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30 Best Travel Documentaries & Series To Watch

• by Jonny Duncan
• October 20, 2023 December 7, 2023

We all need a bit of travel inspiration and these are some of the best travel documentaries that will give you some wanderlust, and understanding, of the regions of the world involved.

These are my favourite travel documentaries and series that have inspired my travels.

Disclaimer: I own none of the images in this post, they are used under fair-usage terms to discuss the travel documentaries.

Himalaya With Michael Palin (2004)

Michael Palin is my all-time favourite travel presenter, writer, and hell, just an awesome person in general and his travel documentaries are some of the best you can watch.

His sense of humour, interest in the places he visits, how he interacts with the local people, and the way he presents himself is what makes this travel journey one of the best.

Add to that epic Himalayan scenery and adventure and you have the perfect combination for the best travel documentary.

You can watch it here as well as some of his other travel documentaries.

The Endless Summer (1966)

Surfs up! And also lots of fun, fun, fun, in the sun.

Set in the mid-sixties it follows two surfers from California as they travel around the world, including countries like South Africa, Australia, and Ghana, in search of the ‘perfect wave’. 

It’s very laid back to watch and entertaining and a good insight into surfer travels in the sixties.

I would love to hit up some of the waves they found! If you want one of the best travel documentaries based around surfing and beaches then watch this.

Watch it online here .

Encounters at the End of the World (2009)

Want some cold weather viewing, beautiful scenery in the vast expanse of Antarctica, and some fun with scientists? This is it.

Filmmaker Werner Herzog tackles this perfectly, exploring the desolate and vast wilderness of Antarctica around the US base of McMurdo Station, and the people who live and work there.

This will make you want to go to a remote and cold place.

Watch it here .

Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown (2013 – 2018)

Anthony Bourdain was one of my travel heroes. He died in 2018. His style of reporting and meeting the people he visits around the world and coming together around a common theme worldwide, food, brought a personal approach to the travel genre.

Parts Unknown is one of the best travel documentaries to watch for food. 

The other series with Anthony Bourdain exploring world cuisine, such as No Reservations is also worth watching.

See it on Netflix here .

Under An Arctic Sky (2017)

This is a short travel documentary coming in at only 40 minutes, but worth the watch for sure.

I had been recommended this by a fellow travel blogger and was glad about it.

It’s beautifully shot in Iceland in winter, following a group of surfers looking for (as usual) the perfect waves. 

But a storm comes through during this time and they have to outrun it.

The first time surfers have been filmed under the Northern Lights.

This has made me want to return to Iceland again to explore more of the country in the Arctic darkness.

See what it’s like surfing under the Northern Lights !

Sahara With Michael Palin (2002)

Yes, another Michael Palin travel documentary. I can’t help it his journeys are just so good.

This time he’s out exploring the Sahara Desert, getting into remote adventures with tribal nomads, and so much more.

This will inspire you for a desert adventure.

Watch the epic Sahara journey here .

180° South (2010)

180° South follows Jeff Johnson, an adventurer who travels across South America to Patagonia to visit the places that Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins had visited in 1968, two people who had inspired him.

Easily one of the best travel documentaries about South America to see.

Chasing Coral (2017)

Chasing Coral is a documentary for anyone interested in the ocean and, given the title, especially coral reefs.

It follows scientists and divers who explore the coral areas to see why they are disappearing and to explain it all to you. A good conservationist documentary as well as one for travel to these beautiful parts of the world.

Billy Connolly’s World Tour of Australia (1996)

Billy Connolly is one of the great all-time stand-up comedians.

He also travels a lot and his ‘world tour’ series has taken him to lots of different countries around the world, with Australia being the best.

It’s a combination of him exploring Australia and what is there, with a great sense of humour for everything, as well as some short clips of his stand-up performances in each area he visits with views and opinions about his experience in Australia.

A must-see travel documentary for anyone interested in Australia with a very amusing outlook on travel there.

It ain’t cheap but if you’re a Billy Connolly fan, or want to give a gift to someone who is, this is the Billy Connolly box set of all his world tours.

Dark Tourist (2018)

For some people (myself included) there’s a strange and weird fascination with some of the ‘darker’ tourist spots to visit and dark tourism has become more popular.

