Lots of great movies are based on true stories, but what about movies that are true stories themselves? The greatest documentaries to hit our screens take real incidents—drawn from history, nature, the arts, sports, or ongoing world events—and bring them to a wider audience, using the language of cinema and journalism to give viewers a full understanding of a topic they might have never known about before.
Ranking films is always tricky, and it's especially hard to objectively rank documentaries. Are you ranking the real events that the documentary is depicting? Is a true crime inherently "better" than an unlikely sports triumph? Of course not. Instead, what makes for a great documentary is the marriage of subject and storytelling. Good documentaries educate on important issues; the great documentaries do it with artistry and style that enhances the impact.
Rest assured—all 32 of the documentaries on this list are amazing films.
32. Touching the Void
Year: 2003
Director: Kevin Macdonald
One of the most astounding survival stories of all time, Touching the Void is about British mountaineers Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, who in 1985 attempted to climb a Peruvian mountain face for the first time. As depicted in the documentary, which features well-done reenactments, something goes wrong… and then something else goes wrong… and then another thing. By all rights, Simpson should have died many, many times over, and yet here he is co-narrating this documentary. It's a truly unbelievable true story, and watching Touching the Void will make your jaw drop lower and lower in awed disbelief.
31. Searching for Sugar Man
Year: 2012
Director: Malik Bendjelloul
The American folk singer Sixto Rodriguez, who went just by Rodriguez professionally, did not enjoy much success in his home country when he was recording music in the '70s. However, completely unbeknownst to him, Rodriguez and his albums had become a huge sensation during Apartheid in South Africa. This documentary, which won the Best Documentary Feature Oscar at the 85th Academy Awards, follows two South African fans as they try to track down information about this mysterious singer who many in their country presumed was long dead—only to discover that he's still kicking. Rodriguez became a legend without knowing it, a creative symbol of freedom during one of the most oppressive periods in history.
30. Won't You Be My Neighbor
Year: 2018
Director: Morgan Neville
There's something ever so slightly melancholy in Morgan Neville's masterful documentary about Fred Rogers, the man behind the iconic, beloved children's show Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. Won't You Be My Neighbor tells his story, showcasing the heartwarming history and legacy of his work, but it also touches on the struggle of standing up for something purely good in a fast-moving world that doesn't always have goodness in mind. The documentary makes you so happy that Mr. Rogers tried regardless—and he definitely made an impact.
29. Summer of Soul (...or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
Year: 2021
Director: Questlove
The 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival took place the same summer as the famous Woodstock concert, and yet this celebration of Black culture and music, like soul and jazz, doesn't get nearly the recognition as the iconic hippie festival. This Oscar-winning documentary, from the musician Questlove in his directorial debut, explores why that might be, using gorgeously restored footage of the concert to bring the festival to life once more, many decades later.
28. March of the Penguins
Year: 2005
Director: Luc Jacquet
It's hard to explain to those who weren't around in the mid-'00s just how much of a sensation this nature documentary was. A rare commercial and critical success for a documentary, the film followed the breeding rituals of emperor penguins. Every year, hundreds of these big flightless birds waddle across Antarctica in below-freezing winds to lay eggs and raise their chicks. It is one of the more incredible feats in all the animal kingdom, and March of the Penguins vividly brings it to life.
27. The Tower
Year: 2016
Director: Keith Maitland
In 1966, Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the Main Building at the University of Texas at Austin and started firing at people down below, killing 15 and injuring 31 others. At the time, it was the deadliest mass shooting in American history. The Tower uses gripping interviews with people who were there on that fateful day, combined with animated recreations of the incident, to paint a chilling picture of an early instance of an event that has become all too common.
26. Man on Wire
Year: 2008
Director: James Marsh
In 1974, French acrobat Philippe Petit pulled off what he called "the artistic crime of the century" when he and his crew snuck into the just-built World Trade Center and tightrope walked from tower to tower. Man on Wire, which won the Best Documentary Feature Oscar, structures itself like a heist film, following Petit (who is quite a character) as he recounts his efforts to plan and pull off this daring act. It culminates in a magic moment, as a man calmly, happily strolls between what were at the time the two tallest buildings in the world. Notably, 9/11 is never once addressed in the film. It doesn't need to be. Why taint such a pure expression?
