It’s a new year, and with it comes changes to the Netflix 100. These aren’t specific to 2016, however, just the usual handful of titles dropped and handful of titles added, most of them dependent on what’s now available or unavailable from Netflix Watch Instantly. Some of our longtime favorites have expired from the service over the past month, including Pina, The Missing Picture, Camp 14: Total Control Zone, Control Room and Countdown to Zero.
Fortunately, some of our other longtime favorites have returned to stream on Netflix, including the essential Nick Broomfield pair Aileen: The Selling of a Serial Killer and Aileen Wuornos: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (the latter is one of my top 10 of all time) and the devastating AIDS doc We Were Here. Meanwhile, new to the service are the restored Robert Flaherty classic Moana (aka Moana With Sound) and the new doc How to Change the World, which was named as one of the best of 2015 in our annual critics and filmmakers poll.
We also had to include the hot Netflix doc series Making a Murderer, if only because everyone’s talking about it right now. We’re not certain we’d recommend it in the long run, but it’s a current necessity. Speaking of which, last month we added the popular film The Wolfpack and now are removing it because we’re not fans and it’s time for its moment in the spotlight to end.
Now a reminder of how the Netflix 100 titles are numerically arranged:
They are mostly ranked in order of my favor with some objective authority, but there are some clumps throughout the list that obviously fit together. Some are by director, some are by genre or subject matter and some are by series. In fact, I see this whole list as being best watched in order of the rankings. There are a few double features in the bunch (Expedition to the End of the World and Encounters at the End of the World and The Act of Killing and Camp 14, for two example sets) and some groupings where I truly think the higher ranking title is best watched before a certain title or titles below it.
- Making a Murderer (Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi, 2015)
- The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988)
- The Cruise(Bennett Miller, 1998)
- Hoop Dreams (Steve James, 1994)
- Life Itself (Steve James, 2014)
- Sherman’s March (Ross McElwee, 1986)
- Brother’s Keeper (Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, 1992)
- Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (Nick Broomfield, 1992)
- Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (Nick Broomfield, 2003)
- Super Size Me (Morgan Spurlock, 2004)
- Super High Me (Michael Blieden, 2007)
- Expedition to the End of the World (Daniel Dencik, 2013)
- Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog, 2007)
- Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2010)
- The End of Time (Peter Mettler, 2012)
- Particle Fever (Mark Levinson, 2013)
- Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (Brannon Braga, Ann Druyan and Steven Soter, 2014)
- Paris is Burning (Jennie Livington, 1990)
- Man on Wire (James Marsh, 2008)
- Moana With Sound (Robert J. Flaherty, Frances Hubbard Flaherty and Monica Flaherty, 1926/1980)
- Manakamana (Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez, 2013)
- Approaching the Elephant (Amanda Wilder, 2014)
- Actress (Robert Greene, 2014)
- The Civil War (Ken Burns, 1990)
- Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2003)
- The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (Sophie Fiennes, 2012)
- The Nightmare (Rodney Ascher, 2015)
- Side By Side (Chris Kenneally, 2012)
- Casting By (Tom Donahue, 2012)
- Lost in La Mancha (Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, 2002)
- Virunga (Orlando von Einsiedel, 2014)
- War Don Don (Rebecca Richman Cohen, 2010)
- The Act of Killing: Director’s Cut (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012)
- The Imposter (Bart Layton, 2012)
- Kumare (Vikram Gandhi, 2011)
- Naqoyqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 2002)
- Samsara (Ron Fricke, 2011)
- Touching the Void (Kevin MacDonald, 2003)
- Last Days in Vietnam (Rory Kennedy, 2014)
- Best of Enemies (Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville, 2015)
- Let the Fire Burn (Jason Osder, 2013)
- The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975 (Goran Olsson, 2011)
- Concerning Violence (Goran Olsson, 2014)
- How to Change the World (Jerry Rothwell, 2015)
- How to Die in Oregon (Peter Richardson, 2011)
- How to Survive a Plague (David France, 2012)
- We Were Here (David Weissman and Bill Weber, 2011)
- Crazy Love (Dan Klores, 2007)
- All American High Revisited (Keva Rosenfeld, 2014)
- Maidentrip (Jillian Schlesinger, 2013)
- Undefeated (Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin, 2011)
- Medora (Andrew Cohn and Davy Rothbart, 2013)
- Rich Hill (Andrew Droz Palermo and Tracy Droz Tragos, 2014)
- White Earth (Christian Jensen, 2014)
- The Overnighters (Jesse Moss, 2014)
- Jesus Camp (Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, 2006)
- Detropia (Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, 2012)
- Caucus (AJ Schnack, 2013)
- The Square (Jehane Noujaim, 2013)
- Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom (Evgeny Afineevsky, 2015)
- Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Alex Gibney, 2005)
- Kids for Cash (Robert May, 2013)
- The House I Live In (Eugene Jarecki, 2012)
- The Farm: Angola USA (Liz Garbus, 1998)
- Evolution of a Criminal (Darius Clark Monroe, 2014)
- Which Way Home (Rebecca Cammisa, 2009)
- These Birds Walk (Omar Mullick and Bassam Tariq, 2013)
- Call Me Lucky (Bobcat Goldthwait, 2015)
- Girl Model (David Redmon and Ashley Sabin, 2011)
- Iris (Albert Maysles, 2014)
- Dior and I (Frederic Tcheng, 2014)
- Mad Hot Ballroom (Marilyn Agrelo, 2005)
- Gasland (Josh Fox, 2010)
- FrackNation (Phelim McAleer, Ann McElhinney and Magdalena Segieda, 2013)
- Restrepo (Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, 2010)
- Hell and Back Again (Danfung Dennis, 2011)
- Out of the Clear Blue Sky (Danielle Gardner, 2012)
- First Comes Love (Nina Davenport, 2013)
- After Tiller (Martha Shane and Lana Wilson, 2013)
- Lady Valor: The Kristin Beck Story (Mark Herzog and Sandrine Orabona, 2014)
- Mala Mala (Dan Sickles and Antonio Santini, 2014)
- What Happened, Miss Simone? (Liz Garbus, 2015)
- Seymour: An Introduction (Ethan Hawke, 2014)
- Kurt & Courtney (Nick Broomfield, 1998)
- Beware of Mr. Baker (Jay Bulger, 2012)
- Bigger, Stronger, Faster (Chris Bell, 2008)
- This Ain’t California (Marten Persiel, 2012)
- Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy, 2010)
- Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story (Brad Bernstein, 2012)
- Print the Legend (Luis Lopez and J. Clay Tweel, 2014)
- Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (Alison Klayman, 2012)
- Jiro Dreams of Sushi (David Gelb, 2011)
- More Than Honey (Markus Imhoof, 2012)
- Microcosmos (Claude Nuridsany and Marie Perennou, 1996)
- Blackfish (Gabriela Cowperthwaite, 2013)
- The Whale (Suzanne Chisholm and Michael Parfit, 2011)
- The Queen of Versailles (Lauren Greenfield, 2012)
- Tabloid (Errol Morris, 2010)
- Vernon, Florida (Errol Morris, 1981)
- Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (Kurt Kuenne, 2008)
