Rather than update our original list of the Best Documentaries on Netflix whenever a film expires or is added, we’d like to post a new version each month to keep things tidy and less confusing. And to make it even nicer for all of you, we’re going to note everything that has joined or left the guide.
So much for thinking that increasing the number of recommendations to 150 would solve all my problems. A bunch more great nonfiction films joined Netflix Watch Instantly since last month’s post, and it’s just as difficult to find room for all of them as always. In June, we got the exclusive debut of Liz Garbus’s latest, the excellent music bio What Happened, Miss Simone? plus the addition of two of her previous, quite different essentials, Girlhood and the Oscar-nominated The Farm: Angola USA.
Also making their way onto our Netflix 150 this month are three very different docs about performers: Jody Lee Lipes’s Ballet 422, which follows choreographer Justin Peck and the New York City Ballet do; Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin’s Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, about the incarceration of members of the Russian feminist activist music group; and Tyler Measom and Justin Weinstein’s An Honest Liar, a fascinating portrait of magician turned debunker The Amazing Randi.
So what’s leaving our list? Well, there are a number of necessary titles that have departed the streaming service. Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine and the Moore-featuring The Yes Men are gone after a brief run. Cutie and the Boxer has sadly stopped streaming, and sad doc Dear Zachary is also no longer available. Strangely, 56 Up has been removed from Watch Instantly, yet the other seven installments of the Up series remain. I had to make one choice for the final removal myself, and I went with Ken Burns’s Jazz. He has enough representation on the list already, and I actually haven’t yet seen that one anyway.
Now a reminder of how the 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 — the Up installments are of varied quality, for instance, but they should be seen in order. 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 grouping where I truly think the higher ranking title is best watched before a certain title or titles below it.
- Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
- The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988)
- Hoop Dreams (Steve James, 1994)
- Life Itself (Steve James, 2014)
- Sherman’s March (Ross McElwee, 1986)
- Bright Leaves (Ross McElwee, 2003)
- Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012)
- The Family Album (Alan Berliner, 1988)
- Intimate Stranger (Alan Berliner, 1991)
- Brother’s Keeper (Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, 1992)
- The Last Waltz (Martin Scorsese, 1978)
- Expedition to the End of the World (Daniel Dencik, 2013)
- Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog, 2007)
- Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005)
- Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2010)
- The End of Time (Peter Mettler, 2012)
- Pina (Wim Wenders, 2011)
- Paris is Burning (Jennie Livington, 1990)
- The Order of Myths (Margaret Brown, 2008)
- The Great Invisible (Margaret Brown, 2014)
- Man on Wire (James Marsh, 2008)
- Leviathan (Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, 2012)
- Manakamana (Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez, 2013)
- Approaching the Elephant (Amanda Wilder, 2014)
- Actress (Robert Greene, 2014)
- Seven Up (Paul Almond, 1964)
- 7 Plus Seven (Michael Apted, 1970)
- 21 Up (Michael Apted, 1977)
- 28 Up (Michael Apted, 1985)
- 35 Up (Michael Apted, 1991)
- 42 Up (Michael Apted, 1998)
- 49 Up (Michael Apted, 2005)
- American Promise (Joe Brewster and Michele Stephenson, 2013)
- The Civil War (Ken Burns, 1990)
- The Dust Bowl (Ken Burns, 2012)
- Prohibition (Ken Burns, 2012)
- Baseball (Ken Burns, 1994)
- Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2003)
- The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (Sophie Fiennes, 2012)
- Room 237 (Rodney Ascher, 2013)
- Side By Side (Chris Kenneally, 2012)
- Milius (Joey Figueroa and Zak Knutson, 2013)
- Lost in La Mancha (Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, 2002)
- Aileen Wuornos: Selling of a Serial Killer (Nick Broomfield, 1993)
- Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill, 2003)
- Virunga (Orlando von Einsiedel, 2014)
- War Don Don (Rebecca Richman Cohen, 2010)
- The Unknown Known (Errol Morris, 2013)
