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.
- Of Men and War (Laurent Becue-Renard, 2014)
- Dirty Wars (Rick Rowley, 2013)
- 1971 (Johanna Hamilton, 2014)
- Democrats (Camilla Nielsson, 2014)
- Sembene! (Samba Gadjigo and Jason Silverman, 2015)
- The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988)
- The Cruise (Bennett Miller, 1998)
- Hoop Dreams (Steve James, 1994)
- Life Itself (Steve James, 2014)
- 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)
- The Act of Killing: Director’s Cut (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012)
- The Look of Silence (Joshua Opppenheimer, 2014)
- Super Size Me (Morgan Spurlock, 2004)
- Super High Me (Michael Blieden, 2007)
- Expedition to the End of the World (Daniel Dencik, 2013)
- 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)
- Moana With Sound (Robert J. Flaherty, Frances Hubbard Flaherty and Monica Flaherty, 1926/1980)
- Approaching the Elephant (Amanda Wilder, 2014)
- Actress (Robert Greene, 2014)
- Finders Keepers (Bryan Carberry and J. Clay Tweel, 2015)
- The Civil War (Ken Burns, 1990)
- Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2003)
- In the Basement (Ulrich Seidl, 2014)
- The Nightmare (Rodney Ascher, 2015)
- 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 Imposter (Bart Layton, 2012)
- Naqoyqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 2002)
- Samsara (Ron Fricke, 2011)
- Touching the Void (Kevin MacDonald, 2003)
- Stray Dog (Debra Granik, 2014)
- Last Days in Vietnam (Rory Kennedy, 2014)
- Chau, Beyond the Lines (Courtney Marsh, 2015)
- Best of Enemies (Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville, 2015)
- The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975 (Goran Olsson, 2011)
- Concerning Violence (Goran Olsson, 2014)
- 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)
- Sunshine Superman (Marah Strauch, 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)
- Detropia (Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, 2012)
- Western (Bill and Turner Ross, 2015)
- 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)
- Making a Murderer (Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi, 2015)
- Last Day of Freedom (Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman, 2015)
- Cartel Land (Matthew Heineman, 2015)
- 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)
- Finding Vivian Maier (John Maloof and Charlie Siskel, 2013)
- 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)
- The Hunting Ground (Kirby Dick, 2015)
- 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)
- My Prairie Home (Chelsea McMullan, 2013)
- What Happened, Miss Simone? (Liz Garbus, 2015)
- Kurt & Courtney (Nick Broomfield, 1998)
- Orion: The Man Who Would Be King (Jeanie Finlay, 2015)
- Pumping Iron (George Butler and Robert Fiore, 1977)
- Bigger, Stronger, Faster (Chris Bell, 2008)
- Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy, 2010)
- 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)
- Batkid Begins: The Wish Heard Around the World (Dana Nachman, 2015)
- Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (Kurt Kuenne, 2008)
