Nonfics

100 Must-See Documentaries Streaming on Amazon Prime This November

100 Must-See Documentaries Streaming on Amazon Prime This Month

If you’re a Prime member, you’ve got plenty to watch for free.

This month, the Amazon 100 list adds nine new titles, including the Oscar-contending Amazon-exclusive City of Ghosts and the Oscar-nominated The Square, which used to be a Netflix exclusive. There are also documentaries by Pamela Yates, Steve James, Brett Morgen, and Aaron Eites and Audrey Ewell, plus a 20-year-old Oscar nominee, one of the more notable financial crisis films, and cult favorite Best Worst Movie.

They take the place of The Reagan Show and The Living Sea, neither of which is free for Prime members anymore, and the following titles I selected for removal for now: Meru, Elena, Herman’s House, Private Violence, Gimme Danger, The Yes Men Are Revolting, and Drew: The Man Behind the Poster. Any of those could return in the future, of course.

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.

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)
“Jehane Noujaim has done something extraordinary with The Square, her documentary of the Egyptian Revolution. She was there in Tahrir Square almost from the very beginning, when President Hosni Mubarak was forced out of office. That was February of 2011. Noujaim and her crew stayed, filming a small group of activists through the election of Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi on June 16–17th, 2012.” — Daniel Walber
Granito: How to Nail a Dictator (Pamela Yates, 2011)
The Interrupters (Steve James, 2011)
“The documentary brings James back to Hoop Dreams territory, setting-wise, by following the inspiring Chicago-based organization CeaseFire, tracking the work and lives of a few members of its ‘violence interrupters’ team. These individuals, many of whom come from a violent past themselves, now mediate gang disputes and try to resolve other potential causes for alarm that may lead to more murders, adding to an already epidemic issue in the city. Through a year in the lives, we witness the subjects’ personal struggles with inner-city violence as well.” — Christopher Campbell
Chicago 10 (Brett Morgen, 2010)
Waco: The Rules of Engagement (William Gazecki, 1997)
Until the Light Takes Us (Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell, 2008)
Best Worst Movie (Michael Paul Stephenson, 2009)
The Flaw (David Sington, 2011)
Cameraperson (Kirsten Johnson, 2016)
“Every time Johnson picks up a camera, there is an almost chemical reaction, a negotiation between vision and subject that yields only more questions. This is what nonfiction cinema should be, a living dialog that complicates the position of the camera person in invigorating, sometimes emotionally taxing ways. This mediation, for lack of a better term, is art.” — Daniel Walber
Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012)
“The reason Stories We Tell is so appealing and absorbing is in how her story is presented, with wonder and vigor and drama and a clever, well-executed structure involving a variety of technique.” — Christopher Campbell
Amy (Asif Kapadia, 2015)
“Another affecting rush of archival footage, like his previous, breakout film, Senna. But this one has a more interesting, sometimes troubling relationship between the footage and the subject.” — Christopher Campbell
The Russian Woodpecker (Chad Gracia, 2015)
“In his stunning debut, Chad Gracia has tried for a work of political and artistic importance and triumphantly succeeds with a constantly surprising mix of history, humor, drama, character study, journalistic odyssey, global intrigue and terror and what looks like a bit of sci-fi and fantasy but is all too real.” — Christopher Campbell
Louisiana Story (Robert J. Flaherty, 1948)
All This Tea (Les Blank and Gina Leibrecht, 2007)
The Chair (Robert Drew, 1963)
Love Meetings (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964)
Only the Young (Elizabeth Mims and Jason Tippet, 2012)
Approaching the Elephant (Amanda Wilder, 2014)
Last Train Home (Lixin Fan, 2009)
Manufactured Landscapes (Jennifer Baichwal, 2006)
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
The Gleaners and I (Agnes Varda, 2002)
Foreign Parts (Verena Paravel and J.P. Sniadecki, 2010)
Picture of Light (Peter Mettler, 1994)
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)
The Central Park Five (Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon, 2012)
Private Practices: The Story of a Sex Surrogate (Kirby Dick, 1986)
Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (Nick Broomfield, 1992)
Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill, 2003)
Driving Me Crazy (Nick Broomfield, 1988)
Kurt & Courtney (Nick Broomfield, 1998)
Biggie & Tupac (Nick Broomfield, 2002)
Who Cares (Nick Broomfield, 1971)
Soldier Girls (Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill, 1981)
Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam (Nick Broomfield, 1995)
Tracking Down Margaret (Nick Broomfield, 1996)
David Lynch: The Art Life (Jon Nguyen, Rick Barnes, and Olivia Neergaard-Holm, 2016)
“One of the finest glimpses into the mind of David Lynch available…the documentary traces the years from Lynch’s childhood in Montana through the making of his first feature, 1977’s Eraserhead, but crucially uses only Lynch’s own words to do so.” — Jake Orthwein
Altman (Ron Mann, 2014)
The People vs. George Lucas (Alexandre O. Philippe, 2010)
The Last Laugh (Ferne Pearlstein, 2016)
Kung Fu Elliot (Matthew Bauckman and Jaret Belliveau, 2014)
Author: The JT LeRoy Story (Jeff Feuerzeig, 2016)
Prelude to War (Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak, 1942)
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)
The Battle of China (Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak, 1944)
War Comes to America (Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak, 1945)
Desert Victory (Ray Boulting and David MacDonald, 1943)
The True Glory (Garson Kanin and Carol Reed, 1945)
Let There Be Light (John Huston, 1946)
The Battle of the Somme (Geoffrey Malins and John McDowell, 1916)
The Battle of the Ancre and the Advance of the Tanks (Geoffrey Malins, 1917)
The Oath (Laura Poitras, 2010)
The Kill Team (Dan Krauss, 2013)
Street Fight (Marshall Curry, 2005)
Videocracy (Erik Gandini, 2009)
In the Shadow of the Moon (David Sington, 2007)
Fake It So Real (Robert Greene, 2011)
The Endless Summer (Bruce Brown, 1966)
On Any Sunday (Bruce Brown, 1971)
On Any Sunday II (Ed Forsyth and Don Shoemaker, 1981)
Seven Second Love Affair (Robert Abel, 1965)
12 O’Clock Boys (Lotfy Nathan, 2013)
Gleason (Clay Tweel, 2016)
Head Games (Steve James, 2012)
“Steve James, best known for Hoop Dreams, directed yet another notable work with Head Games, which looks at the issue of concussions in sports, from football to girls’ soccer. There’s a fairly standard framework to it, but it’s a very important topic at the moment and the film does a great job at presenting the clash of science and culture that is keeping this from being a straightforward matter.” — Christopher Campbell
Indie Game: The Movie (Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky, 2012)
Jig (Sue Bourne, 2011)
Paul Williams: Still Alive (Stephen Kessler, 2011)
Shut Up and Play the Hits (Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern, 2012)
Unraveled (Marc H. Simon, 2011)
Almost There (Dan Rybicky and Aaron Wickenden, 2014)
Art and Craft (Sam Cullman, Jennifer Grausman and Mark Becker, 2014)
Bill Cunningham New York (Richard Press, 2010)
Stations of the Elevated (Manfred Kirchheimer, 1981)
The Parking Lot Movie (Meghan Eckman, 2010)
Berkeley in the Sixties (Mark Kitchell, 1990)
The Source Family (Maria Demopoulos and Jodi Wille, 2012)
“Chronicles the rise and fall of the eponymous Source Family, a cult of young people who followed “Father Yod,” a charismatic faux-eastern soothsayer…Unlike most other docs about cults, this one is pretty upbeat about its subject. All of the former Family members look back on the experience fondly. It seems that the Source Family actually lived up to its ideals of peace and love.” — Dan Schindel
American Commune (Rena Mundo Croshere and Nadine Mundo, 2013)
Farmland (James Moll, 2014)
“The film looks at the lives of a new generation of growers and ranchers. These subjects, all in their 20s, are a rarity right now, as a lot of children and grandchildren of the traditional American farmer is moving on to other kinds of work.” — Christopher Campbell
Thin (Lauren Greenfield, 2006)
4 Little Girls (Spike Lee, 1997)
When the Levees Broke: An American Tragedy (Spike Lee, 2006)
Trouble the Water (Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, 2008)
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (Chad Freidrichs, 2011)
Fatherland (Nicolas Prividera, 2011)
We Come as Friends (Hubert Sauper, 2014)
Sick Birds Die Easy (Nicholas Fackler, 2013)
Into the Cold: A Journey of the Soul (Sebastian Copeland, 2010)
The Cove (Louie Psihoyos, 2009)
“The Cove captures in unsparing detail the annual dolphin drive hunt held in the small town of Taiji, Japan. The efforts of the filmmakers and the team of activists they followed were blocked by the authorities, necessitating a covert shooting operation. The doc is presented like a heist movie, with much attention paid to the logistics required in setting up the various cameras and crew members.” — Dan Schindel
Voyage to the Edge of the World (Philippe Cousteau, 1976)
Kon-Tiki (Thor Heyerdahl, 1950)
Song From the Forest (Michael Obert, 2013)
Reindeerspotting: Escape From Santaland (Joonas Neuvonen, 2010)
Super High Me (Michael Blieden, 2007)
Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (Benjamin Christensen, 1922)