
Rather than update our original list of the 100 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.
One month you’re in, the next month you’re out. That paraphrased slogan of Heidi Klum is appropriate for this list, as we often include new Netflix additions that we feel don’t make the cut weeks later when another fresh batch comes through. To give an example for last and this month’s changes, September saw the inclusion of Mission Blue, while it’s absent from October’s rankings. We had also just added Fela Kuti: Music is the Weapon only to take it off now. Maybe it’ll be back later.
Meanwhile, titles that had fallen off in the past have returned for different reasons. Make Believe is back in order to be paired with the great new Netflix Original Print the Legend, both being from director J. Clay Tweel. And I’ve brought Ondi Timoner’s Cool It back in part because everyone’s been talking about climate change lately.
Another addition, Manakamana also joins associated films. The doc comes out of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, just like Foreign Parts and Leviathan. Then there’s Justin Bieber: Never Say Never, which just arrived on Watch Instantly and can now be easily viewed by any skeptics and haters who haven’t known what they’re missing. That could almost be two listings in one since Netflix also added the film’s “Director’s Fan Cut” to its streaming service. But we haven’t seen that version (nor have we seen the sequel Justin Bieber: Believe, which is on Netflix Watch Instantly), so it’s not.
Obviously we had to cut out some other picks to fit the newcomers in. One was easy, as Style Wars is unfortunately departing the service as of October 8th (see it before then!). The others were hard, but we wound up removing two numerically titled we find to be lesser works by their directors: Alex Gibney’s Client 9 and Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon’s The Central Park Five. I also gave Monica and David a leave of absence, hopefully only temporarily.
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.
- Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
- The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988)
- Hoop Dreams (Steve James, 1994)
- Sherman’s March (Ross McElwee, 1986)
- Bright Leaves (Ross McElwee, 2003)
- Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012)
- Brother’s Keeper (Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, 1992)
- Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog, 2007)
- Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2010)
- Pina (Wim Wenders, 2011)
- Paris is Burning (Jennie Livington, 1990)
- Man on Wire (James Marsh, 2008)
- Senna (Asif Kapadia, 2010)
- Foreign Parts (Verena Paravel and J.P. Sniadecki, 2010)
- Leviathan (Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, 2012)
- Manakamana (Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez)
- 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)
- 56 Up (Michael Apted, 2012)
- The Civil War (Ken Burns, 1990)
- Aileen Wuornos: Selling of a Serial Killer (Nick Broomfield, 1993)
- Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (Nick Broomfield, 2003)
- The Unknown Known (Errol Morris, 2013)
- This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi, 2011)
- War Don Don (Rebecca Richman Cohen, 2010)
- The Missing Picture (Rithy Panh, 2013)
- The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012)
- Camp 14: Total Control Zone (Marc Wiese, 2012)
- The Red Chapel (Mads Brugger, 2009)
- The Ambassador (Mads Brugger, 2011)
- The Imposter (Bart Layton, 2012)
- Winged Migration (Jacques Perrin, Jacques Cluzaud and Michel Debats, 2001)
- Vivan las Antipodas (Victor Kossakovsky, 2011)
- 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)
- How to Survive a Plague (David France, 2012)
- We Were Here (David Weissman and Bill Weber, 2011)
- Cutie and the Boxer (Zachary Heinzerling, 2013)
- Crazy Love (Dan Klores, 2007)
- Maidentrip (Jillian Schlesinger, 2013)
- Jesus Camp (Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, 2006)
- Detropia (Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, 2012)
- Control Room (Jehane Noujaim, 2004)
- The Square (Jehane Noujaim, 2013)
- 5 Broken Cameras (Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi, 2012)
- Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Alex Gibney, 2005)
- The House I Live In (Eugene Jarecki, 2012)
- Into the Abyss (Werner Herzog, 2011)
- Gideon’s Army (Dawn Porter, 2013)
- Which Way Home (Rebecca Cammisa, 2009)
- Girl Model (David Redmon and Ashley Sabin, 2011)
- Particle Fever (Mark Levinson, 2013)
- Cool It (Ondi Timoner)
- Radio Bikini (Robert Stone, 1988)
- Pandora’s Promise (Robert Stone, 2013)
- Countdown to Zero (Lucy Walker, 2009)
- Gasland (Josh Fox, 2010)
- FrackNation (Phelim McAleer, Ann McElhinney and Magdalena Segieda, 2013)
- Dirty Wars (Rick Rowley, 2013)
- Call Me Kuchu (Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worrall, 2012)
- The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975 (Goran Olsson, 2011)
- Armadillo (Janus Metz Pedersen, 2010)
- Restrepo (Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, 2010)
- Hell and Back Again (Danfung Dennis, 2011)
- Dogtown and Z-Boys (Stacy Peralta, 2002)
- This Ain’t California (Marten Persiel, 2012)
- After Tiller (Martha Shane and Lana Wilson, 2013)
- The Invisible War (Kirby Dick, 2012)
- 20 Feet From Stardom (Morgan Neville, 2013)
- Pumping Iron (George Butler and Robert Fiore, 1977)
- Bigger, Stronger, Faster (Chris Bell, 2008)
- Marwencol (Jeff Malmberg, 2010)
- 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 (Bansky, 2010)
- Helvetica (Gary Hustwit, 2007)
- Objectified (Gary Hustwit, 2009)
- Urbanized (Gary Hustwit, 2011)
- Print the Legend (Luis Lopez and J. Clay Tweel)
- Make Believe (J. Clay Tweel)
- Her Master’s Voice (Nina Conti, 2012)
- Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg)
- Justin Bieber: Never Say Never (Jon M. Chu)
- Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (Alison Klayman, 2012)
- 1428 (Du Haibin, 2009)
- Blackfish (Gabriela Cowperthwaite, 2013)
- The Whale (Suzanne Chisholm and Michael Parfit, 2011)
- Berkeley in the Sixties (Mark Kitchell, 1990)
- A Fierce Green Fire (Mark Kitchell, 2012)
- Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (Kurt Kuenne, 2008)
- The Queen of Versailles (Lauren Greenfield, 2012)
- Tabloid (Errol Morris, 2010)
- Vernon, Florida (Errol Morris, 1981)