The 64 Best Documentaries of All Time
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As the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction. If you disagree, well, let us direct you to the modern documentary. (Tiger King, anyone?!) The best of the genre will teach you something new. For example: If you think you understand how the American justice system works, check out Ava Duvernay’s award-winning documentary, 13.
Want to see for yourself? Below, we named—in no particular order—the best documentaries of all time. You'll find music biopics featuring Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain, along with deep-dives into New York's ballroom scene. Looking for more of an adventure? Try Paris is Burning and Free Solo. If you're simply looking for a true-crime story, you'll find plenty of options here. (Though we highly recommend O.J: Made in America. It's worth your time.)
Without further ado, here are the 64 best documentaries of all time.
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 Anna 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 Treadwell himself. The survivalist had extensive video captured from his years of camping among the bears. It's a must-watch.
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Gates of Heaven
Errol Morris’s first-ever feature film explores the pet cemetery business, including a peculiar family who operates one cemetery. He also interviews several grieving pet-owners about their recent losses. It’s a strange, but beautiful movie, which uses this odd subject matter to have some fascinating conversations about mortality.
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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. Along with Herzog’s signature narration, this really is one of the great documentaries about a fascinating environment.
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14 Peaks: Nothing is Impossible
This epic mountaineering doc stars the Nepali climber Nirmal Purja —and the team around him—as he attempts to climb all 8,000-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, Purja and the team even rescue a stranded climber.
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Holy Hell
Holy Hell is a chilling documentary about the filmmaker Will Allen, who embedded in the United States cult Buddhafield. The film explores the cult's members with a uniquely personal and empathetic perspective, which we haven’t seen in many other documentaries exploring cults.
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Shirkers
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 beautiful journey, and it’s one of the best documentaries about young creativity ever made.
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Jodorowsky’s Dune
We’ve seen documentaries about challenging film production experiences, but what about a pre-production doc for a film that never saw the light of day? Jodorowsky’s Dune is an endlessly fascinating look at the development process through the eyes of the incredible cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky. The director takes us through his conception of a massively ambitious Dune adaptation that involved music from Pink Floyd, art from H.R. Giger, and what-if cast members, including Salvador Dali, Mick Jagger, and Orson Welles.
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The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years
Eight Days a Week takes you back to the height of bowl-cut Beatlemania, with beautifully-restored archival footage of the band’s touring years—from the crew hitting the road in 1962, to their final concert in San Francisco in 1966.
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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's combination of modern interviews, footage from the Man on the Moon set, and great moments from Kaufman’s career are perfectly balanced.
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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, which resulted in fraud charges for the young founder. The film is a great examination not just of the ambitious entrepreneur behind Theranos, but the employees, investors, whistleblowers and journalists involved.
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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.
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Stories We Tell
Director Sarah Polley, who just won a screenwriting Oscar for Women Talking, turns the camera on herself and her family history in this 2012 documentary. The result is more profound and mind-blowing than you may expect. This is an absolute must-watch—and it’s available for anyone to watch for free on YouTube Movies.
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MLK/FBI
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 in the civil rights movement. These investigations were exposed in newly-declassified documents—and MLK/FBI interviews with historians and figures involved in the situation.
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Particle Fever
Particle Fever is an incredible science documentary that follows the experiments at Switzerland’s Large Hadron Collider—where theoretical physicists attempt to get the collider’s ambitious physics experiments up and running. The film is an incredible achievement in communicating scientific theories, somehow making the process of following the experiments extremely thrilling and watchable.
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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. Seriously: Who thought the waddling, weird 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 21st-century documentary film. Narration done by none other than Morgan Freeman.
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When We Were Kings
Some sports buffs might argue this, 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
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Minding the Gap
Thankfully, history will remember the Academy well for giving Minding the Gap an Oscar nomination back in 2018. In filming his best friends over a period of 12 years, Bing Liu comprised a heartbreaking coming-of-age story that punches hard—and will stick with you for years after you've seen the film. (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.
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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 impacted millions of young (and old!) lives.
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Free Solo
If you like when your documentaries make you sweat, then hey, Free Solo will have you heading for the shower afterward. The film documents 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 equates to about an hour in a sauna.
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The Last Waltz
Back in the '70s, 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.
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Paris is Burning
What was once a required viewing for most Intro to Gender and Sexuality courses is now required for … well, everyone. After all, a vast majority of today’s pop culture as we know it has been co-opted from ballroom culture. Jenny Livingston offers a cinematic immersion into New York’s underground ballroom scene of the 1980s. As fascinating as it is moving, the film offers deep insight into the lives and realities these performers lead inside and outside of the competitive space.
