as Entertainment Weekly names the 25 best documentaries on Max right now.

Paris Is Burning (1990)

Jennie Livingston’s groundbreaking film chronicles the “golden age” of New York City’s drag scene. To call Paris Is Burning revolutionary would be short-changing its contribution to queer culture and the documentary format as a whole. It’s such an evocative memory of a specific time and place that you can practically taste the hairspray. Livingston’s eye is both sensitive and quizzical, and her film is at its best when it focuses on the community’s specific members, many of whom left their real families in search of a more welcoming home.

Where to watch Paris Is Burning : Max

EW grade: A ( read our review )

Director: Jennie Livingston

Cast: Paris Dupree, Pepper LaBeija, Octavia Saint Laurent

Related content: Paris Is Burning director on the spin-off idea too painful to make

Stop Making Sense (1984)

This seminal concert film, directed by the great Jonathan Demme and profiling a two-night stint by the Talking Heads at Hollywood’s Pantages Theatre, features some of the most electric live footage ever put to screen. Eschewing the cliches of most concert docs, Demme builds an intimate quasi-narrative about the process of creating a performance — and the musical quality of creation itself. Rather than gratuitous crowd shots, Demme stays on the stage, maintaining focus on David Byrne and his bandmates’ imagination, humor, physicality, and boundless energy. 

To put it simply, Stop Making Sense is one of the best films of its kind. If you’ve never seen it, you have a magical 88 minutes waiting for you. (And yes, The Big Suit is as big and as glorious as you’ve heard.)

Where to watch Stop Making Sense : Max

Director: Jonathan Demme

Cast: David Byrne, Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth, Jerry Harrison

Related content: Punk photographer Jim Saah shares the stories behind his favorite shots of Black Flag, Talking Heads, more

Hoop Dreams (1994)

Steve James’ affecting feature debut chronicles two Black teenagers in Chicago who get recruited to play basketball at a well-heeled white school. Filmed over five years, James’ documentary follows the players on the court and at home, providing first-hand insight into how young athletes are shaped by social obstacles, not to mention the institutions seeking to monetize them. Hoop Dreams is a spectacular piece of work that has stood the test of time, an “almost novelistic tapestry of cinema verite and talking-head interviews,” says EW’s critic .

Where to watch Hoop Dreams : Max

EW grade: A ( read the review )

Director: Steve James

Cast: William Gates, Arthur Agee

Related content: Hoop Dreams director Steve James on his new documentary about concussions among athletes and whether the NFL can "save their sport"

Grey Gardens (1975)

A classic from filmmaking duo Albert and David Maysles, this time working with Muffie Meyer and Ellen Hovde, follows the bizarre exploits of Jackie O. relatives Edie Bouvier Beale and her mother Edith, a.k.a. Little Edie and Big Edie.

The Bouviers spent their days in a ramshackle Long Island mansion, engaging in a mysteriously co-dependent relationship (when they could tolerate one another). Much like Gimme Shelter , the Maysles let the action unfurl before their lens without commenting upon it or dissecting it, allowing the audience to form their own conclusions about what they’re seeing. Grey Gardens is not only one of the most referenced and parodied documentaries of all time, but one of the most astonishing and rewatchable.

Where to watch Grey Gardens : Max

Director: Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Muffie Meyer, Ellen Hovde

Cast: Edith Bouvier, Edie Bouvier, Albert Maysles, David Maysles

Related content: How "Little Edie" Beale became a creative muse

Capturing the Freidmans (2003)

Andrew Jarecki, creator of The Jinx , directed this somber and utterly chilling account of a seemingly typical suburban family that comes undone when the patriarch and one of his sons are accused of unthinkable crimes.

Jarecki’s sharp, heartbreaking work makes terrific use of the documentary format, utilizing home videos filmed by one of the sons and questioning the compulsions one might have for recording such a personal, slow demise. Much like The Jinx subject Robert Durst, the Friedmans are a gang whose hubris puts their biggest secrets on display in an effort to conceal them.