From nuclear disaster zone tours to death-worshipping cults, this travel documentary covers them all.

It can be disturbing given the tragedy behind some of the events, but it is history, and it is part of humanity. 

To escape the ‘normal’ tourist spots this will give you an idea of an alternative travel experience.

Right or wrong it is fascinating.

See it on Netflix .

Given (2016)

This is such a unique and refreshing take on a travel documentary as it’s narrated by a six-year-old boy.

It follows a family from Kauai (part of Hawaii) on a journey through 15 countries around the world.

This a really good insight into family travel and the life-teaching experiences travel can have on young children.

Watch their website for the documentary.

Stephen Fry In America (2009)

Stephen Fry is one of my favourite comedians and in this travel series, he travels across the U.S. in search of what makes America.

Just like Billy Connolly and Michael Palin, there is lots of humour involved.

It gives a great insight into American culture.

This is one of the best travel documentaries to watch if planning a trip to the United States. 

Watch here .

The Eagle Huntress (2016)

One of those interested in Central Asia travel, this documentary is about a 13-year-old Kazakh girl called Aisholopan who wants to be an eagle hunter, the first female in her family for twelve generations to do it.

Beautiful scenery and an inspiring story make this a spellbinding travel documentary to watch.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2010)

Have an interest in sushi and Japanese food? Then this is the ultimate travel documentary for you.

It follows an 85-year-old sushi master called Jiro Ono and how he makes some of the best sushi in the world and tries to teach his son the way and the family business.

It’s one of the best documentaries about Japan to watch.

Baraka (1992)

Out of all the travel documentaries, this is one of the older ones but it has aged well. It’s also one of the most beautiful travel documentaries to watch.

The tagline is “A world beyond worlds”, and after watching it you will see why.

There is no narrative, just epic films from all over the world showing natural environments, cities and everything else.

Personally, I remember watching this in the 90s and being inspired to see the places it showed.

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (2010)

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga is another Werner Herzog travel documentary that is absolutely brilliant if you have an interest in cold places and Siberia in particular.

It follows the people in a remote village in the Siberian Taiga region and shows the repeated way of life in how they deal with living in a harsh cold environment. It includes footage of some of the native Ket people as well.

Tawai: A Voice From The Forest (2017)

Out of all the travel documentaries, this is one of the best ones taking a look at indigenous people around the world.

Adventurer Bruce Parry explores the forests of the Amazon and Borneo, as well as the Isle of Skye in Scotland where he looks at the ways the native people get on with the nature around them.

Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin (2019)

Nomad is yet again another one with Werner Herzog and this time it’s a much more personal one.

His good friend Bruce Chatwin, who was a well-known travel writer, died of AIDS in 1989 he left Werner his rucksack as a parting gift. Thirty Years after his death Werner heads out to explore places inspired by his friend’s travel life.

Maidentrip (2013)

Maidentrip will make you want to get a yacht and go on an adventure around the world! It’s about a 14-year-old sailor who leaves home for a 2-year journey around the world alone to become the youngest person to ever achieve such a task.

This is one of the best travel documentaries not just about yachting and boats but also about the determination of the human spirit to achieve something great.

Travel Man (2015 Onwards)

Travel Man is a great travel documentary series where each episode host Richard Ayoade visits a new city with a different celebrity to explore what the city has to offer in the way of tourist attractions and other things.

Lots of fun to watch and one of the best recent travel documentaries to see.

Fishpeople (2017)

Fishpeople is a group of stories about various individuals who have dedicated their lives to the sea. It includes a long-distance swimmer, surfers, and many more.

This is one to watch if you have an interest in anything related to life with the ocean.

Grand Tours of the Scottish Islands (2013 – 2016)

If you love Scotland or really want to go there then this is the ultimate Scottish travel series for you. The presenter is Paul Murton and he explores all around the Scottish Isles.

He also has other shows such as the Grand Tour of Scotland and Grand Tour of Scotlands Lochs. He really gets into the culture of Scotland.

Backpackingman note: I am of Scottish ancestry with my great-grandfather being a proper Scotsman from Aberdeen and I have visited Scotland a few times now and can highly recommend this series.

Rick Steves’ Europe (2000 – Onwards)

Rick Steves’ Europe is one of the longest-running travel documentary series out there, if not the longest.