25. Exit Through the Gift Shop
Year: 2010
Director: Banksy
Thierry Guetta, a Frenchman living in Los Angeles, spent years hanging out with and filming street artists like Banksy and Shepard Fairey. Ostensibly, he was going to use this footage to make some kind of documentary, but nothing ever came of it. So instead Banksy, the famous pseudonymous street artist, made a documentary himself. The resulting film is partially a history of street art, partially an inversion of the original pitch as it follows Guetta's burgeoning street art career as "Mr. Brainwash," and partially a test of the limits of authenticity. It's undeniably a hoot.
24. 13th
Year: 2006
Director: Ava DuVernay
Ava DuVernay's acclaimed documentary gets its title from the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which abolished slavery in the United States. What 13th argues—quite convincingly—is that slavery hasn't fully gone away, as the Amendment leaves a carveout that keeps involuntary servitude a valid punishment for convicted criminals. DuVernay shows how the law, political policies, and the prison-industrial complex have resulted in a society where large numbers of Black Americans are essentially still in slavery despite the titular Amendment due to mass incarceration.
23. Minding the Gap
Year: 2018
Director: Bing Liu
It's technically accurate to call Minding the Gap a sports documentary, but Bing Liu's film, made of footage he took of himself and his friends Keire Johnson and Zack Mulligan as they turned to skateboarding as an outlet in the run-down town of Rockford, Illinois, is about so much more than that. It's a masterful, revealing, and brave documentary about coming of age, hardship, and cycles of abuse that's at times heartbreaking — and, at times, utterly, joyously euphoric.
22. Room 237
Year: 2012
Director: Rodney Ascher
Stanley Kubrick's 1980 adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining (aka one of the best horror movies of all time) is a famously dense film, one that viewers have imparted with all sorts of meaning that probably wasn't intended and might not be there. This uneasily dreamy documentary has various fans of the film explain why tiny pieces of perceived evidence support their theory about what The Shining is really about, including themes about Native American cultural assimilation, the Holocaust, or even conspiracy theories that Kubrick helped fake the moon landing. Room 237 isn't as interested in the specifics of any one theory, all of which are told entirely through voiceover. Instead, it's a fascinating look at the ways people find—and project—meaning.
21. Blackfish
Year: 2013
Director: Gabriela Cowperthwaite
Blackfish is a documentary that feels somewhat like a horror film on two levels. The first is more immediate, as it centers around Tilikum, an orca whale responsible for three deaths during his time in captivity at theme parks like SeaWorld. Though the deaths were tragic and gruesome, Tilikum is hardly a killer from a slasher film, because the second level of horror comes from the pretty undeniable case Blackfish makes against the ethics of keeping whales like Tilikum in captivity in the first place.
20. Flee
Year: 2021
Director: Jonas Poher Rasmussen
The first movie to be nominated for Best Documentary Feature, Best International Feature, and Best Animated Feature at the Academy Awards, Flee is a Danish animated documentary about a man, a friend of the director, who is finally ready to tell his story of escaping Afghanistan when he was a child. This story, while harrowing, is hiding secrets and is more complicated than it initially seems. Flee paints a deeply human portrait of hardship, love, family, sexuality, and the precarious nature of coming to another country.
19. Grizzly Man
Year: 2005
Director: Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog, a singular director if there ever was one, delivers one of the most harrowing looks at the wildness of nature and mankind's hubris in thinking we can ever truly understand it. Grizzly Man tells the story of Timothy Treadwell, a self-proclaimed conservationist who spent several stretches living amongst wild brown bears until he and his girlfriend were mauled to death by a bear in Katmai National Park, Alaska, in 2003. It's a fascinating portrait of a fascinating individual that has a lot to say about our perceived relationship with the natural world.
18. They Shall Not Grow Old
Year: 2018
Director: Peter Jackson
The images and footage we have of World War I are well over 100 years old, and while that may make people from modern times picture the Great War in black and white, it was a vivid experience to those who lived it. Peter Jackson, director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, took footage of WWI and used cutting-edge technology to restore and colorize it, adding sound and even some dialog to make the past come alive. Seeing WWI depicted like this alone makes They Shall Not Grow Old worth seeing, but the film pairs it with old narration from veterans recounting their experiences. These British soldiers reveal a perhaps unexpected attitude towards the war, and as a result, They Shall Not Grow Old makes the conflict seem both immediate and alien in a fascinating way.
17. Stories We Tell
Year: 2012
Director: Sarah Polley
Something about not wanting to "spoil" a documentary—a movie about real life and verifiable facts—feels wrong, but if there were ever a documentary not to spoil, it's Sarah Polley's film about her family's secrets. Polley, a Canadian actress and filmmaker, uses extensive interviews as well as staged reenactments in the style of old home movies to weave a story about complicated people and the nature of family and identity. It's a complicated, but ultimately very warm film that, yes, has plenty of twists.
16. Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat
Year: 2024
Director: Johan Grimonprez
It's impressive that a documentary this information-dense can also be this stylish. Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat documents the coup and eventual murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Republic of the Congo. An exhaustive tour of one rage-inducing part of the Cold War and American complicity, Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat also follows the jazz musicians who were unwittingly used by the American government as propaganda—or even CIA fronts in the struggle to control the African front of the Cold War. This informative film is a jazzy delight to listen to and deeply infuriating to watch.
15. Bowling for Columbine
Year: 2002
Director: Michael Moore
Michael Moore, one of the most commercially successful mainstream documentarians, turned his sights on America's gun violence epidemic in this acclaimed documentary on the country's love affair with firearms. Using the tragic 1999 school shooting as a jumping off point, Moore attempts to figure out why the United States is so prone to gun violence when other countries—including countries with violent pasts and widespread gun ownership—don't experience nearly as many shootings. His investigation is insightful (and darkly funny, at times), but he doesn't quite arrive at an answer. That's not so much a failing as it speaks to the issue Bowling for Columbine focused on, as gun violence has only gotten worse in the decades since.
14. Icarus
Year: 2017
Director: Bryan Fogel
Icarus was originally supposed to be a very different sort of documentary. Filmmaker Bryan Fogel, who was a very competitive cyclist but not on the level of a professional, set out to do all the doping he could in an experiment to see if it would elevate him to elite levels. But when he starts working with the head of Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory, Icarus transforms into something with a much broader scope, as he's found a whistleblower who will ultimately help expose the Russian state-sponsored Olympic doping program.
13. American Movie
Year: 1999
Director: Chris Smith
Mark Borchardt, a resident of Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, set out to make a horror movie. A passionate amatuer filmmaker (emphasis on the word "amatuer" despite his camera know-how), Borchardt struggles to bring his vision to live. Still, American Movie, a documentary about his efforts to get his film off the ground, is an incredible, unflinching look at what drives people, with all their flaws, to create and want to make movies in the first place. Your mileage may vary on whether American Movie is ultimately inspiring or if Borchardt ended up making an effective horror movie after all, just as a documentary subject rather than as a filmmaker.
12. Fire of Love
Year: 2022
Director: Sara Dosa
This documentary about geology is actually one of the more moving love stories you'll ever see on film. Katia and Maurice Krafft were a pair of French Volcanologists who both loved volcanoes, and when they met and fell in love with each other, too, they spent the rest of their lives studying them together until their tragic deaths. Boasting beautiful archival footage from their various expeditions and studies, an aesthetic that borders on Wes Anderson's style at times, and poetic narration from Miranda July, Fire of Love will make your heart melt.
11. Apollo 11
Year: 2019
Director: Todd Douglas Miller
There is no narration, talking head interviews, or any other of the typical documentary tricks in this film about Apollo 11, released 50 years after the Moon landing. Instead, it's just immaculately edited footage of the mission—including 70mm footage that had never been made public prior to the documentary—and it is absolutely breathtaking to behold. Rather than attempt to offer facts or place the mission in a new context, Apollo 11 instead aims for visceral immediacy, documenting the awesome wonder of an event that we somehow now take for granted.
10. Black Box Diaries
Year: 2024
Director: Shiori Itō
When Japanese journalist Shiori Itō was assaulted by a powerful and influential bureau chief, she spent the next decade reporting on her own experience, documenting trauma and the many barricades to justice she faced as she became the face of the #MeToo Movement in Japan. Itō doesn't shy away from depicting the ups and downs of her life and her efforts to bring her assailant to justice, making Black Box Diaries an extremely raw and brave act of documentary filmmaking. It's a powerful and important movie on our list.
9. Harlan Country USA
Year: 1973
Director: Barbara Kopple
Barbara Kopple's coverage of the Brookside Strike, a 1973 strike by coal miners in the titular Kentucky country, is one of the greatest labor documentaries ever made and one of the most acclaimed documentaries of any sort, full stop. Kopple spent years with the striking miners, getting to know their families and their plight while also showing the escalating tactics and violence brewing at the picket lines as neither the miners nor the Duke Power Company wanted to stand down. It's an intimate, gripping, and revealing documentary that gives its striking subjects the dignity they're not often afforded.
