Nonfics

The Best Documentaries on Amazon Prime in September 2019

This month's additions include a masterpiece about a chimpanzee and a doom and gloom doc from producer Martin Scorsese.

Warning: Hoop Dreams is leaving Prime Video this month, on September 15th. You’ll no longer be able to watch it over and over and over, as you’ve been warranted to do, and must check out any of the hundreds of other great documentaries available through your Amazon Prime subscription.

To help you, as always, here is a guide to the best and most essential nonfiction film and docu-series streaming on Prime Video. And since four other titles from our main list have expired — Marlene, Standard Operating Procedure, The Road to Guantanamo, and The Last Party (still available there via IMDb TV with ads, however) — we’ve added five docs this month.

Two of them, Project Nim and Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, don’t actually start streaming through the service until the very end of the month. We’ve also re-added Dior and I to go with the Vreeland doc — both are helmed by Frédéric Tcheng, whose new film, Halston, is hopefully coming aboard soon.

Then there’s the Martin Scorsese-produced doom and gloom doc Surviving Progress, which debuted recently on Prime. And finally, we’ve re-added After Tiller to pair up with the recently added Vessel. We almost also re-added Super Size Me since the sequel just came out. But we decided against highlighting it on the list. Just know that it’s on Prime if you want it.

Here is how the Amazon 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 and triple features in the bunch and some groupings where I truly think the higher ranking title is best watched before a certain title or titles below it. Also, the first bunch of entries consists of those that are new to the list that month.

Project Nim (James Marsh, 2011)
“Man on Wire Oscar-winner James Marsh has done it again with another riveting tale of a minor ’70s celebrity. This time it’s the precocious primate Nim Chimpsky, famous for being taught sign language (and definitely the inspiration for Virgil in the ’80s movie Project X) yet less known for being an abandoned research tool and tragic victim of bad science.” – Christopher Campbell
Surviving Progress (Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks, 2011)
Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel (Frédéric Tcheng, 2011)
Dior and I (Frédéric Tcheng, 2014)
“This documentary about the famous couture house is peppered with shots of the name itself, hanging above the doorway of a shop or pasted onto an advertisement. Sometimes the effect is intimidation, other times adoration, but it is always at least brushing up against fetishization. Never quite slipping into insistence or redundancy, this leitmotif reminds of the power and dignity of the house, legendary since Christian Dior opened its doors in 1947.” — Daniel Walber
The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn, and Anonymous, 2012) *OSCAR NOMINEE
“The genius of the film lies not in its buzz-generating conceit, but in the opportunity that its scenario provides for exploring ‘the act’’s fraught relationship to its mediated depictions. The Act of Killing is neither singularly about mass murder nor about movie violence, but about the interminable gap between the horror of the act itself and our strained ability to truly comprehend that horror through its representation.” – Landon Palmer
Bisbee ’17 (Robert Greene, 2018)
“As a cerebral consideration of how different people think of the past and engage with history, Bisbee ’17 is a consuming experience, and as a controlled experiment in getting to that experience, the film is an impressive feat of construction…on a technical level, it’s extraordinary.” – Christopher Campbell
The Gospel of Eureka (Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri, 2018)
“The Gospel of Eureka offers a glimpse into the backcountry Christian world that doesn’t steal headlines with its MAGA hats. Eureka Springs, Arkansas, is a town of around two thousand folks where pastors and drag queens and passersby alike enjoy each other as they abandon the stereotypical tendency toward mutual condemnation. Sure, Eureka Springs is an anomaly, but by God is it a rousing example of what could be.” – Luke Hicks
Louisiana Story (Robert J. Flaherty, 1948)
All in This Tea (Les Blank and Gina Leibrecht, 2007)
Love Meetings (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964)
Fahrenheit 11/9 (Michael Moore, 2018)