Given the title of the show, it follows Rick as he travels around Europe showing everything the place has to offer. The series from 2018 focuses on Scotland so goes nicely with the Grand Tours of the Scottish Islands mentioned above.

Desert Runners (2013)

Desert Runners is the ultimate documentary about people who run in some of the harshest environments and in this case the desert.

But the twist to this story is that it explores a group of people who join the hardest ultra-marathon race series on the planet and none of them are professional runners.

Watch this one if you have an interest in deserts and running.

Down To Earth (2020)

Down To Earth is a travel documentary series on Netflix that follows actor Zac Efron to different parts of the world where he looks at the sustainability efforts of each destination.

For example, in Iceland, he learns about the efforts to use the natural energy of Earth for power.

Magical Andes (2020 – Onwards)

Magical Andes a travel documentary series is set in South America and takes a look at the Andes Mountain range, from the mountains themselves to the deserts, forests, and everything else that surrounds them

Highly recommended if you’ve ever wanted to visit South America and in particular the Andes region.

Expedition Happiness (2017)

Expedition Happiness follows a couple who get an old school bus and then drive throughout North America with their dog.

The couple is so lovely it’s worth watching just to see them and their life.

Free Solo (2018)

Free Solo follows Alex Honnold, a professional rock climber, as he attempts to be the first person to free solo climb El Capitan’s rock face.

It’s set in Yosemite National Park and is thrilling to watch not just for the action but also for the scenery. Watch this documentary if you are interested in mountain travel and rock climbing as a sport.

The Dawn Wall (2017)

Following on from Free Solo, The Dawn Wall is also set in Yosemite National Park, and this time follows Tommy Caldwell, a free climber, who tried to climb the Dawn Wall of El Capitan.

As with Free Solo, watch this one for mountains.

Mountain (2017)

The Mountain is one of the best travel documentaries about mountains and is breathtaking to watch.

It explores mountains around the world and tells at the same time the history between humans and mountains.

Notable Mention: BBC Planet Earth 1+2 (2006 + 2016)

The BBC Planet Earth series is absolutely beautifully filmed and epic to watch.

In each episode, they explore different parts of the planet, such as deserts, mountains, oceans, forests, etc.

There are also other travel documentaries by the BBC, like The Blue Planet, Frozen Planet, and a lot more. Each one shows a different side of our planet.

These will get you wanting to get out and see the world!

The Best Travel Documentaries

And that’s the list of the best travel documentaries that will hopefully give you some inspiration for your own travels.

Interested in more travel-related movies? Check out 10 movies to watch before travelling to Japan .

You can find some of the older travel documentaries on places like YouTube. In fact, YouTube is a great place to find new and old travel documentaries in general.

And for some travel reading 20 books to read set in the Arctic and Antarctic .

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Hi Jonny, this is Christian from Germany I pic you up from Zagreb 2008 and we travel to Germany by car. Later I visit you in Amsterdam. My speciality is Africa. Like to contact you again cause I cannot find you anymore on Couchsurfing. May I ask for your PM adress? see you Christian

Dark Tourist is the best part of this post ..

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The 25 Best Documentaries of 2023 (So Far)

From hard-hitting historic stories to bombshell moments in pop culture.

Sometimes, when the mind-numbing cattiness of The Real Housewives gets old, it's nice to turn on something that gets the ole noggin' spinning—something you'll enjoy watching that teaches you something new. Enter: The year's best documentaries. As with the best documentaries of 2022, these are the series and films that will garner your full attention with real-life stories from the past and present day. 2023's slate of awe-inspiring titles has a little something for everyone, from insightful sports stories to pop culture bombshells. Get ready to add these new documentaries to your watchlist.

'Sometimes When We Touch'

Premieres : Out now on Paramount+

This music doc chronicles the mostly-untold story of soft rock, the genre whose artists dominated pop music worldwide in the 1970s—think The Carpenters, Barry Manilow, "The Pina Colada Song"—only to crash and burn in the 1980s. The pioneers of the rock/pop sound chronicle the rise and fall, as well as one of the most unlikely comebacks in music history.