Where to watch Capturing the Friedmans : Max

EW grade: N/A ( read the review )

Director: Andrew Jarecki

Cast: Arnold Freeman, David Freeman, Jesse Friedman

Related content: The 31 best true crime documentaries on Netflix

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022)

Laura Poitras ’ beautifully structured documentary profiles artist and activist Nan Goldin’s crusade to hold the Sackler family accountable for the opioid crisis. Goldin, a former addict who founded the advocacy group Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (P.A.I.N.), personifies the pain and desperation of the epidemic in her quest to avenge the destruction wrought on her life and that of others. The Oscar-nominated doc benefits tremendously from putting real faces to the devastation while also grappling with larger issues about those culpable.

Where to watch All the Beauty and the Bloodshed : Max

Director: Laura Poitras

Cast: Nan Goldin

Related content: The 10 best movies of 2022 (and 5 worst)

Asif Kapadia’s tragic examination of the soaring career and untimely death of Amy Winehouse is a much fuller, more nuanced look at the musician’s life than this year’s biopic, Back to Black . With a remarkable amount of archival footage, Kapadia traces Winehouse’s life from her early childhood until the night of her death. Along the way, there’s plenty of Winehouse performances which, though less than 20 years old, somehow seem beamed in from a previous century.

You won’t leave Amy feeling any better about Winehouse’s demise or the way she was treated by the media (and those close to her); but you’ll walk away with a better understanding of the star’s drive, her spiral into addiction, and her commitment to her craft.

Where to watch Amy : Max

Director: Asif Kapadia

Related content : Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black is exploitative and tone-deaf

Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief (2015)

Alex Gibney ’s enraging and illuminating documentary profiles the Scientology movement from the ground up, tracing how the niche beliefs of C-grade sci-fi author L. Ron Hubbard led to the establishment of one of the most controversial religious organizations on Earth.

Gibney is an incisive documentarian with an eye for details and a knack for nailing potent points. Going Clear may be his masterwork. It’s admirably clear-eyed in overview of the facts, told with creative flair and respect for the survivors involved.

Where to watch Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief : Max

Director: Alex Gibney

Cast: Paul Haggis , Jason Beghe, L. Ron Hubbard, David Miscavige

Related content: Going Clear : An Inquiry and an Inquisition

Moonage Daydream (2022)

Brett Morgen takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey through the life and career of David Bowie . With well-rendered visual sequences and a brilliant playlist of Bowie’s catalog — tracks both well-known and obscure — Morgen charts the enigmatic musician’s rise from a cloistered English schoolboy to the larger-than-life glam rocker we all love.

Morgen’s approach is much more interested in the feeling of Bowie’s music, and the impression his career left on fans, than in Bowie’s work ethic or recording method, which comes as a bit of a relief after the numerous works charting Bowie’s discography. This documentary feels like a much more personal, ground-level view of the singer that peeks behind his mystique without doing away with it.

Where to watch Moonage Daydream : Max

EW grade: A- ( read the review )

Director: Brett Morgen

Related content: Every song on David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust , ranked

The Times of Harvey Milk (1984)

One of the finest documentaries on this list, The Times of Harvey Milk is a stunning portrait of the late San Francisco politician’s crusade for equality. This film was made just six years after Milk’s assassination at the hands of Dan White, a fellow government worker, and deals with the aftermath of that tragedy as well as White’s infamous trial. Rob Epstein’s incomparable feature serves as one of the definitive statements on Milk’s legacy and as a vibrant time capsule of his beloved city.

Where to watch The Times of Harvey Milk : Max

Director: Rob Epstein

Related content: 25 powerful movies based on real-life political drama

Gimme Shelter (1970)

This gripping account of the Rolling Stones’ infamous free concert at Altamont is directed with grace by Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin. It’s a spectacular document of the tragic event, which culminated in bloodshed after the Stones wrangled the Hell’s Angels to work security for the gig. 

The unblinking lens of Zwerin and the Maysles’ camera catches the carnage as it organically unfolds, making this one of the most unmissable and important music documentaries ever made.

Where to watch Gimme Shelter : Max

Director: Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin

Cast: Mick Jagger , Keith Richards , Charlie Watts, Mick Taylor

Related content: The 25 best rock songs of all time

Buena Vista Social Club (1999)

Wim Wenders ’ vibrant film is a deeply moving chronicle of Ry Cooder’s effort to, along with his son Joachim, travel to Cuba and assemble the country’s most famous, forgotten musicians to record a new album. The band eventually comes to America, where they play to rapt houses.