“Fahrenheit 11/9 is mostly a sad and scary and angry and alarming movie. There is little room for comedy next to a montage of people who’ve died from Legionnaires’ disease in Flint or following a sequence of smartphone-shot footage of the Parkland, Florida, school shooting, including audio of shots fired and view of one of the dead.” – Christopher Campbell
Tchoupitoulas (Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross, 2012)
Only the Young (Elizabeth Mims and Jason Tippet, 2012)
Maidentrip (Jillian Schlesinger, 2013)
“Maidentrip is part of a new breed of nonfiction teen movies that acutely tap into the true heart and soul of that age better than any fiction filmmakers are doing right now. Specifically here, that time is an exploration, paralleled with a physical analogy of both triumph and inconclusiveness in the spirit of not only growing up but also growing outward.” – Christopher Campbell
Girl Model (David Redmon and Ashley Sabin, 2011)
All This Panic (Jenny Gage, 2016)
“All This Panic finds its art in impressions and perceptions. The varied experiences of these young women illustrate the fluid nature of getting older, each subject reaching milestones at different times, or not perhaps not even reaching the same milestones at all. Its structural looseness and its intuitive images are its greatest attribute, making it the most accomplished American portrait of youth since at least Rich Hill.” – Daniel Walber
Approaching the Elephant (Amanda Wilder, 2014)
I Am Not Your Negro (Raoul Peck, 2016) *OSCAR NOMINEE
“I Am Not Your Negro gives Baldwin’s trenchant, brilliant prose — ever timely both because he was a genius and because America is too slow to change on these matters — its due, keeping his spirit in times when it’s needed badly.” – Dan Schindel
Hale County This Morning, This Evening (RaMell Ross, 2018) *OSCAR NOMINEE
“Hale County is the cinematic equivalent of a memory quilt, woven together with a deep love of community, comprised of intimate though disparate moments from others’ lives, and poetically comforting despite its historically weighty components.” – Jordan M. Smith
Code Black (Ryan McGarry, 2013)
“The action in Code Black makes a strong case that there should be more nonfiction films set in hospitals…[it’s] never boring and actually blows through its brief 78 minutes so quickly that it leaves us wanting more.” – Christopher Campbell
Trouble the Water (Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, 2008) *OSCAR NOMINEE
Dark Days (Marc Singer, 2000)
“A film about the city beneath the city, this documentary reveals the homes of the homeless in the abandoned tunnels of Manhattan. And no New Yorker who saw it could think the same about the island (or the rest of the boroughs) again.” — Christopher Campbell
Picture of Light (Peter Mettler, 1994)
The End of Time (Peter Mettler, 2012)
“The End of Time brings together time, space, nature and humankind in a way that other recent documentaries have perhaps only begun to consider. It’s a bit like Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Encounters at the End of the World combined, with some of Werner Herzog’s earlier thematic ambitions tossed in.” – Daniel Walber
Samsara (Ron Fricke, 2011)
Finders Keepers (Clay Tweel and Bryan Carberry, 2015)
“With this, Tweel proves he can also do right with more intricate and difficult material, further fulfilling his place as one of the most interesting and reliable (and definitely underrated) documentarians in the scene today.” – Christopher Campbell
Nuts! (Penny Lane, 2016)
Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, 1996)
Paradise Lost 2: Revelations (Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, 2000)
Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, 2011) *OSCAR NOMINEE
The Central Park Five (Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon, 2012)
Chicago 10 (Brett Morgen, 2010)
Captivated: Trials of Pamela Smart (Jeremiah Zagar, 2014)
“In a way, it’s not really a documentary about Pamela Smart, only using her story as a perfect example of how the over-mediation and sensationalist exploitation of crimes like her husband’s killing wind up affecting the outcome. Director Jeremiah Zagar (In a Dream) even got a journalism professor to explain the relevant Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, but it’s not all as simple as the observed changing for the sake of the cameras. This doc is also and perhaps more so concerned with how observation changes the observer.” — Christopher Campbell
Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (Nick Broomfield, 1992)
Kurt & Courtney (Nick Broomfield, 1998)
Biggie & Tupac (Nick Broomfield, 2002)