'Break Point' 

Premieres: Out now on Netflix 

Sports lovers and tennis fans especially are sure to love Netflix's new docuseries, Break Point . This series follows up-and-coming tennis stars over a year as they train and compete their way across the globe in the hopes of becoming the sport's number one player.  

'Super League: The War for Football'

Premieres: Out now on Apple TV+

It turns out there's a lot of tension behind the scenes of the world's most popular sport. Over four episodes, this series follows what happens when plans for a breakaway soccer league emerge. Leaders of the sport are forced to decide whether that want to defend or upend soccer's long-held traditions. 

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'The 1619 Project' 

Premieres: Out now on Hulu

Brought to you by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole-Hannah Jones and the New York Times Magazine, this docuseries isn't your average history lesson. This six-part series places the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the forefront of our nation's history.  

'Pamela: A Love Story' 

Premieres: Out now on Netflix

We all become extra obsessed with the story of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee thanks to Hulu's Pam & Tommy, but Anderson herself is taking back her own narrative in this documentary. In her own words and personal videos, Anderson tells the story of her rise to fame from small town girl to international sex symbol. 

'The Reluctant Traveler' 

When you can't afford to trot across the globe, the next best thing is to watch someone else do it on TV. This travel series sees Schitt's Creek star Eugene Levy explore some incredible places including Japan, Portugal, Maldives, Finland, and more. Knowing Levy, the series' eight episodes are sure to be filled with dry jokes and funny situations. 

'Emergency NYC'

Premieres : Out now on Netflix

First responders have one of the most demanding jobs in the world, and many who don't work in the industry only have a faint idea of everything they face. This docuseries following several frontline medical professionals in NYC as they balance their intense work with their personal lives.

'Little Richard: I Am Everything'

Premieres : Out now on VOD

In this electric documentary, Lisa Cortés lays out the history of the early rock 'n' roll star's career and inescapable influence, peppering footage of his performances and speeches with appearances from artists including Mick Jagger and Billy Porter.

'Longest Third Date'

Imagine: you meet a cool guy, decide to go one a spontaneous trip with him... and a pandemic hits while you're in another country. This doc follows Khani Le and Matt Robertson as they find their way to love while stranded in Costa Rica in the early days of COVID.

'Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie'

Premieres : Out now on Apple TV+

This captivating documentary about the Back to the Future star tells the story of his career and his experiences learning to live with Parkinson's disease, with the actor opening up about keeping his health condition secret for years.

'Bama Rush'

Premieres : Out now on Max

In August 2021, #BamaRush took over Tik Tok, as millions of grown adults became deeply invested in whether potential new members were admitted into sororities at the University of Alabama . Filmed ahead of 2022's rush, this doc follows several PNMs in the year leading up to the process, in an exploration of Southern fraternity culture, and how far people will go for acceptance.

'The Deepest Breath'

In this documentary about the dangerous world of free diving, director Lauren McGann follows the early lives and careers of Italian free diver Alessia Zecchini, who's determined to break the world record, and Irish safety diver Stephen Keenan, who accompanies Zecchini partway down to help in case something goes wrong.

'The League'

This nuanced sports documentary from acclaimed filmmaker Sam Pollard tells the history of the Negro League, and the triumphs and challenges that the Black baseball players faced throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

'Kokomo City'

D. Smith's award-winning documentary profiles four Black trans sex workers in Atlanta and NYC—Daniella Carter, Koko Da Doll, Liyah Mitchell, and Dominique Silver—as they tell the stories of their lives and their work in all their unfiltered, humorous, and stunning glory.

'Stephen Curry: Underrated'

Even if you're not a fan of basketball, you'll be able to appreciate Stephen Curry's coming-of-age story. From his time as a college player to a four-time NBA champion, this film documents Curry's rise to stardom with intimate cinéma vérité, archival footage, and on camera interviews. 

'King Coal'

Premieres : Out now in theaters

This acclaimed, poetic documentary follows the families who live and grow up in Central Appalachia's coal mining towns, as director Elaine McMillion Sheldon examines the coal industry’s history and influence on the region she calls home.

This three-hour doc from French director Claire Simon offers an emotional study of the diverse patients at the gynecological unit of a Paris hospital. As the film documents the various procedures in the ward—ranging from pregnancy consultations and deliveries to fertility and cancer treatments to gender-affirming care—it provides a compassionate look at the frontlines of gender-related healthcare.

