Guides
The Best Documentaries Ever Made, and Which One to Start With
Documentaries have a reputation for being homework. These fourteen are not. Several are more gripping than anything fiction produced that year.
Hero image: Free Solo (artwork via TMDB)
Key takeaways
- Hoop Dreams is the best documentary ever made and it is about far more than basketball.
- The Act of Killing is the most morally extraordinary and the hardest to shake.
- Start with Free Solo, Man on Wire, or Senna. All three are as tense as any thriller.
- The best documentaries are almost never neutral. They have an argument, and they show their working.
There is a persistent assumption that documentaries are worthy rather than enjoyable, and it puts people off a form that regularly produces the most gripping thing released in a given year. Free Solo is more tense than almost any thriller. Senna has a better third act than most sports dramas. Man on Wire is a heist film in which the heist actually happened.
This list is grouped by what kind of evening each one delivers, because a documentary about grief and a documentary about a man walking between two towers are not interchangeable recommendations.
The three best, regardless of category
Hoop Dreams (1994)
- 2h 54m
- TMDB 7.6/10
- Documentary
The best documentary ever made and one of the best American films of the 1990s in any form. Steve James followed two Chicago teenagers, William Gates and Arthur Agee, for five years as they pursued basketball scholarships.
It is nominally a sports film and it is actually about almost everything else: class, race, the economics of American education, the way institutions extract value from young athletes and discard them, and two families under sustained financial pressure.
The access is what makes it extraordinary. Five years of filming means you watch these boys physically grow up, and the film is present for moments no crew should plausibly have captured, including a father's relapse and a mother's nursing qualification.
At 170 minutes it is long and it does not feel long. Its Oscar snub for Best Documentary is the most cited scandal in the category's history and it changed how the nominations work.
Watch it if: you want the best the form has produced. No sports knowledge required.
The Act of Killing (2012)
- 2h 39m
- TMDB 7.7/10
- Documentary, History
The most morally extraordinary documentary ever made and one of the strangest films of any kind. Joshua Oppenheimer went to Indonesia to make a film about the 1965 anti-communist purges, found that the perpetrators were still in power and happy to discuss it, and then made an unprecedented offer: he invited them to reenact their killings in the style of their favourite Hollywood genres.
They agreed enthusiastically. The result is men in gangster costumes and elaborate musical numbers cheerfully staging murders they committed, which sounds unwatchable and is instead one of the most devastating things ever filmed.
The final sequence, in which one of them begins to understand what he did while standing on the roof where he did it, is among the most difficult scenes in cinema. It is not catharsis. It is closer to a physical reaction.
159 minutes. The companion film, The Look of Silence, follows a victim's family and is equally strong.
Watch it if: you want a film that will genuinely change how you think about impunity.
Man on Wire (2008)
- 1h 34m
- TMDB 7.4/10
- Documentary
A heist film where the heist happened. In 1974 Philippe Petit and a small team smuggled equipment into the World Trade Center, rigged a cable between the towers overnight, and Petit walked across it for forty-five minutes.
James Marsh structures it exactly like a caper: the crew assembles, the plan is explained, the security is cased, and things go wrong on the night. The reenactments are shot in a heightened black and white that makes the whole thing feel like a thriller.
The film's most quietly brilliant decision is that it never mentions 11 September. The towers are simply present, and the absence of comment does more than any acknowledgement could.
94 minutes and genuinely joyful, which is not a word this list uses often.
Watch it if: you want the most purely entertaining documentary ever made.
If you want tension
Free Solo (2018)
- 1h 40m
- TMDB 7.9/10
- Documentary, Adventure
Alex Honnold climbing El Capitan, three thousand feet, without ropes. The most physically stressful film on this page and one of the tensest things ever released.
What lifts it above a stunt document is that it is genuinely about the ethics of filming it. The crew are climbers and friends, and the film includes their explicit discussion of whether their presence increases the risk, and what they will do if they watch him fall. Camera operators had to be positioned to look away.
It is also a relationship film. Honnold's partner Sanni is given real weight, and the tension between what he needs to do and what that does to someone who loves him is the emotional engine.
100 minutes. Genuinely difficult to watch if you dislike heights.
Watch it if: you want to be physically stressed for an hour and forty minutes.
Senna (2010)
- 1h 46m
- TMDB 8.1/10
- Documentary
Ayrton Senna's Formula One career, assembled entirely from archive footage with no talking-head interviews and no on-screen narrator. Asif Kapadia's method, which he repeated with Amy, is to let the material carry the story.
The result feels less like a documentary than like a film that happened to be shot as it went. The onboard camera footage, the drivers' meetings, and the political manoeuvring with Alain Prost are all contemporaneous.
You do not need any interest in motorsport. The film is about a rivalry, a national symbol, and a sport that at the time was killing people regularly and had decided that was acceptable.
106 minutes. The final act is unbearable even though you know what happens.
Watch it if: you want a sports documentary that works entirely without sports knowledge.
Icarus (2017)
- 2h 1m
- TMDB 7.6/10
- Documentary
Bryan Fogel set out to make a film about doping himself to see whether he could beat testing in amateur cycling. He contacted a Russian scientist for help, and that scientist turned out to be Grigory Rodchenkov, the head of Russia's anti-doping laboratory.