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13th
Filmmaker Ava DuVernay provides an in-depth analysis of the ways in which the United States prison system has functioned as a vehicle of institutionalized racism and inequality. 13th compiles footage alongside moving interviews from a long list of brilliant academics, activists, politicians, and men and women who have experienced incarceration.
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Amy
Amy Winehouse had a voice that sealed her destiny as a music icon at a young age, but her fate became more twisted than anyone could have ever expected. This heart-wrenching biopic destigmatizes Winehouse’s infamous “party girl” record, providing a second look into the once-in-a-generation talent’s personal life and career, as well as a retrospective into how the world lost her.
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Three Identical Strangers
This famed reunion of triplets separated at birth takes a disheartening twist when the three begin to seek out the conditions of their separation as infants. A true tour de force of the ability of documentary to capture the shocking circumstances that could only be crafted by life itself.
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Honeyland
If you’re yearning to enter a world separate from your own, look no further than Honeyland, a documentary that transports you to the Balkan Mountains alongside Hatidže Muratova, one of the last Macedonians to practice ancient beekeeping. Shot over the course of three years, the film discovers an interesting foil to the analog woman in a young family that moves in nearby. However, even if the film lacked this central plot, the gorgeous cinematography and landscapes in themselves make this a pleasure to watch.
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The Work
Within the confines of the infamous Folsom Prison, level-four convicts—prisoners assigned to maximum security—meet for an intensive three-day group therapy session that serves as part of their rehabilitation. It’s there that convicts reach deep inside themselves to revisit their past traumas and vulnerabilities that have played a role in their violent behavior. It is at times heartbreaking, terrifying, and incredibly urgent.
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Pina
Legendary director Wim Wenders offers a moving portrait of his friend Pina Bausch, an internationally acclaimed dancer and choreographer who died unexpectedly in the early days of the documentary's production. Shot in gorgeous 3D, Pina is unlike any dance performance you’ve ever seen. The result is not just a fascinating biographical document of a creative genius, but also a beautiful celebration of the human body and the art that it can usher forth.
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The Act of Killing
Between 1965 and 1966, an anti-communist purge took place in Indonesia, a mass killing that historians have estimated a total of 400,000 to 3,000,000 victims. Half a century later, director Joshua Oppenheimer (along with Christine Cynn and an anonymous Indonesian filmmaker) crafted The Act of Killing, a compelling and brutal look at former members of the death squads—now revered for creating the society in which they now live.
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The Central Park Five
In April 1989, 28-year-old Trisha Meili was brutally assaulted and raped as she was jogging in New York City’s Central Park. That same night, five young men—four black, one Hispanic—were arrested for suspected gang activity in the park; after hours of interrogations and coerced confessions, the teenage boys were charged with assault, rape, and the attempted murder of Meili. What ensued was a media firestorm, in which racism led to the boys’ conviction. Ken Burns’s documentary looks back at one of the most notorious criminal cases in recent memory a decade after another man confessed to committing the crime.
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Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck
At 27, Kurt Cobain was one of the most famous musicians on the planet—a status that he would have rather avoided, and a level of fame that, along with his mental illness and drug addiction, led to his downfall. Two decades after his suicide, Montage of Heck attempts to piece together a portrait of Cobain, one told by the loved ones he left behind (including his Nirvana bandmates), as well as his personal audio recordings.
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The Overnighters
Director Jesse Moss examines the residents of Williston, a small town in North Dakota that saw a huge population spike following an oil boom in the midst of the recession. With jobseekers flocking to the town and overwhelming Williston's housing market, the town's locals turned against their new neighbors—with the exception of Jay Reinke, a Lutheran pastor who offered up the confines of his church as a sanctuary for the town's newest residents.
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Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened
Lonny Price's dreams came true when he landed one of the lead roles in a brand-new Stephen Sondheim musical, 1981's Merrily We Roll Along. The cast expected it to the first in a long line of career successes. The show, however, was a flop. Years later, the cast members looked back in this touching examination of how we learn the most about ourselves in the face of major setbacks.
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I Am Not Your Negro
Using James Baldwin's unpublished manuscript Remember This House, I Am Not Your Negro tells the story of American identity through Baldwin's eyes, looking at the lives and deaths of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. alongside narration from Samuel L. Jackson.
