100 Must-See Documentaries Streaming on Netflix This October
Netflix may not be holding onto a lot of their classic documentaries — Hoop Dreams is gone again! — but this fall they’re adding a handful of very good originals. This week sees the debut of Ava DuVernay’s powerful feature 13th, for instance (that’s an image from the film above, by the way, allowing us two Cory Booker header images in a row).
And last weekend had the premiere of the problematic but compelling Amanda Knox (see my new piece on the doc at Film School Rejects). Plus Kevin Macdonald’s Sky Ladder: The Art of Cai Guo-Qiang (see my ★★★★ review) drops on October 14th.
Additionally, I’ve been catching up on this year’s releases and finally discovered the wonderful My Beautiful Broken Brain. If you’re wondering where some other new Netflix originals are, well, I sadly was disappointed by the very inconsistently directed Audrie & Daisy. And Werner Herzog’s Into the Inferno doesn’t release until October 28th, so I figured that’s late enough to save it for later.
In anticipation of that, however, Netflix brought back some other Herzog titles, so we’ve added Grizzly Man, Lessons of Darkness, Little Dieter Needs to Fly and the collaboration Happy People: A Year in the Taiga. Rounding out the new additions is Holy Hell, which was on our list of the best docs of Sundance this year.
As for what that means for removals, it’s not too bad. Well, it is bad that in addition to Hoop Dreams some other great docs have expired from Netflix streaming, including Best of Enemies, Caucus, Evolution of a Criminal, Girl Model and Lady Valor. Also, Actress expires Friday so watch that one ASAP!
For the other three that needed to be removed, I decided to take off the two series on the Netflix 100, Cosmos and Making a Murderer, because I might do a separate list for them later. The other is The Hunting Ground, which combined with the Audrie & Daisy snub is admittedly bad for rape as a subject, but I haven’t seen it and our review is actually not positive. Once I catch up with it, if I think it should return it will.
Now a reminder of how the Netflix 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 features in the bunch (Super Size Me and Super High Me and GasLand and FrackNation, for two example sets) and some groupings where I truly think the higher ranking title is best watched before a certain title or titles below it.
- 13th (Ava DuVernay, 2016)
- Amanda Knox (Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn, 2016)
- Sky Ladder: The Art of Cai Guo-Qiang (Kevin Macdonald, 2016)
- My Beautiful Broken Brain (Sophie Robinson and Lotje Sodderland, 2014)
- Holy Hell (Will Allen, 2016)
- Lessons of Darkness (Werner Herzog, 1992)
- Little Dieter Needs to Fly (Werner Herzog, 1997)
- Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005)
- Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (Werner Herzog and Dmitry Vasyukov, 2010)
- The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988)
- Life Itself (Steve James, 2014)
- Brother’s Keeper (Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, 1992)
- Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (Nick Broomfield, 1992)
- Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (Nick Broomfield, 2003)
- The Act of Killing: Director’s Cut (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012)
- The Look of Silence (Joshua Opppenheimer, 2014)
- Super Size Me (Morgan Spurlock, 2004)
- Super High Me (Michael Blieden, 2007)
- Expedition to the End of the World (Daniel Dencik, 2013)
- Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2010)
- Particle Fever (Mark Levinson, 2013)
- Moana With Sound (Robert J. Flaherty, Frances Hubbard Flaherty and Monica Flaherty, 1926/1980)
- Approaching the Elephant (Amanda Wilder, 2014)