Soldier Girls (Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill, 1981)
Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam (Nick Broomfield, 1995)
Tracking Down Margaret (Nick Broomfield, 1996)
Tales of the Grim Sleeper (Nick Broomfield, Barney Broomfield, and Marc Hoeferlin, 2016)
“With its Los Angeles setting and plot filled with sex and murder and police corruption, on the surface Tales might be the closest thing there is to nonfiction noir, with Broomfield an ever-narrating hardboiled detective leading the way. But it’s hardly a pulp story, its complications deeper than warrants a clever line of ‘forget it, Nick, it’s South Central.'” – Christopher Campbell
McQueen (Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui, 2018)
“Fashion designer Alexander McQueen gets one of the most widely appealing biographical documentaries in some time with this perfectly constructed film. Don’t care about fashion? Don’t know who he was? Not a problem, since McQueen’s rags-to-riches story is universally compelling and thoroughly riveting, even if ultimately it has an unhappy ending. He was a rock star in the fashion world, and McQueen is appropriately sort of a rock doc. Accessibly broken up into a chaptered narrative based around audio recordings of the late subject, the film offers a portrait of an intriguingly humble, yet shockingly brilliant artist. Even if you don’t like his work, you’ll be inspired and saddened by his story.” – Christopher Campbell
Moonwalk One (Theo Kamecke, 1971)
The Space Movie (Tony Palmer, 1980)
“The Space Movie is a product of its time. It is a zany, off-kilter, and often vapid look at space travel. But it is beautiful, and through its beauty, it becomes moving. As a documentary, it feels like a concert film more than a scientific, fact-based endeavor.” – Cole Henry
In the Shadow of the Moon (David Sington, 2007)
Particle Fever (Mark Levinson, 2013)
“Particle Fever is not necessarily a film about what the Large Hadron Collider does or might prove or disprove. It’s a film about the people involved in its creation and/or with the scientific theories it will impact, such as the young post-doc Monica Dunford and the patient physicist Savas Dimopoulos, who’s been waiting three decades to test out his theories, and even the great hero of particle physics himself, Peter Higgs. And as this, it’s among the very best portrayals of passion and excitement ever put on screen.” — Christopher Campbell
Prelude to War (Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak, 1942) *OSCAR WINNER
Divide and Conquer (Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak, 1943)
The Battle of Britain (Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak, 1943)
The Battle of Russia (Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak, 1943) *OSCAR NOMINEE
The Battle of China (Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak, 1944)
Desert Victory (Ray Boulting and David MacDonald, 1943) *OSCAR WINNER
The Fighting Lady (Edward Steichen, 1944) *OSCAR WINNER
Resisting Enemy Interrogation (Robert B. Sinclair, 1944) *OSCAR NOMINEE
Tunisian Victory (Frank Capra, Hugh Stewart, John Huston, 1944)
War Comes to America (Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak, 1945)
The True Glory (Garson Kanin and Carol Reed, 1945) *OSCAR WINNER
Let There Be Light (John Huston, 1946)
Genocide (Arnold Schwartzman, 1982) *OSCAR WINNER
The Long Way Home (Mark Jonathan Harris, 1997) *OSCAR WINNER
One Day in September (Kevin Macdonald, 1999) *OSCAR WINNER
Last Days in Vietnam (Rory Kennedy, 2014) *OSCAR NOMINEE
Cartel Land (Matthew Heineman, 2015) *OSCAR NOMINEE
City of Ghosts (Matthew Heineman, 2017)
“Its most interesting moments come in the movie’s coverage of the message war between ISIS and RBSS. Shots of ISIS propaganda are juxtaposed with the carefully cut RBSS footage that is sent to Western media outlets. Home-grown media machines, both: one apes Hollywood video game drama, the other apes our own melodramatic 24-hour news coverage. “We don’t just repeat the news,” an RBSS member tells Heineman. In a war of words, you have to bring your own. There’s always evil to be found; evil, everywhere.” — Andrew Karpan
The Square (Jehane Noujaim, 2013) *OSCAR NOMINEE
“Inevitably the situation in Egypt will continue to change, and the factual usefulness of the film will diminish. It’s the narrative itself, the way that the events of this summer change the story of the activists that are profiled, that will keep us coming back to The Square for years to come.” – Daniel Walber
The Tillman Story (Amir Bar-Lev, 2010)
Human Flow (Ai Weiwei, 2017)
