Every year is a great year for documentaries, because, frankly, so many get made. But it also means that many fall through the cracks, especially when the most visible are typically image-managed biographies of the already famous, one-note issue docs, or sensational true-crime stories. These 10 prove how versatile, artistic and resonant the nonfiction form can be, brilliantly letting us into everything from closed worlds to open minds, from forgotten history to today’s most urgent concerns. (And yes, there are the occasional celebrities, hot topics, and criminal doings.)
Runners-Up Worth Mentioning: “Flee” (from oppression to isolation and eventually peace); “The Rescue” (of the Thai boys’ soccer team by expert divers); “Final Account” (of the last surviving, and rationalizing, Nazi-era Germans); “Jacinta” (a vibrant, troubled young mother); “The Sparks Brothers” (a celebration of oddball music longevity); “Enemies of the State” (who are hard to discern in this jaw-dropping story); “My Name Is Pauli Murray” (an equal-rights hero); “All Light, Everywhere” (but constrained by our biases); “Tina” (Turner, saying goodbye her way); “Missing in Brooks County” (where U.S. policy condemns migrants to suffer).
10. “Ascension”
Without narration or talking heads, but with an aesthetically keen eye for place, detail and atmosphere, Jessica Kingdon charts China’s exploding capitalist might through observed vignettes in churning factories, training centers for an aspiring middle class and, lastly, elite playgrounds of the wealthy. A visually arresting journey up a consumer-economy ladder of increasingly distant rungs, Kingdon wittily, starkly lays bare the growing divide between toilers and enjoyers.
9. “President”
Zimbabwe, rid of its longtime dictator Robert Mugabe but still controlled by his ruling party, held elections in 2018 that were supposed to be the first fair, free and transparent vote in a generation. What Camilla Nielsson thrillingly captured with her vérité camera was something else, resulting in a film with a chilling message for fragile democracies (and ones that don’t realize they’re fragile) everywhere.
8. “Writing With Fire”
The story of India’s only female-run independent news organization is also the year’s best depiction of journalism as a democratic necessity. The brave Dalit women at the heart of this invigorating, inspiring film from Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh are leading the charge for truth, transparency and meaningful societal change in the most underserved parts of an increasingly right-wing and patriarchal nation, risking their lives in the process.
7. ‘Faya Dayi”
“Nonfiction art” best describes Jessica Beshir’s elliptical black-and-white meditation on the culture of khat in Ethiopia, where this chewable narcotic leaf’s harvesting, production and consumption have entire communities — but most worryingly, their struggling young — in its powerful economic and psychological grip.
6. “Acasa, My Home”
Nature and civilization are starkly juxtaposed in journalist-turned-filmmaker Radu Ciorniciuc’s empathetic epic — filmed over many years — about the Enaches, a boisterous, tight-knit Roma family in Bucharest forced to relocate from their shack in a protected wetland preserve to the city just over the wall. The result is one of the more heartbreakingly complex depictions of our modern world’s contradictions you’re likely to see.
5. “In the Same Breath”
Pandemic docs have proliferated, but Nanfu Wang’s dissection of China’s initial handling of the virus’ spread, and some eerie similarities to how the Trump administration first handled the messaging around COVID-19, made for one of the year’s more urgent political documentaries about how crises embolden the powerful to think about protecting themselves first, not the public.
4. “Summer of Soul”
Debut films don’t get much more dazzling than musician Questlove’s lovequest into the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, a knockout lineup of R&B acts who turned several days of music and community into a celebration of joy and a call for Black visibility. Anchored by incredible, long-unseen footage, and vivid interviews with attendees and participants, it’s among the greatest of concert films, partly because this stunning event’s delayed amplification makes it an inherently political work, too.
3. “State Funeral”
You always remember your first — in this case, the first movie I saw in a theater since the pandemic began: Sergei Loznitsa’s distillation of 200 hours of captivating Soviet footage from the aftermath of Stalin’s funeral in 1953 into one hypnotic epic about limbo. An exploited crisis, death made political, history as spectacle, the grief, the strangeness. When was this, again?
2. “The Velvet Underground”
A sensory masterpiece of clashing as creativity, Todd Haynes’ artful music biodoc puts us inside the transgressive epiphanies that gave us one of the greatest noisemaking outfits in rock history. Lou Reed, John Cale, Andy Warhol and others come alive as brawling poets and synchronous innovators, while Haynes frames their story with his usual command of sight, selection and sound.
1. “Procession”
Boundary-pushing documentarian Robert Greene collaborated with six men — each of whom suffered abuse as children at the hands of Roman Catholic priests — to produce a breathtakingly moving, one-of-a-kind work about healing through dramatic therapy, in which the men write, stage and film scenes to help them process their trauma. A beautiful, wrenching and ever-sensitive exploration of community, it’s also a landmark film about the suffering that writes so many lives, and how art can nourish such souls.