This heartfelt documentary is one of the finest accounts of the perils and pitfalls of artistry in conjunction with its greatest benefits. You’ll likely be struck by the musicians’ fearsome talent and smacked by the unfairness of them not being given their due. Indeed, Wenders’ film is a love letter to their talent, to music, and to cinema itself.

Where to watch Buena Vista Social Club : Max

Director: Wim Wenders

Cast: Ry Cooder, Compay Segundo, Ibrahim Ferrer, Rubén González, Octavio Calderon

Related content: Buena Vista Social Club is born

The Mystery of D.B. Cooper (2020)

A rousing and tremendously exciting look at one of history’s most notorious unsolved heists, this documentary concerns a crime undertaken by the mysterious D.B. Cooper, who vanished without a trace after a daring mid-air escape.

Cooper’s case has inspired rampant speculation for decades, but John Dower’s precise film distills the story down to 85 minutes of essentials through interviews with those present for the astonishing incident. This is one of the most concise and fascinating accounts about Cooper, and it’s well worth a watch for any true crime fan.

Where to watch The Mystery of D.B. Cooper : Max

Director: John Dower 

Cast: Jo Weber, Jim Weber, Duane Collins, William Rataczak

Related content: The high-flying story of D.B. Cooper

Albert Brooks: Defending My Life (2023)

Rob Reiner ’s appropriately reverent examination of Albert Brooks ’ career is one of the most comprehensive documentaries of its kind. Through interviews with modern comedy legends such as Jerry Seinfeld , James L. Brooks , and Larry David — all of whom count themselves among Brooks’ disciples — Reiner cannily makes the case that Brooks was the first alternative comedian and that without him, there would be no Steve Martin , no Saturday Night Live , no Borat , nor any modern comedy scene worth noting. 

Eschewing any sense of hagiography that these docs often descend into, Reiner offers a wry, truthful examination of Brooks’ remarkable career.

Where to watch Albert Brooks: Defending My Life : Max

Director: Rob Reiner

Cast: Albert Brooks, Rob Reiner, Jon Stewart , Sarah Silverman , Alana Haim

Related content: Albert Brooks' mother on Albert Brooks' Mother

The Automat (2021)

Lisa Hurwitz’s nostalgic, dewy-eyed doc looks back at Horn & Hardart automats, a New York City staple that became a cultural institution. An early progenitor to fast food, automats offered an assortment of freshly made dishes (and some damn good coffee) for just a nickel apiece. With the help of Mel Brooks , who composes a delightful song for the closing credits, Hurwitz dives into H&H’s brief but illustrious history.

The Automat is a cheery look into a distinctly antiquated concept. It also serves as a longing paean for a lost sense of community — and instills an almost pathological craving for a cup of coffee and a slice of pie.

Where to watch The Automat : Max

Director: Lisa Hurwitz

Cast: Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Colin Powell, Ruth Bader Ginsburg

De Palma (2015)

Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s eminently rewatchable dissection of Brian De Palma ’s oeuvre — with the man himself serving as the tour guide — is a fascinating, understated look into the mind of one of America’s most influential filmmakers.

Parsing through his filmography one by one (with one very famous music video thrown in), De Palma explores each film with an exhaustive approach. The documentary is a hair over 100 minutes, but it could easily stretch on for days with little complaint from its target audience. There’s nothing quite as exciting as hearing De Palma — at times self-deprecating but always forthright and in control — digest his own work.

Where to watch De Palma : Max

Director: Noah Baumbach, Jake Paltrow

Cast: Brian De Palma

Related content: Brian De Palma on how he depicts women in his films

Everything Is Copy: Nora Ephron Scripted and Unscripted (2015)

This delightful look at the sprawling career of journalist, screenwriter, and filmmaker Nora Ephron is co-directed by her son, Jacob Bernstein. It’s a terrific overview of Ephron featuring interviews with collaborators like Meryl Streep , spiritual successors like Lena Dunham , and admirers like Reese Witherspoon . Also examined is Ephron’s personal life, which made up the backbone of her autobiographical novel and screenplay for Heartburn — later adapted by Mike Nichols into a 1986 film starring Streep — and her ultimate decision not to inform loved ones about her fatal cancer diagnosis.