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Capturing the Friedmans
Andrew Jarecki set out to make a light-hearted documentary about birthday party clowns. When he began researching one of his subjects, David Friedman, he discovered a more interesting—and disturbing—story: Friedman's father and brother, Arnold and Jesse, had been convicted of child sexual abuse in Long Island.
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Gleason
New Orleans Saint Steve Gleason achieved near-holy status when he blocked a punt in a game against the Atlanta Falcons—the first the team played in their hometown after Hurricane Katrina. Years later, at age 34, Gleason was diagnosed with ALS. The documentary is a heartbreaking yet triumphant film about a man who symbolized the refusal to admit defeat.
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Jiro Dreams of Sushi
Enter the world of Jiro Ono, the 85-year-old master chef of Tokyo's Sukiyabashi Jiro, a 10-seat sushi restaurant that has earned three Michelin stars and worldwide acclaim. This documentary also looks toward the future of the Ono legacy, as Jiro's sons, Yoshikazu and Takashi, followed in their father's footsteps to become sushi chefs in their own right.
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Life, Animated
This Oscar-nominated film depicts Owen Suskind who, after being diagnosed with autism at 3 years old, withdrew into a nearly silent state of being. On the verge of losing hope, his parents discovered he responded intensely to the world of animated films—particularly those produced by Walt Disney—giving him a new chance to understand the confounding world around him.
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The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara
The Fog of War from Errol Morris is a long interview with former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara concerning his reflections on his political career—particularly his influence on the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War.
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Sound and Fury
This Oscar-nominated film follows the Artinians, a family of multiple deaf and hearing children across three generations. When brothers Peter (who is deaf) and Chris (who is hearing) both had deaf children and considered giving them cochlear implants, they opened up a debate within their family—one that also exists within deaf culture at large.
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Koyaanisqatsi
Koyaanisqatsi is admittedly more of an experimental film than a documentary. While one might have to appreciate the droning style of a Philip Glass composition (a tough thing to love, I'll concede), the film itself is a cult classic. Taking its title from a Hopi word that means "unbalanced life," Reggio's film is a juxtaposition of slow-motion and time-lapse images of cities and landscapes across the United States. What one takes from Koyaanisqatsi is personal, and while it may be befuddling, most viewers find it incredibly provocative and mind-blowing.
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Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father
When Andrew Bagby was murdered by his girlfriend Shirley Jane Turner—and Turner announced that she was pregnant with Bagby's child after his death—filmmaker Kurt Kuenne planned to make a visual scrapbook dedicated to Bagby's son Zachary so that the boy would know how much his father was loved by his friends and family.
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Bill Cunningham New York
A Bill Cunningham spotting in New York City was almost as exciting as having your picture taken by him. The New York Times columnist, who documented how the city's residents expressed themselves through fashion, was a cheerful and outgoing presence in the city—serving more as a cultural anthropologist. This portrait, filmed when he was 80 years old, follows him through the city and offers a look into the man for whom, as Vogue editor Anna Wintour put it, all of New York dressed.
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How to Survive a Plague
How to Survive a Plague is a staggering portrait of the early days of the AIDS crisis, a time when those who lived on society's margins were largely ignored by an apathetic government. Director David France, who covered the AIDS crisis as a journalist in the '80s, sheds light on the efforts made by members of ACT UP who raised awareness of the disease, humanized the men and women afflicted by it, and ultimately changed the course of history.
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O. J.: Made in America
An exposé on the life and legacy of O.J. Simpson, Made in America examines the football star's rise and fall—and the murder trial that ripped the country apart in the '90s. This documentary also places the Simpson saga into a larger context by highlighting the ways in which it said more about race and American culture than any other event that took place in the second half of the 20th century.
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The Times of Harvey Milk
Long before Sean Penn won an Oscar for his role in Gus Van Sant's Milk, director Rob Epstein picked up the same trophy for Best Documentary with his incredible portrait of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors—and the first openly gay elected official in California history.
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Harlan County, U.S.A.
Acclaimed documentarian Barbara Kopple won her first of two Academy Awards for this incendiary look at the 1973 Brookside Strike formed by coal miners employed by the Eastover Coal Company in southeast Kentucky.
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The Thin Blue Line
Errol Morris's best known film is, by his definition, a work of non-fiction rather than a documentary. It follows Randall Dale Adams, who at the age of 26 was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to the death penalty for the 1976 murder of a police officer in Dallas, Texas—a crime Adams did not commit.
