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The 100 Best Documentaries to Stream On Netflix This July

Stories We Tell

Rather than update our previous list of the 100 Best Documentaries on Netflix whenever a film expires or is added (as I said we would), we’d actually 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. For instance, now gone from Netflix Watch Instantly are Ken Burns’s The Civil War and The Dust Bowl (and pretty much the rest of his work) as well as Make Believe. In their place, though not necessarily in the same slots, are the following titles: Stories We Tell, recent Oscar nominee The Missing Picture and Cool It. We’ll be highlighting the new additions in blue to make it even easier for everyone to see where they’ve fallen.

We should also note that this month sees the exclusive release of The Battered Bastards of Baseball, which I hear is worth seeing. That arrives on July 11th.

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 (Dogtown and Z-Boys and This Ain’t California 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.

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(Editor in Chief)

Christopher Campbell is the founding editor of Nonfics.