Everything Is Copy gives viewers will undoubtedly make viewers curious to seek out her writings and, if they’ve somehow missed them, her many classic films.

Where to watch Everything Is Copy: Nora Ephron Scripted and Unscripted : Max

EW grade: A- ( read the review ) 

Director: Jacob Bernstein, Nick Hooker

Cast: Nora Ephron, Carl Bernstein, Nicholas Pileggi, Gaby Hoffman , Meg Ryan

Related content: Meg Ryan and Nora Ephron once planned to make a movie about red hawks in Central Park

Faye: The Many Lives of Faye Dunaway (2024)

Faye Dunaway ’s singular life and career get a forceful recollection in Laurent Bouzereau’s powerful documentary, which bears a structural similarity to De Palma as it walks audiences through Dunaway’s career performance by performance.

The star’s roles in classics like Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Chinatown (1974), and Network (1976) are profiled in full, as are her later works, which are a lot more varied than you probably remember. Crucially, Faye also spotlights Dunaway’s off-screen life in a way no other project has afforded the controversial star. Here, she speaks for herself, illuminating corners of her career and personality that have remained unexplored until now. Bouzerau’s documentary is inspiring and heart-wrenching, reminding us that the greatest talents are often misunderstood in their time.

Where to watch Faye: The Many Lives of Faye Dunaway : Max

Director: Laurent Bouzereau

Cast: Faye Dunaway

Related content: Faye Dunaway was reluctant to film the infamous Mommie Dearest wire hangers scene

Julia (2021)

Julia is a charming trip through the life, love, and culinary prowess of Julia Child. For those looking for an overview of the chef’s career, you will be well rewarded; and for those with a passing knowledge of Child wanting to explore more of her work, Julia satisfyingly fits the bill.

Betsy West and Julie Cohen faithfully capture Child’s vibrant spirit in the tone of their work. Also addressed with great care and emotion is her marriage to Paul Cushing, which seems like one of history’s great love affairs, as well as her sense of never being fully appreciated in the field due to her age and gender. One comes away from Julia considering how culture’s most influential figures never live to see the breadth of their own influence.

Where to watch Julia : Max

Director: Betsy West, Julie Cohen

Cast: Julia Child, Paul Cushing Child, Alex Prud'homme, Ina Garten, Ruth Reichl

Little Richard: I Am Everything (2023)

Little Richard gets his due in this vibrant gem of a documentary directed by Lisa Cortés. I Am Everything tracks the rock star’s meteoric rise and wildly influential career with interviews from contemporaries such as Paul McCartney and Keith Richards, plus those, like John Waters , influenced by Richard’s anarchic, proto-glam rock act. 

Of particular note here is the film’s terrific original soundtrack and score, which pays tribute to and celebrates Little Richard’s work through several toe-tapping compositions.

Where to watch Little Richard: I Am Everything : Max

Director: Lisa Cortés

Cast: Little Richard, John Waters, Keith Richards, Paul McCartney, Elton John

Related content: Little Richard: I Am Everything director on re-crowning the King of Rock & Roll, his sexuality, and legacy

Mel Brooks Unwrapped (2018)

Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty 

Mel Brooks guides viewers through his early days and career in this jaunty documentary. Through rare archival footage, Brooks tells audiences in his own words how he came to be one of the preeminent comedic voices of his day.

Director Alan Yentob bookends Unwrapped with a wry pseudo-bit in which Brooks does his best to hijack the documentary’s production. (One gets the sense it’s impossible to make Brooks a part of something without it becoming A Mel Brooks Production.) If there’s any criticism to be had here, it’s that Yentob is perhaps too deferential to Brooks in terms of structure; those expecting an A-to-Z summary of Brooks’ career will be left wanting. However, those who know Brooks’ work and are seeking more niche details will be in heaven.