“Ai’s feature debut manages to achieve the visual and political massiveness of Picasso’s Guernica, a mural of frenzied, scared images of a century slowly disconnecting. Shot with iPhones and from drone cameras, Human Flow eschews the small case study-intimacy common among journalist-driven doc fare. Bopping around the fragmented borders of some 23 countries, including the U.S., Human Flow is a work of extraordinary visual art as a well as an agitprop set-piece.” — Andrew Karpan
Chisholm ’72: Unbought & Unbossed (Shola Lynch, 2004)
Street Fight (Marshall Curry, 2005) *OSCAR NOMINEE
The Weather Underground (Sam Green and Bill Siegel, 2002) *OSCAR NOMINEE
We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists (Brian Knappenberger, 2012)
“An immensely engaging and digestible history of the Internet, for the most part, through the first decade of the 21st century. The focus is on the hacker and activist (or hacktivist) group Anonymous and their most noteworthy attacks and pranks, but in a way being about Anonymous means being about the whole net. This is a doc that can pretty much trace serious movements like Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street back to goofy stuff like LOLcats and ‘Chocolate Rain.’ Everything is connected online, and this film illustrates that perfectly.” – Christopher Campbell
The Panama Papers (Alex Winter, 2018)
Fake It So Real (Robert Greene, 2011)
The Endless Summer (Bruce Brown, 1966)
On Any Sunday (Bruce Brown, 1971) *OSCAR NOMINEE
Seven Second Love Affair (Robert Abel, 1965)
Gleason (Clay Tweel, 2016)
John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection (Julien Faraut, 2018)
“No other tennis pro could be at the center of a doc like In the Realm of Perfection. Not just because McEnroe is the one whom de Kermadec ended up concentrating on. But also because he was a wild animal. There is, of course, the acknowledgment in the film that the footage looks at McEnroe as another documentary might study penguins in Antarctica. It is, in part, March of the McEnroe.” – Christopher Campbell
The Road Movie (Dmitrii Kalshnikov, 2016)
“There is a disturbing pleasure to be enjoyed in dashboard-cam footage of traffic accidents, though The Road Movie isn’t just a compilation of Russia’s craziest car videos…There are surprises aplenty in this Warholian presentation of real-life death and destruction, and it will leave you paranoid about getting behind the wheel of your own vehicle.” – Christopher Campbell
Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer (Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin, 2013)
“While A Punk Prayer is certainly a kinetic and informative document on the band’s history, tactics and controversies, the film illustrates more broadly the conflict between a nation’s gestures toward democracy and its privileging of an orthodox culture.” – Landon Palmer
The Other F Word (Andrea Blaugrund Nevins, 2011)
“The most endearing and potentially tearjerking documentary about punks you’ll ever see. Could you ever have expected that a pseudo-sequel to films like Penelope Spheeris’ The Decline of Western Civilization and Suburbia would elicit so many responses of ‘awwwww’? If so, you’re probably a former punk who has grown up, too, and this is made just for you.” – Christopher Campbell
The Decline of Western Civilization (Penelope Spheeris, 1981)
“The Decline of Western Civilization explores the Los Angeles punk rock scene from 1979 to 1980. At the time, punks were regarded by many as criminals, dope fiends, and nihilists. A danger and a detriment to society, even. If you enjoyed this music and lifestyle, then you were judged. But Spheeris’ film taps into the heart of this subculture and portrays its members in an honest, more nuanced light.” – Cole Henry
The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years (Penelope Spheeris, 1988)
“Balancing mainstays like Ozzy Osbourne and Kiss with struggling acts like Odin and Seduce, The Metal Years treats hair metal as a scene fit for the era of Reagan and the superficiality stereotypically associated with L.A., all despite the fact that such music was seen as a prime enemy to the moral police of its day. With gender-bending styles brushing up against compensatory machismo, hair metal was loaded with fascinating contradictions.” – Landon Palmer
The Decline of Western Civilization Part III (Penelope Spheeris, 1998)
