100 Best-Reviewed Documentaries of All Time Rotten Tomatoes

Documentary filmmaking can be used as a form of journalism, advocacy, or personal expression. Released seven years before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Winter on Fire follows a Ukrainian fight of a different kind. The visceral documentary centers on the Maidan Uprising of 2013 and 2014, which began after a free-trade deal with the European Union fell through at the last minute, with then-Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych making a deal with Russia instead. This documentary doubles as a cautionary tale for those swiping right and hoping to find their soulmate, showing just how easily one can get tricked into believing their date is who they say they are. The New York food scene has never seen a story like Sarma Melngailis, the celebrity restaurateur who was responsible for successful upscale vegan eateries like Pure Food and Wine and One Lucky Duck.

Fans of Free Solo will find new heights to explore in Race to the Summit. This sports and climbing documentary chronicles the rivalry between alpinists Ueli Steck and Dani Arnold as both climbers race to secure the fastest times on their ascents up the Swiss Alps‘ great north faces. That’s exactly what happened to dozens of people who found out it was highly likely (in the 90th percentile) that their birth father was the same man. From the early 1970s to 1989, Dr. Donald Cline, a married Indiana-based fertility doctor, helped medically inseminate women — only it was actually his sperm. Our Father focuses on the affected families‘ confusion, grief, anger, and, invariably, the bonds forged between these half-brothers and sisters. There’s method acting, and then there’s what Jim Carrey did to play Andy Kaufman in 1999’s Man on the Moon.

• Her tears of sadness before the camera show how blind allegiance online — often posted for laughs — can wound real people.
• This three-part Netflix series is essentially the story of what actually happened.
• Usually made for promotional purposes, it is closer to an advertisement than a classic documentary.
• Cinéma vérité and similar documentary traditions can thus be seen, in a broader perspective, as a reaction against studio-based film production constraints.
• He’s desperate for a win, both to see his favorite team crowned champions, but also to cash in a lucrative sports gamble for them.
• In this style, there is a host who appears on camera, conducts interviews, and who also does voice-overs.

The Staircase tells a true crime story so gripping the machine had no choice but to make it into a wildly popular drama series of the same name starring Colin Firth and Toni Collette. The 13-part docuseries (yes, 13 episodes. It’s a meaty case!) dives into the mysterious death of Kathleen Peterson and the subsequent murder trial of her husband Michael Peterson. The Emmy and BAFTA-nominated Three Identical Strangers tells of a group of identical triplets who, by chance, discover they are one of three siblings after being separated during childhood. Their stranger-than-fiction story becomes a media sensation, and the brothers make the most of their fortune. But as the truth behind their disparate upbringings comes to light, a wholesome tale of family reunions and happenstance descends into an unsettling account of injustice and exploitation happening behind closed doors.

When a 13-year-old girl is brutally raped by three men, her father pursues justice, seeking out the help of activists with an advocacy organization. His righteous quest is met with disapproval from much of the family’s community in rural northeastern India — where many of the villagers blame the victim or suggest she just marry one of her attackers — but the girl and her family, united, refuse to yield. When learning about a new subject, there are few better guides than Werner Herzog. With Into the Inferno, the filmmaker dives into active volcanoes — “dives into” as an area of study, that is. With volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer, Herzog surveys active volcanoes around the world — and shares awe-inspiring, often-terrifying footage — and examines the belief systems and spiritual practices inspired by them. Take your viewing underwater with Jeff Orlowski’s powerful documentary, the winner of an Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017.

Box office analysts have noted that the documentary film genre has become increasingly successful in theatrical release with films such as Fahrenheit 9/11, Super Size Me, Food, Inc., Earth, March of the Penguins, and An Inconvenient Truth among the most prominent examples. Compared to dramatic narrative films, documentaries typically have far lower budgets which makes them attractive to film companies because even a limited theatrical release can be highly profitable. Cinéma vérité and similar documentary traditions can thus be seen, in a broader perspective, as a reaction against studio-based film production constraints.

Craig Foster spent a year free-diving and following an octopus living in a South African kelp forest, and the bond he develops with the animal as she invites him into her underwater life helps to inform and transform his relationships with his fellow humans — especially his son. Well-deserving of its Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature, Four Daughters is a Tunisian film that mixes traditional documentary practices with fictionalized moments to create a cinematic project unlike anything else in the genre. The four daughters in question belong to Olfa Hamrouni, a Tunisian mother who lost two of her four children when they were radicalized by the Islamic State and moved to Libya.

Best-Reviewed Documentaries 2020

But we don’t know how we will feel about him, and where we will place the blame for this bizarrely American story of true crime tangled with sports. The novelty of Babudar’s story combined with the movie’s in-depth documentary approach create a fun, if complicated, watch. Nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Academy Awards, Nisha Pahuja’s 2023 film To Kill a Tiger is a powerful and essential document of one family’s story.

Baraka tries to capture the great pulse of humanity as it flocks and swarms in daily activity and religious ceremonies. Biographical documentaries appeared during this time, such as the feature Eminescu-Veronica-Creangă (1914) on the relationship between the writers Mihai Eminescu, Veronica Micle and Ion Creangă (all deceased at the time of the production), released Living Without Money by the Bucharest chapter of Pathé. Downey Jr. — one of the producers on „Sr.“ — unpacks family traumas and shares his remembrances of his father throughout the doc. The film serves as a deeply personal tribute from a son to a father, and a loving eulogy, as Downey Sr. died in 2021 from complications of Parkinson’s disease.

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” to create “We Are the World” with a line-up that included Lionel Ritchie, Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan among many, many others. The Greatest Night in Pop takes us behind the scenes of that ambitious idea (and no doubt scheduling nightmare!), with interviews from some of the stars who took part. Expository documentaries speak directly to the viewer, often in the form of an authoritative commentary employing voiceover or titles, proposing a strong argument and point of view. (They may use a rich and sonorous male voice.) The (voice-of-God) commentary often sounds „objective“ and omniscient.

Documentary film

A film about mothers and daughters as told through one family’s traumatic story, Four Daughters is affecting, creatively structured, and deeply memorable. Netflix has an extensive library of feature films, documentaries, TV shows, anime, award-winning Netflix originals, and more. The story begins and ends with Tavel, a twentysomething touring musician whose unassuming, charming screen presence proves a welcome escort through her family’s life story.

The editors of the movement – such as Werner Nold, Charlotte Zwerin, Muffie Meyer, Susan Froemke, and Ellen Hovde – are often overlooked, but their input to the films was so vital that they were often given co-director credits. With Robert J. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North in 1922, documentary film embraced romanticism. Flaherty filmed a number of heavily staged romantic documentary films during this time period, often showing how his subjects would have lived 100 years earlier and not how they lived right then. For instance, in Nanook of the North, Flaherty did not allow his subjects to shoot a walrus with a nearby shotgun, but had them use a harpoon instead.