Where to watch Mel Brooks Unwrapped : Max

Director: Alan Yentob

Cast: Mel Brooks, Alan Yentob, Carl Reiner

Related content: Mel Brooks came up with one of the most famous horror movie taglines of all time

The Ringleader: The Case of the Bling Ring (2023)

The sordid Hollywood Bling Ring theft saga, chronicled in a Vanity Fair feature and adapted by Sofia Coppola , is the documentary treatment in this perfectly calibrated feature about the ring’s leader, Rachel Lee. In her own words, Lee explains why she felt compelled to recruit a group of celebrity-obsessed pals to rob the homes of people like Paris Hilton and Orlando Bloom . This is a remarkably compelling, well-told recitation of events that benefits greatly from Lee’s cooperation.

Where to watch The Ringleader : Max

Director: Erin Lee Carr

Cast: Rachel Lee, David Lee, Christine Kee, Sarika Kim

Related content: Alexis Haines on the legacy of the Bling Ring

The Super Bob Einstein Movie (2021)

Bob Einstein was a brilliant comedic actor best known for his recurring failed stuntman character Super Dave Osborne and playing Marty Funkhouser on Curb Your Enthusiasm . This affectionate documentary explores how Einstein, the brother of Albert Brooks, was a remarkably thoughtful and committed entertainer whose biggest laughs were often generated by his no-nonsense demeanor. As Sarah Silverman notes in the charmed feature, Einstein is perhaps the only comedian to ever make a career out of playing the straight man to himself.

Where to watch The Super Bob Einstein Movie : Max

Director: Danny Gold

Cast: Bob Einstein, Albert Brooks, Sarah Silverman, Jeff Garlin , Larry David

Related content: HBO's The Super Bob Einstein Movie honors the beloved comedian

The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (2019)

Alex Gibney brings his laser focus to the story of Elizabeth Holmes, who through her start-up Theranos defrauded investors with the promise of a revolutionary blood testing device. Holmes is another shyster whose story has been dissected in several documentaries and in dramatizations like Hulu’s The Dropout , but Gibney brings specific insights and a fresh perspective to this truly unbelievable story.

Where to watch The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley : Max

Cast: Elizabeth Holmes, Alex Gibney, Ken Auletta, Erika Cheung

Related content: See Amanda Seyfried practice her Elizabeth Holmes voice in first trailer for Hulu's The Dropout

MoviePass, MovieCrash (2024)

This is a succinct, rather depressing look at the spectacular rise and just-as-sudden flameout of MoviePass, the subscription service beloved by many cinephiles. (MoviePass has since been revived, albeit in a curtailed form.)

Mark Wahlberg produced this look at the short-lived phenomenon, which aimed to boost multiplex visitation but eventually crashed and burned due to corporate greed and shoddy upkeep. The documentary shows that, while it may never have been the most sustainable model, MoviePass was certainly a well-intentioned idea that could’ve had a more successful run under better leadership. 

Where to watch MoviePass, MovieCrash : Max

Director: Muta'Ali

Cast: Mitch Lowe, Nathan McAlone, Stacy Spikes

Related Articles

The 15 Best Documentaries on Max Right Now (August 2024)

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The truth can be scary sometimes. And whether you believe they’re real or fake, the truth is still out there somewhere. Max has been garnering quite the attention for its handpicked selection of films and shows. But their list of compelling documentaries is not to be missed! From the equal pay struggles of a women’s soccer team to the groundbreaking artists these films and shows below will show you just how diverse the documentary genre is. Check out these documentary shows and movies on Max.

For more recommendations, check out our list of the best movies on Max or the best documentaries on Hulu , Disney+ , Prime Video , and Netflix .

Disclaimer: These titles are available on US Max.

Editor's note: This article was updated August 2024 to include Paris is Burning.

‘Paris is Burning’ (1990)

Rotten tomatoes: 98% | imdb: 8.2/10.

Paris is Burning

Paris is Burning is a once-in-a-generation documentary that captures a moment that would be lost to time without it. Director Jennie Livingston ( Who's the Top? ) pulls back the curtain on the underground drag ball culture of the late 80s that not only gave Black and Latine members of the LGBTQI+ community a space to express themselves and form community but would also ripple out for decades to influence popular culture even to this day. This film isn’t just a fantastic chronicle of the real people who created a movement — it also serves as an inspirational reminder of the power that marginalized groups have when they work together to keep each other safe.