'The Heart of Invictus'

The long-awaited docuseries about Prince Harry 's Invictus Games has finally landed on streaming, as it chronicles the players and production behind the annual sporting event for wounded, injured, and sick veterans and members of the armed services internationally.

'Invisible Beauty'

Fashion trailblazer Bethann Hardison co-directs this highly-anticipated doc about her own legacy of championing racial diversity in the modeling industry, with commentary from the countless models and stars she has inspired, including Naomi Campbell, Tyson Beckford, Tracee Ellis Ross, and Zendaya.

'The Super Models'

This four-part docuseries brings together four of the world's most iconic supermodels—Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, and Christy Turlington—to reminisce on the early days of their career and the behind-the-scenes events that the public did not see.

'Beyond Utopia'

This engrossing documentary on North Korean defectors follows the harrowing journey of the Roh family as they journey from their home country to Thailand, via footage captured by the family as well as operatives on the underground network which helped them escape.

Oscar nominee Sylvester Stallone will be the subject of a retrospective documentary covering his decades-long career, showing the parallel between his personal underdog story and the iconic characters he's brought to life,  Rocky to  Rambo .

'Stamped from the Beginning'

Premieres : November 20 on Netflix

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s 2016 New York Times- bestselling book is getting a feature documentary adaptation. Propelled by vivid animation and commentary from leading female academics and activists including Dr. Angela Davis and Dr. Jennifer L. Morgan, the doc will guide viewers through a comprehensive account of how racist tropes were developed and enshrined in American culture.

'20 Days in Mariupol'

Premieres : November 21 on PBS

After a year's worth of hype from its decorated film-festival run, Mstyslav Chernov's Pulitzer Prize-winning documentary will finally be aired for the general public, showing the struggles of an AP team of Ukrainian journalists as they report on the atrocities of the Russian invasion while trapped in the city of Mariupol.

'American Symphony'

Premieres : November 24 on Netflix

In 2021, on the same week that Jon Batiste received 11 Grammy nominations for his eventual Album of the Year winner "We Are," his longtime partner Suleika Jaouad discovered her rare form of leukemia had returned after 10 years in remission. This intimate musical by Matthew Heineman follows the couple over the following year of their lives, as they each balance their creative pursuits with Jaouad's treatment.

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72 Dangerous Places to Live, Dark Tourist, and more: Sate your wanderlust with the best travel shows and documentaries on Netflix

You'll love these amazing travel documentaries.

Traveling is something that many people wish they could do more of. Whether you lack the time, money, or know-how to travel the world, though, it can be comforting to watch others do it from the comfort of your couch. A great travel show or documentary can be a wonderful escape and a reminder that the world is much bigger than the tiny slice of it you live in every day. What’s even better is that many great travel documentaries on Netflix, if you’re willing to go looking for them.

These documentaries will deliver stunning panoramic shots of the U.S. National Parks , as well as plenty of international wonders, and a little bit of good food as well. If you like all kinds of docs, travel or not, we’ve got you covered with Netflix documentaries (or maybe you’re just really into crime docs and action flicks). We also have an overall guide on the best Netflix movies and the best Netflix shows .

72 Dangerous Places to Live (2016)

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Down to Earth with Zac Efron (2020)

The chef show (2019), street food collection (2020), tales by light (2015), dark tourist (2018), midnight asia: eat dance dream (2022), jack whitehall: travels with my father (2017), lorena, light-footed woman (2019), the world's most amazing vacation rentals (2021), our planet (2019), salt fat acid heat (2018), editors' recommendations.

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The best sci-fi shows are able to capture the imagination of audiences with the perfect amount of realism, while also dissociating from reality enough to entertain and thrill. There are plenty of sci-fi movies on Netflix that are well worth checking out, but if you’re in the mood for something that will take a little bit longer to consume, you may be looking for a series. To find the best show for you, we've done the hard work of looking through all of Netflix's many options to find the best options. Below are the greatest sci-fi TV shows on Netflix. Once you’re done watching any of these sci-fi TV shows, you may want to check out the best sci-fi movies of all time.