- The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (Andrei Ujica, 2010)
- Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer (Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin, 2013)
- The Last of the Unjust (Claude Lanzmann, 2013)
- The Missing Picture (Rithy Panh, 2013)
- The Act of Killing: Director’s Cut (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012)
- Camp 14: Total Control Zone (Marc Wiese, 2012)
- The Red Chapel (Mads Brugger, 2009)
- The Imposter (Bart Layton, 2012)
- Samsara (Ron Fricke, 2011)
- Life in a Day (Kevin MacDonald and Natalia Andreadis, 2011)
- Touching the Void (Kevin MacDonald, 2003)
- Let the Fire Burn (Jason Osder, 2013)
- 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)
- What Now? Remind Me (Joaquim Pinto, 2013)
- Call Me Kuchu (Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worrall, 2012)
- God Loves Uganda (Roger Ross Williams, 2013)
- Crazy Love (Dan Klores, 2007)
- Monica and David (Alexandra Codina, 2009)
- 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)
- The Overnighters (Jesse Moss, 2014)
- Jesus Camp (Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, 2006)
- Detropia (Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, 2012)
- We Always Lie to Strangers (AJ Schnack and David Wilson, 2013)
- Caucus (AJ Schnack, 2013)
- Mitt (Greg Whiteley, 2014)
- Control Room (Jehane Noujaim, 2004)
- The Square (Jehane Noujaim, 2013)
- 5 Broken Cameras (Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi, 2012)
- Return to Homs (Talal Derki, 2014)
- Maidan (Sergei Loznitsa, 2014)
- Point and Shoot (Marshall Curry, 2014)
- Informant (Jamie Meltzer, 2012)
- Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Alex Gibney, 2005)
- Client 9: Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer (Alex Gibney, 2010)
- The Central Park 5 (Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon, 2012)
- Kids for Cash (Robert May, 2013)
- The House I Live In (Eugene Jarecki, 2012)
- Into the Abyss (Werner Herzog, 2011)
- The Farm: Angola USA (Liz Garbus, 1998)
- Girlhood (Liz Garbus, 2003)
- Gideon’s Army (Dawn Porter, 2013)
- Evolution of a Criminal (Darius Clark Monroe, 2014)
- Which Way Home (Rebecca Cammisa, 2009)
- These Birds Walk (Omar Mullick and Bassam Tariq, 2013)
- Girl Model (David Redmon and Ashley Sabin, 2011)
- Mad Hot Ballroom (Marilyn Agrelo, 2005)
- First Position (Bess Kargman, 2011)
- Ballet 422 (Jody Lee Lipes, 2014)
- Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (Brannon Braga, Ann Druyan and Steven Soter, 2014)
- Particle Fever (Mark Levinson, 2013)
- Radio Bikini (Robert Stone, 1988)
- Pandora’s Promise (Robert Stone, 2013)
- Countdown to Zero (Lucy Walker, 2009)
- Waste Land (Lucy Walker, 2010)
- Gasland (Josh Fox, 2010)
- FrackNation (Phelim McAleer, Ann McElhinney and Magdalena Segieda, 2013)
- Cool It (Ondi Timoner, 2010)
- Last Call at the Oasis (Jessica Yu, 2011)
- Berkeley in the Sixties (Mark Kitchell, 1990)
- A Fierce Green Fire (Mark Kitchell, 2012)
- Dirty Wars (Rick Rowley, 2013)
- Armadillo (Janus Metz Pedersen, 2010)
- Restrepo (Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, 2010)
- Korengal (Sebastian Junger, 2014)
- Hell and Back Again (Danfung Dennis, 2011)
- Out of the Clear Blue Sky (Danielle Gardner, 2012)
- After Tiller (Martha Shane and Lana Wilson, 2013)
- Vessel (Diana Whitten, 2014)
- Lady Valor: The Kristin Beck Story (Mark Herzog and Sandrine Orabona, 2014)
- The Invisible War (Kirby Dick, 2012)
- What Happened, Miss Simone? (Liz Garbus, 2015)
- 20 Feet From Stardom (Morgan Neville, 2013)
- Justin Bieber: Never Say Never (Jon M. Chu, 2011)
- Kurt & Courtney (Nick Broomfield, 1998)
- Biggie and Tupac (Nick Broomfield, 2002)
- Last Days Here (Don Argott and Demian Fenton, 2011)
- Beware of Mr. Baker (Jay Bulger, 2012)
- Paul Williams Still Alive (Stephen Kessler, 2011)
- Pumping Iron (George Butler and Robert Fiore, 1977)
- Bigger, Stronger, Faster (Chris Bell, 2008)
- This Ain’t California (Marten Persiel, 2012)
- An Honest Liar (Tyler Measom and Justin Weinstein, 2014)
- Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story (Brad Bernstein, 2012)
- The Art of the Steal (Don Argott, 2009)
- Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy, 2010)
- Print the Legend (Luis Lopez and J. Clay Tweel, 2014)
- Objectified (Gary Hustwit, 2009)
- Urbanized (Gary Hustwit, 2011)
- Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (Alison Klayman, 2012)
- Jiro Dreams of Sushi (David Gelb, 2011)
- 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)