Watch on Max

'Amy' (2015)

Rotten tomatoes: 96% | imdb: 7.8/10.

Archival footage and personal testimonials present an intimate portrait of the life and career of British singer/songwriter Amy Winehouse.

Amy is a raw look at the devastating story of musical genius Amy Winehouse . Focusing on her upbringing and training without shying away from or sugarcoating the artist’s heartbreaking battles with substance abuse, Amy shines a light on the musician’s incredible, tragically short life. Amy’s director, Asif Kapadia , genuinely attempts to share the harsh realities of her struggles while showcasing her authentic talent, unique sound, and reluctant rise to fame. While the Winehouse family was not only not involved with the documentary but also heavily criticized it, the film’s success was undeniable, garnering immense critical acclaim and festival awards.

'Call Me Country: Beyonce & Nashville’s Renaissance' (2024)

Imdb: 5.9/10.

Call Me Country: Beyonce & Nashville’s Renaissance

On March 29, 2024, Beyoncé dropped the genre-blending album Cowboy Carter . The CNN documentary Call Me Country: Beyoncé and Nashville’s Renaissance is an examination of the impact that that album has had on country music, especially in bringing greater recognition to Black country music artists. However, it’s not just another PR exercise for a recognized superstar. In fact, Beyoncé isn’t even actually involved with the project. The 42-minute documentary takes a wider view of the country music industry and its historic lack of diversity. While the genre has largely been dominated by straight white men, this has been changing in more recent times thanks to artists like Beyoncé and Lil Nas X , which is what the documentary seeks to highlight. Call Me Country also looks at Black artists in Nashville, the country music capital, who have been working to bring about this change years before such heavy-hitters entered the game. It’s a short, insightful glance at an ongoing transformation that has both revived a genre and opened the doors for greater change.

'LFG' (2021)

Rotten tomatoes: 53% | imdb: 5.6/10.

LFG follows members of the United States women's national soccer team as they file a gender-discrimination lawsuit against the United States Soccer Federation for pay discrimination. The documentary stars notable soccer players like Megan Rapinoe, Becky Sauerbrunn, and Jessica McDonald as they sue the federation three months before the 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup. U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner sets a trial in Los Angeles to address the players' claim of discriminatory work. However, Klausner did not acknowledge the unequal pay portion of the lawsuit.

The film also features clips depicting the team's athletic performances, including highlights from their 2019 World Cup victory, which broke numerous records. These clips, which highlight the pinnacle of their success, contrast with the players' struggle to receive equal pay, and they show viewers the harsh reality of these athletes as they attempt to fulfill the physical demands of their jobs with a courageous and unwavering spirit. LFG is a powerful and cinematic documentary that delves into the difficult work that the team puts in both on and off the field.

'BS High' (2023)

Rotten tomatoes: 87% | imdb: 7.2/10.

BS High is aptly named as it follows the investigation of an Ohio high school football team that garnered attention after it was discovered that their high school didn’t exist. The scandal surrounds the charismatic and controversial former head coach Roy Johnson , who used his charm and questionable intentions to create a fake team composed of aspiring young athletes from Columbus that would compete against the elite private high schools around the state, getting exposure to crowds and media coverage they never could have dreamt of at their underfunded public schools. Unfortunately, Johnson’s lies and scamming would ultimately lead to these young Black teens being scrutinized in harmful ways while exposing the financial imbalances of the Ohio sports system.

'Being Mary Tyler Moore' (2023)

Rotten tomatoes: 77% | imdb: 7.5/10.

Being Mary Tyler Moore

Step into the life of the revolutionary performer who redefined the way that women were seen on television — both in front of and behind the camera. Being Mary Tyler Moore is a thorough examination of Moore’s life, from her early work on The Dick Van Dyke Show to her personal struggles with health and hardships. The documentary features archival interviews and footage that give insight into the way she was perceived by the media, plus testimonials and stories from her closest friends and colleagues like Treva Silverman ( The Mary Tyler Moore Show ), James L. Brooks ( The Simpsons ), and Edward Asner ( Up ). – Tauri Miller

'All the Beauty and the Bloodshed' (2022)

Rotten tomatoes: 95% | imdb: 7.5/10.