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Hoop Dreams
Hoop Dreams follows two boys in Chicago (William Gates and Arthur Agee) over the course of eight years as they are recruited from their inner-city high schools to attend one of the most renowned basketball programs. The film stirred controversy when it was shut out of the Best Documentary category at the Academy Awards—its sole Oscar nomination was for Best Film Editing.
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The Up Series
In 1964, Michael Apted profiled 14 children for his Granada Television special 7 Up, viewing the group as representative of England at large across the country's socio-economic system. Every seven years, Apted returned to his subjects to see how life changed for each one—and how their dreams, fears, and philosophies evolved with time.
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The Silent World
French oceanographer and filmmaker Jacques Cousteau took us into the unknown to swim with sharks and experience the life of a sea crew in The Silent World, a groundbreaking 1956 work for nature documentaries.
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Ikebana
Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara documented the history and art of Ikebana for a 1957 film about a tradition of flower arranging that goes back for centuries. The director's father, Sofu Teshigahara, owned and operated the Sogetsu School of Ikebana, and spent his life keeping the practice alive.
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Black Panthers
Director Agnes Varda captured the spirit of the Black Panthers movement back in 1970 in her documentary about a demonstration outside an Oakland courthouse calling for the release of activist and Black Panthers cofounder Huey P. Newton.
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Women of the Resistance
Women of the Resistance, a World War II documentary made for Italian television, profiles many women who survived Italy's Nazi invasion as they tell of everyday heroics and perseverance in the face of one of history's greatest evils.
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The Blues Accordin' to Lightnin' Hopkins
Lightnin' Hopkins, an American blues singer from Texas, was one of the greatest guitarists who ever lived. Director Les Blank was given access to Hopkins' private life back home on his Texas ranch for this close and rich portrayal of the legendary musician.
Watch on The Criterion Channel
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Pumping Iron
Arnold Schwarzenegger made his film debut in Pumping Iron, a documentary about the lives of world champion bodybuilders and one future movie star's quest to win Mr. Universe for the sixth time.
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Dark Days
Famous for its musical score by DJ Shadow, Dark Days talks to the homeless inhabitants of New York City's subway system, and those who live in the unused, underground tunnels beneath the city.
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Lenny Cooke
Uncut Gems directors Josh and Benny Safdie completed this story of Lenny Cooke, one of the top prospects in the 2002 NBA Draft. As we follow Lenny to the stress-inducing Draft Day, the documentary explores how dreams can be achieved or crushed in an instant.
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City of Gold
Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold was a special kind of journalist, and a writer who delighted in highlighting the cuisines cooked up by Los Angeles' rich cultural makeup. In this warm portrayal of the golden age of food writing, Gold drives around in his green truck and shows audiences the best finds in strip malls, food trucks, and secret family recipes.
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Filmworker
Filmworker is the autobiographical true life of Leon Vitali, a British actor and filmmaker who worked as Stanley Kubrick's assistant for most of his life. Worked to the bone, Vitali tells stories of helping Kubrick make movies with reverence and the kind of people it takes behind the scenes to make a celebrated work of art.
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Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It
Rita Moreno, celebrated Puerto Rican actress and EGOT winner, tells the story of her 70+ year career on Broadway and in Hollywood from the struggles she faced to the barriers she broke down.
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Summer of Soul
The Roots drummer Ahmir 'Questlove' Thompson presented Summer of Soul in 2021, a revival of archival footage thought lost to time of a 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. Called the 'Black Woodstock,' the music festival featured performances from Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Sly & the Family Stone, and more, shining a light on the importance of preserving America's Black cultural history.
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The Truffle Hunters
Adorable old men search for truffles, a rare culinary delicacy, deep in the woods of Piedmont, Italy in this cute and wholesome story about delicious mushrooms and the scavengers who would rather die than tell you their secret of where the best hunting grounds are kept.
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Mayor
Mayor is the true story of the daily life of Musa Hadid, the mayor of Ramallah, Palestine. Located right on the West Bank, Hadid can do very little to help his people since governance is gripped tight by Israeli occupation, but he does what he can (such as a little Christmas fountain show), to try and make a hectic life just a little more pleasant.
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Flee
Flee tells the story of Amin Nawabi, a refugee from Afghanistan currently living in Denmark, who for the first time shares his perilous journey dealing with human traffickers, secrets kept from his boyfriend, and his difficulty discovering his sexuality.
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