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100 Must-See Documentaries Streaming on Netflix This May

Alice Films

Five great documentaries have been added to Netflix this month, including one that has been here before, Oscar nominee Dirty Wars. The others are new to the streaming service and include some of our favorite nonfiction films of the past few years. There’s Of Men and War and Democrats, both of which received four-star reviews and appear on Daniel Walber’s top 20 of 2015, and 1971, which is on my own top 20 of 2015, and the Ousmane Sembene bio Sembene!, which had a positive review out of Sundance last year.

Of course they have to replace five other films, and it so happens that it’s that many regulars from our Netflix 100 that expired over the past 30 days. We’re sad to see such lesser-known favorites as Beware of Mr. Baker and Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story go, along with Werner Herzog’s Oscar-nominated Encounters at the End of the World, the box office hit Mad Hot Ballroom and the Slavoj Zizek-led The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. Hopefully they’re not gone for long.

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 (Super Size Me and Super High Me and GasLand and FrackNation, 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.

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(Editor in Chief)

Christopher Campbell is the founding editor of Nonfics.