All The Beauty And The Bloodshed

Masterful director Laura Poitras dives into the fascinating life of activism, as well as the successful photography career of legend Nan Goldin , in All the Beauty and the Bloodshed . With an emphasis on the intersection of art and politics, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed rawly reveals Goldin’s passionate involvement in exposing the crimes of the Sackler family and their horrific opioid epidemic. Showcasing the iconic artist, along with unencumbered interviews with David Velasco and Megan Kapler , Poitras’ brilliant documentary is a deeply moving revelation . – Yael Tygiel

'Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present' (2012)

Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present

Since 1973, conceptual and performance artist Marina Abramović has been creating works meant to be striking for anyone who bears witness, and this documentary follows her as she prepares a retrospective installation of her artwork that will push her to her limits. For 78 days, Abramović displays her work at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as sits motionless in a chair every hour the museum is open, inviting anyone who wants to come to sit across from her to do so. The director captures her every move as she mentally and physically prepares to become an immersive experience for six days a week, seven and a half hours a day. Though the installation is over, the raw emotion that goes into creativity is perfectly captured in this in-depth look into the impact of Abramović’s career. – Tauri Miller

'Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain' (2021)

Rotten tomatoes: 91% | imdb: 7.7/10.

Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain

When news of Anthony Bourdain’s death was announced in 2018, the culinary scene was never the same. Years after his passing, Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain aims to explore the life and career of Bourdain as a chef, author, and travel documentarian. Bourdain is a celebrated figure not just amongst fellow renowned chefs but also amongst the general public. He became prominent thanks to his book Kitchen Confidential , an unfiltered take on the demanding restaurant industry. But fame arrived in his favor thanks to his travel show Parts Unknown , offering audiences a greater awareness of people living in developing countries, war zones, and disaster areas through one universal item: food.

Bourdain is remembered as a hard-working individual whose career is not without its highs and lows. However, his frequent travel for work often brought issues to his personal life, which he has never addressed. Everything is about to unravel in Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain.

'Tina' (2021)

Rotten tomatoes: 92% | imdb: 7.9/10.

The life of a mega superstar can be a tumultuous one. Tina is a film demonstrating the highs and lows of Tina Turner’s musical career. Primarily adapted from Turner’s memoir ‘Happiness Becomes You,’ the documentary is a raw retelling of Tuner’s life events, from her childhood abandonment, living in poverty, rise to stardom, and the abusive relationship she had to endure in secret. Audiences will look into her struggles as she falls and rises again in the demanding music industry and how she returned as a solo artist and have a peaceful life with her loving partner, Erwin Bach.

Tina is about resilience. With all the good happening in the singer’s journey, many bad moments still take over a massive portion of her life. However, Turner has proven that she can survive whatever tragedy may occur despite the violent past she has to endure after all these years and how she became a strong figure in both her personal and professional life.

'Class Action Park' (2020)

Rotten tomatoes: 80% | imdb: 7.0/10.

Class Action Park

What if you discovered that your local amusement park is a death trap? Class Action Park investigates the infamous American amusement park Action Park, situated in Vernon Township, New Jersey. Famous for its attraction areas, the Alpine Center, Motorworld, and Waterworld, the park modernized the idea of American water parks. Action Park attracted fellow thrill-seekers looking for some much-needed adrenaline. Still, there is another reason why the amusement park gained notoriety: it’s filled with a chock-full of safety hazards.

With nicknames like “Accident Park,” “Friction Park,” and “Traction Park,” Class Action Park unravels the park’s poor safety records, which resulted in the deaths of at least six visitors. From intoxicated guests, under-aged staff, and dangerously-designed rides, you’ll be surprised at how rides with names like Cannonball Loop, Alpine Slides, and Tarzan Swings managed to endanger many lives. In addition, the documentary features former Action Park employees and the brainchild of the area: Eugene Mulvihill, a penny stockbroker who envisioned Action Park as a park with “no rules.”

'The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley' (2019)

Rotten tomatoes: 78% | imdb: 7.2/10.