Partway through filming, Rodchenkov becomes a whistleblower on a state-run doping programme, flees the country, and the film abruptly becomes something else entirely.
It is the clearest example on this page of a documentary discovering its actual subject mid-production, and the shift is visible on screen. Fogel simply keeps filming as his personal stunt becomes an international scandal.
121 minutes and it plays like a thriller from the halfway point.
Watch it if: you want to watch a film change genre in real time.
If you want something moving
Won't You Be My Neighbor? (2018)
- 1h 35m
- TMDB 8.0/10
- Documentary
A portrait of Fred Rogers, the presenter of an American children's television programme, and a film that is far more rigorous than its subject suggests.
It is genuinely interested in the argument Rogers was making, which was that children deserve to be spoken to honestly about difficult things. The sequences on how he addressed assassination, divorce, and death on a programme for pre-schoolers are the substance of the film.
It also does not flinch from his contradictions or from the limits of what he was able to change.
94 minutes. Almost nobody gets through the final ten minutes without crying, which is worth knowing in advance.
Watch it if: you need something restorative and you are willing to cry about it.
Amy (2015)
- 2h 8m
- TMDB 7.6/10
- Documentary, Music
Kapadia again, using the same archive-only method on Amy Winehouse, and the result is considerably more damning than a conventional biography could be.
Because the material is contemporaneous, you watch the press coverage happen rather than hearing it described. Talk show hosts making jokes, photographers surrounding a car, tabloid front pages: all of it is presented as it appeared at the time, which turns the audience into a witness rather than a listener.
The film's argument is about complicity, and it implicates almost everyone including the viewer. It is not comfortable.
128 minutes and genuinely upsetting.
Watch it if: you want a film that makes you reconsider something you participated in.
Searching for Sugar Man (2012)
- 1h 25m
- TMDB 7.9/10
- Music, Documentary
A Detroit musician called Rodriguez released two albums in the early 1970s, sold almost nothing, and vanished. Without his knowledge his records became enormously popular in South Africa, where he was rumoured to have died on stage.
Two fans set out to find out what actually happened to him. Saying more spoils it, and the film is structured specifically so that you should not know.
It is the most charming film here and it is doing something quietly serious underneath about what value in art actually is and who gets to collect it.
86 minutes.
Watch it if: you want a genuine mystery with a resolution you will not expect.
If you want scale or strangeness
Apollo 11 is assembled entirely from restored 65mm footage discovered in archives, with no narration and no interviews, and the launch sequence in particular is overwhelming. Grizzly Man is Werner Herzog examining the footage left by a man who lived among bears until they killed him, and Herzog's decision not to play the audio of the death, explained on camera, is the most striking ethical moment in any documentary. Exit Through the Gift Shop is a Banksy film about street art that may or may not be an elaborate hoax, and the ambiguity is the point. And 13th is Ava DuVernay's argument connecting American slavery to modern mass incarceration through a specific clause in the Thirteenth Amendment, and it is the most tightly reasoned film on this page.
Where to start
| If you want | Watch | Runtime |
|---|---|---|
| Pure tension | Free Solo | 100 min |
| Something joyful | Man on Wire | 94 min |
| A great story, no prior interest needed | Senna | 106 min |
| To be moved | Won't You Be My Neighbor? | 94 min |
| The best one | Hoop Dreams | 170 min |
| To be changed | The Act of Killing | 159 min |
| An argument | 13th | 100 min |
On objectivity
A documentary is not neutral and it should not pretend to be. Every one of these films makes choices about what to include, what order to put it in, and what music to lay over it, and those choices are arguments.
The good ones show their working. Herzog appears on camera in Grizzly Man to explain what he is not going to show you and why. Oppenheimer's presence in The Act of Killing is the entire mechanism of the film. Free Solo includes its own crew debating whether they should be there.
The ones to be wary of are the ones that present themselves as simply showing you what happened, because that is where the editorial hand is hidden rather than absent. This is the same problem we cover for dramatised history in best movies based on true stories.
For more, our war movies guide covers several documentary-adjacent films, and the documentary catalog has the wider list.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best documentary ever made?
Hoop Dreams, which followed two Chicago teenagers for five years and is about class, education, and family far more than it is about basketball. The Act of Killing is the most morally extraordinary and Man on Wire the most entertaining.
What is a good documentary for someone who finds them boring?
Free Solo, Man on Wire, or Senna. All three are structured like thrillers, run under two hours, and require no prior interest in their subjects.
Are documentaries objective?
No, and the best ones do not pretend to be. Every editing choice is an argument. The trustworthy ones make their perspective visible, as Herzog does on camera in Grizzly Man and Oppenheimer does structurally in The Act of Killing.
What is the most disturbing documentary?
The Act of Killing, in which perpetrators of mass killings cheerfully reenact them in the style of Hollywood genres. It is not graphic in a conventional sense, which is precisely why it is so difficult.
What documentaries are under 100 minutes?
Searching for Sugar Man (86 min), Man on Wire (94 min), Won't You Be My Neighbor? (94 min), Free Solo (100 min), and 13th (100 min). All five are complete and none feel rushed.
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Ratings, runtimes, and artwork come from TMDB and can change over time. teasertrack is a free discovery site, not a streaming service: every pick links to its full movie page where you can check trailers, cast, and current availability.