“Spheeris is less interested in the music this time around than she is in a specific community that thrives on it: L.A.’s so-called “gutter punks,” homeless teens who have formed a close community against the forces of poverty, stigma, addiction and abuse. While Spheeris delves deep into the often difficult conditions that have brought these disparate outsiders together, she never pathologizes their behavior and instead offers her camera as the conduit for giving voice to kids who most often spend their days asking money from people who are doing everything they can to ignore them.” – Landon Palmer
Hype! (Doug Pray, 1996)
Stop Making Sense (Jonathan Demme, 1984)
“One of the most acclaimed and influential music documentaries of all-time… Stop Making Sense is actually a musical rather than a traditional concert film. It fits multiple criteria including a variety of camera shots, a narrative journey with the main character has experienced some form of growth, and there was extremely intentional lighting design to the feature.” — Max Covill
Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey (Ramona S. Diaz, 2012)
“It’s plenty entertaining, particularly if you like Journey and uplifting rags-to-riches tales. And as far as the abundance of panegyric music films out there go, this one keeps a positive light shone on its subject but never puts him on an undeservedly high pedestal. Pineda is consistently treated and presented as a human figure, an everyman as the sub-title suggests, rather than a rock god or legend. In a way, it’s completely appropriate that the film about him is just good enough, nothing too extraordinary or lasting in our minds.” — Christopher Campbell
The King (Eugene Jarecki, 2017)
“Somehow, Eugene Jarecki got a hold of Elvis Presley’s 1963 Rolls Royce and hit the road with it. Dropping characters like Alec Baldwin, James Carville, and Emmylou Harris in the backseat, the film attempts to understand the cultural earthquake caused by the arrival of that shy guy from Tupelo, Mississippi and how his rise and fall narrative might mimic that of the nation that birthed him. I’m not quite sure Jarecki nails that theme, but neither is he. This confrontational conversation with The King’s legacy is the best dissection of his myth yet.” – Brad Gullickson
Hollywood on Trial (David Helpern Jr., 1976) *OSCAR NOMINEE
Life After Flash (Lisa Downs, 2017)
“An excitable, aggressive hug of a movie. Overflowing with appreciation, or downright passion, for the exuberant adaptation of the comic book serial, director Lisa Downs gathers not only every accessible voice that contributed to the cult classic but seemingly every ear that absorbed that craft.” – Brad Gullickson
The Line King: The Al Hirschfeld Story (Susan Warms Dryfoos, 1996) *OSCAR NOMINEE
“Fittingly, Dryfoos is, herself, sketching a fitting caricature of Hirschfeld: her ear for melancholy picks up resentment, confusion, old ladies tsking.” – Andrew Karpan
Meet the Patels (Geeta Patel and Ravi Patel, 2014)
Stations of the Elevated (Manfred Kirchheimer, 1981)
4 Little Girls (Spike Lee, 1997) *OSCAR NOMINEE
After Tiller (Martha Shane and Lana Wilson, 2013)
“After Tiller will likely not magically solve the communication problem on this issue, but it does seem to assert that mutual understanding is at least possible.” – Daniel Walber
Vessel (Diana Whitten, 2014)
“Vessel explores the reproductive rights of women around the world through the voyages of a ship that provides medical abortions and support for women in countries where it is illegal…an activist story through and through. It’s incredibly inspiring because it shows how one organization — and a ship — empowered women around the world and grew a movement.” – Siân Melton
The Conquest of Everest (George Lowe, 1953) *OSCAR NOMINEE
Voyage to the Edge of the World (Philippe Cousteau, 1976)
Kon-Tiki (Thor Heyerdahl, 1950) *OSCAR WINNER
Stevie (Steve James, 2002)
“A biography inside of an autobiography and in the end it’s really James’ struggle we’re dealing with. At times it feels so personal, particularly on moral and visceral levels, that it’s amazing he was able to compile the doc with a clear head. I presume co-editor William Haugse (with whom James shares an earlier editing Oscar nomination) must have been an enormous help at the steering wheel of this one.” – Christopher Campbell
Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (Kurt Kuenne, 2008)
“If you don’t know much about this documentary, you’re better off going in cold, and that means not even Googling the title because I guarantee one of the top results is a spoiler. That’s if you want to have the optimal experience of the film’s arguably manipulative storytelling and therefore the optimal amount of tears from your eyes by the end.” — Christopher Campbell