- Actress (Robert Greene, 2014)
- Looking for Richard (Al Pacino, 1996)
- Finders Keepers (Bryan Carberry and J. Clay Tweel, 2015)
- In the Basement (Ulrich Seidl, 2014)
- The Nightmare (Rodney Ascher, 2015)
- Casting By (Tom Donahue, 2012)
- Lost in La Mancha (Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, 2002)
- Sembene! (Samba Gadjigo and Jason Silverman, 2015)
- Virunga (Orlando von Einsiedel, 2014)
- The Imposter (Bart Layton, 2012)
- Touching the Void (Kevin MacDonald, 2003)
- In the Shadow of the Moon (David Sington, 2007)
- The Last Man on the Moon (Mark Craig, 2014)
- Stray Dog (Debra Granik, 2014)
- Last Days in Vietnam (Rory Kennedy, 2014)
- 1971 (Johanna Hamilton, 2014)
- The Trials of Muhammad Ali (Bill Siegel, 2013)
- The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975 (Goran Olsson, 2011)
- Concerning Violence (Goran Olsson, 2014)
- How to Change the World (Jerry Rothwell, 2015)
- How to Survive a Plague (David France, 2012)
- We Were Here (David Weissman and Bill Weber, 2011)
- Sunshine Superman (Marah Strauch, 2014)
- Undefeated (Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin, 2011)
- Medora (Andrew Cohn and Davy Rothbart, 2013)
- Rich Hill (Andrew Droz Palermo and Tracy Droz Tragos, 2014)
- White Earth (Christian Jensen, 2014)
- The Overnighters (Jesse Moss, 2014)
- Detropia (Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, 2012)
- Western (Bill and Turner Ross, 2015)
- Street Fight< (Marshall Curry, 2005)
- Democrats (Camilla Nielsson, 2014)
- The Square (Jehane Noujaim, 2013)
- Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom (Evgeny Afineevsky, 2015)
- The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (Ken Burns, 2014)
- Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Alex Gibney, 2005)
- Kids for Cash (Robert May, 2013)
- The Farm: Angola USA (Liz Garbus, 1998)
- Into the Abyss (Werner Herzog, 2011)
- (T)error (Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe, 2015)
- Cartel Land (Matthew Heineman, 2015)
- Dior and I (Frederic Tcheng, 2014)
- Iris (Albert Maysles, 2014)
- Finding Vivian Maier (John Maloof and Charlie Siskel, 2013)
- An Inconvenient Truth (Davis Guggenheim, 2006)
- Gasland (Josh Fox, 2010)
- FrackNation (Phelim McAleer, Ann McElhinney and Magdalena Segieda, 2013)
- Dirty Wars (Rick Rowley, 2013)
- Point and Shoot (Marshall Curry, 2014)
- Of Men and War (Laurent Becue-Renard, 2014)
- Restrepo (Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, 2010)
- Hell and Back Again (Danfung Dennis, 2011)
- Our Last Tango (German Kral, 2015)
- Mala Mala (Dan Sickles and Antonio Santini, 2014)
- My Prairie Home (Chelsea McMullan, 2013)
- What Happened, Miss Simone? (Liz Garbus, 2015)
- Seymour: An Introduction (Ethan Hawke, 2014)
- Young @ Heart (Stephen Walker and Sally George, 2007)
- Kurt & Courtney (Nick Broomfield, 1998)
- Orion: The Man Who Would Be King (Jeanie Finlay, 2015)
- Kumare (Vikram Gandhi, 2011)
- Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru (Joe Berlinger, 2016)
- The Endless Summer (Bruce Brown, 1966)
- Pumping Iron (George Butler and Robert Fiore, 1977)
- Bigger, Stronger, Faster (Chris Bell, 2008)
- Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy, 2010)
- Print the Legend (Luis Lopez and J. Clay Tweel, 2014)
- Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (Alison Klayman, 2012)
- Jiro Dreams of Sushi (David Gelb, 2011)
- More Than Honey (Markus Imhoof, 2012)
- Blackfish (Gabriela Cowperthwaite, 2013)
- The Whale (Suzanne Chisholm and Michael Parfit, 2011)
- The Queen of Versailles (Lauren Greenfield, 2012)
- Tabloid (Errol Morris, 2010)
- Vernon, Florida (Errol Morris, 1981)
- Batkid Begins: The Wish Heard Around the World (Dana Nachman, 2015)
- Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (Kurt Kuenne, 2008)