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100 Must-See Documentaries Streaming on Netflix This March

Drafthouse Films

It may not have won the Oscar, but The Look of Silence is now streaming on Netflix, and of course that means it’s been added to our Netflix 100 list. While the exposure from an Academy Awards spotlight would have been nice, the important thing is for the film to be seen, and now it can and will be seen by a lot more people. I’ve moved Joshua Oppenheimer’s previous film, the also Oscar-nominated The Act of Killing to the top of the list, since it ought to be seen first.

The next new addition this month is Jafar Panahi’s Taxi, a film that isn’t entirely classifiable as a documentary but is enough of a nonfiction film to merit its inclusion here. The other two you’ll see in blue below are titles returning to Netflix Watch Instantly. Finding Vivian Maier is a very problematic film in terms of questioning a certain conflict of interest on the part of one of the filmmakers, but the Oscar-nominated doc is so well-crafted that I think it’s worth seeing. And then there’s Kurt & Courtney, which I took off last month because it seemed to expire for good. I guess that was a temporary mistake, as it’s back.

The four new inclusions mostly fill in for titles that have expired from the service in the past month. They are Crazy Love, which hopefully everyone got a chance to watch for Valentine’s Day, Jesus Camp, which we warned you about last month, and Side by Side, the much better than expected doc on the film versus digital debate. For the fourth removal, I chose All American High Revisited, because it’s a neat time capsule artifact but not as essential as the stuff remaining on the list.

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 Super Size Me and Super High Me, 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.

Tags:FeaturesFinding Vivian Maierkurt-and-courtneyLists

(Editor in Chief)

Christopher Campbell is the founding editor of Nonfics.