8. Free Solo
Year: 2018
Directors: Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin
This vertigo-inducing documentary follows rock climber Alex Honnold as he attempts to become the first person to free solo climb—meaning climbing without any rope or protective harness—Yosemite National Park's towering El Capitan rock face. The footage of Honnold defying death as he scales the seemingly sheer rock face is unbelievable, but the rest of the documentary is quite revealing as a profile, as you get a good sense of how Honnold ticks. The thing that makes him such a talented and driven climber also makes him stand out from so-called "normal" people.
7. Paris Is Burning
Year: 1990
Director: Jennie Livingston
Perhaps the best documentary to shine a light on a subculture, Paris Is Burning explores New York City's ball culture—an African-American and Latino LGBT scene—in the '80s. An intimate, human look at the lives of gay and transgender individuals in the city, Paris Is Burning is a celebration of sexuality, drag shows, and self-expression while also being a stark look at the issues facing this minority, including racism, homophobia, class, and the AIDs epidemic.
6. The Thin Blue Line
Year: 1988
Director: Errol Morris
Filmmaker Errol Morris initially set out to make a documentary about a Texas psychiatrist known as "Dr. Death" because of how his testimony in court frequently got defendants sentenced to the death penalty. However, during the reporting, Morris came upon the case of Randall Adams, a drifter who was convicted of killing a Dallas police officer despite essentially non-existent evidence. Using artistic, stylized re-enactments and interviews that are more revealing than some of the participants intended, Morris systematically dismantles the flimsy case and suggests who the real murderer is. The Thin Blue Line, so named because it's an ironic subversion of the law enforcement idiom, revolutionized true crime, and it's still the standard many decades later.
5. Stop Making Sense
Year: 1984
Director: Jonathan Demme
You may quibble with Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme's Talking Heads concert film, being eligible for a list of the greatest documentaries. After all, it is a staged performance, right? But the wonder of Stop Making Sense is how stripped down it is. There are no behind-the-scenes interviews or crowd shots. Instead, Demme is documenting the concert, bringing David Byrne and the rest of the band to life in such a vivid way that it's hard not to call Stop Making Sense a documentary—just one that you'll find yourself dancing and singing along to.
4. No Other Land
Year: 2024
Directors: Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor
Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, along with two other activists from both sides of the conflict, worked together for this harrowing documentary about the Israeli army's occupation and forced displacement campaign in the West Bank, where Adra and his family have lived for decades. A stark look at the on-the-ground impact of the conflict as well as a story of a complicated partnership that becomes a friendship, No Other Land won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 97th Oscars.
3. 20 Days in Mariupol
Year: 2023
Director: Mstyslav Chernov
Perhaps the most upsetting documentary on this list to watch, 20 Days in Mariupol is a firsthand account of the first weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, made by journalists who were in the port city of Mariupol when the siege began. It is a challenging, devastating viewing experience, full of death and suffering. Yet, time and time again, the people in the documentary are hopeful that, if footage of these atrocities gets out, it will help bring an end to the conflict. 20 Days in Mariupol won an Academy Award, but it didn't make a tangible difference to the occupied city or its people, a grim and sad reality that, in some ways, only heightens the impact of viewing the film.
2. OJ: Made in America
Year: 2016
Director: Ezra Edelman
You might think this nearly eight-hour-long, multipart documentary about O.J. Simpson is more of a TV show than a movie, and you'd basically be right—except that the Academy Awards gave it the Best Documentary Feature Oscar before changing the rules so nothing like it would be eligible again. Hence, it's here on a technicality. Whatever it is, O.J.: Made in America is one of the most incredible documentaries ever made, using its sweeping scope to tell the story of the murder of the former football star's ex-wife and the subsequent, infamous trial while also placing it in context. Made in America is all about context, and by showcasing the state of race relations, history of police brutality, and Simpson's unique starpower, it makes for something more than just a riveting true crime documentary. This is a story about America.
1. The Act of Killing
Year: 2012
Director: Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn, and Anonymous
Filmmakers Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn, and an Indonesian co-director who was credited as Anonymous for their own safety, created one of the most singular documentaries ever made in The Act of Killing. In the mid-'60s, there was a wave of mass killings in Indonesia as the New Order regime leaned on gangsters and thugs to help eliminate any suspected Communists or anybody else in opposition to them. In modern Indonesia, the people who committed the murders have faced few (if any) repercussions. They're downright boastful, if anything, and The Act of Killing focuses on one executioner, Anwar Congo, and asks him to talk about the killings and even re-enact them in increasingly elaborate setpieces. What begins as pride slowly turns into a psychological journey, culminating in what might be the greatest ending of any film, documentary, or otherwise. The Act of Killing is at times a tough watch, but it is absolutely unique and essential viewing.
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