The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley

If you enjoyed Hulu's The Dropout , this documentary is for you. The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley follows the life of American former biotechnology entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes and her now-defunct company Theranos. Once named the youngest self-made female billionaire, with a cover in Forbes magazine, her so-called success collapsed due to her massive frauds. Listed in Fortune's "The World's 19 Most Disappointing Leaders", the film digs into Holmes' inner workings and how she was able to pull off one of the most significant criminal frauds in the healthcare industry.

Holmes pioneered the idea of a miniature blood testing method that only requires small volumes of blood, such as a prick from a finger. As revolutionary as it sounds, medical experts doubt the actual mechanics of such technology. Determined to make her company work, Holmes and her partner Sunny Balwani believed that any criticism was just a plan from her competitors to bring her down and instead ramped up Theranos' marketing. But no matter how much Holmes convinces the media regarding her company's success, allegations against her company continue, eventually bringing Theranos and Holmes down to the ground.

'Fake Famous' (2021)

Rotten tomatoes: 73% | imdb: 6.6/10.

Fake Famous

What does it take to become popular? Fake Famous transforms the lives of three non-famous individuals into social media influencers - through a social experiment. The participants include an aspiring actress, a fashion designer, and an ordinary real estate assistant who are all curious about living an influencer lifestyle.

But in this case, fame literally comes with a cost. Participants must “fake” their fame by purchasing followers and faking their luxurious lifestyle. In a world where social media has successfully altered our perception of people, Fake Famous is a fresh reminder of how Instagram culture can be incredibly out of touch with the real world.

'Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off' (2022)

Rotten tomatoes: 90% | imdb: 8.0/10.

Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off

Tony Hawk is unrivaled in the world of skateboarding. No one else even comes close. Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off provides viewers with an intimate look into the life of Tony Hawk, a professional skateboarder, and how he balances the demands of his extraordinary career with those of his personal life. Skateboarding has been a part of Hawk's life since he was only 12 years old. From there on, he has amassed a number of accomplishments, including winning awards and shattering records. However, the documentary delves much further beyond his career.

Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off is an in-depth documentary that focuses on Hawk's passion for skateboarding as well as the life lessons he has gained from participating in the sport. Audiences get a first-hand look at how much passion, discipline, and determination are required to pull off a particular trick successfully. It is a film that goes beyond Hawk's life; it is a celebration of the skateboarding culture in general, and it features interviews with other prominent figures in the world of skateboarding, footage that has never been seen before, and unfiltered access to the skater.

'The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart' (2020)

Rotten tomatoes: 93% | imdb: 8.1/10.

The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart

The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart revolves around the three members and brothers of the legendary family band The Bee Gees. The film explores how Maurice, Robin, and Barry Gibb formed The Bee Gees. Mainly featuring Barry Gibb, with archival interviews from the late Robin and Maurice Gibb, the documentary features commentary from a variety of other musicians, including Noel Gallagher, Mark Ronson, Justin Timberlake, Eric Clapton, and Chris Martin.

The Bee Gees took the world by storm in the ‘60s and ‘70s with hits like “Stayin’ Alive” and “How Deep Is Your Love.” Through The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart , the documentary details the band's ascent to fame, their brief separation, and their subsequent reunion in the music industry. The film, in contrast to gossipy tell-all documentaries, places a strong emphasis on the creative processes that the group engages in when writing and recording their music. This highlights the Bee Gees' heartfelt songwriting abilities, which are frequently overshadowed by their glittering performances.

'On the Record' (2020)

Rotten tomatoes: 80% | imdb: 7.2/10.

On the Record

On The Record is a documentary released when the #MeToo movement became prominent, investigating the allegations of sexual abuse perpetrated by men in power. The film explores claims of harassment against the co-founder of Def Jam Recordings, Russell Simmons. The film includes interviews with the 20 women who have accused him of abuse, featuring names like Sherri Hines, Alexia Norton, and Sil Lai Abrams.

A huge portion of the documentary focuses on the story of former Def Jam Recordings executive Drew Dixon, the first woman to publicly reveal allegations of assault against Simmons, claiming that he raped Dixon in her apartment. After she left the company to continue her career at Arista Records, she claims that her job was sabotaged by music executive L.A. Reid when he refused his sexual advances. What makes On The Record chilling is that it criticizes the lack of black women’s voices in the #MeToo campaign, reminding viewers that there is still so much work that needs to be done to pursue justice.

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