Dark (2017)

Have you ever found yourself looking through all the movies on Netflix, only to find that actually choosing one to watch is very taxing? That's not even mentioning all the Netflix shows to dig through. If you know you're looking for a particular kind of movie, that can help, but even then, there can be too many movies to choose from. Luckily, we've been watching tons of great sci-fi movies and have already determined which ones rise to the top of the pile on Netflix. So if you're looking for the best sci-fi movies on Netflix this year, you've come to the right place. If you're looking for Netflix movies that will keep you occupied for a whole weekend or an evening, you can also check out our list of the best sci-fi series on Netflix right now.

What is the definition of an action movie? Can there even really be a complete explanation of the genre? Some feature the kinds of stunts that no mere mortal would ever dare to attempt, while others attempt to be more grounded. Still, others have outlandish premises that take us to new, far-off worlds. It's a genre that contains multitudes, but what makes an action movie great is its ability to thrill and captivate its audience. Over the course of its history as a streaming service, Netflix has been home to a number of great action titles. Some are funny, and others are deadly serious. The only thing we know for sure, though, is that the best action movies on Netflix are sure to please. We've also rounded up some of the best action movies on Amazon Prime worth watching if you've seen all these, as well as a few great action movies available on Hulu. Looking for even more films to stream online? We've found the all-around best Netflix movies, Amazon Prime movies, Disney Plus movies, and movies on Hulu to watch this month.

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15 Travel Documentaries to Fuel your Wanderlust

Last updated on April 6th, 2023 at 09:35 pm

If there are travel documentaries being broadcast on British TV, we can guarantee we’ll be ready with remote control in hand. When we’re back home in London , we spend hours on the sofa, fuelling our wanderlust by watching others travelling the world.

For us, watching travel documentaries helps fill those gaps between trips. For an hour or so we’re transported somewhere far away from the normality of home. We reminisce of faraway places we’ve been to if filming locations are in countries we’ve already visited. Or we get excited and inspired if filmed in countries we are yet to discover. Both are just as enjoyable.

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Along with cookery shows and reality TV, there are so many travel documentaries to choose from. Via terrestrial TV, Sky, Netflix, Amazon or other online sites, they’ll be a documentary to satisfy anyone’s wanderlust.

We’ve picked 15 of our favourite travel documentaries from the more thoughtful travel subjects to less serious and humorous ways of seeing the world. Viewing access to these shows changes regularly so we’d suggest entering the title into Google to find which viewing platforms are currently available at the time of reading this post.

Regular guys Scott Wilson and Justin Lukach are bored. So what do they do? Take a road trip, of course. Departures follows them and their cameraman, Andre Dupuis, as they journey to countries all over the world. We love the non-premium feel of this show. It’s just three nice Canadian guys filming themselves travelling the world. They make an effort to visit hard to get to places and interact with locals wherever they go. This brings experiences that not all travellers get to do. Departures make the top of our travel documentaries list. 

Walking the Nile & Walking the Himalayas

Levison James Wood is a British Army officer and explorer. He’s best known for his extended walking expeditions in Africa and Asia. Over the course of nine months from 2013-2014, he undertook the first ever expedition to walk the entire length of the river Nile .

In 2015 he walked the length of the Himalayas. Both adventures were commissioned into four-part travel documentaries for Channel 4 in the UK. His journeys bring amazing landscapes, local interaction, massive highs and some disastrous lows.

Tropic of Capricorn and Tropic of Cancer with Simon Reeve

Simon Reeve makes two “round the world” trips following the tropic of Capricorn in the Southern hemisphere and the tropic of Cancer in the Northern hemisphere . These two travel documentaries include visits to one or more countries, in Asia, Latin America, Africa, the Caribbean, Arabia and Hawaii. Simon explores daily life for locals, tourists and wildlife, as well as the history, culture and politics which all prove quite varied.

Ben Fogle: New Lives in the Wild

New Lives in the Wild is a television series on UK’s Channel 5 hosted by adventurer Ben Fogle . The series is about meeting people who live in some of the most remote locations on earth. More often than not, these are western families or individuals who have had enough of the big city rat race. They’ve escaped to remote parts of the world to set up new lives in the wild.

Examples are the Alaskan wilderness, a Polynesian Island and the Arizonian desert. These are courageous and inspirational people who Ben stays with for a few days to learn how they live so remotely.

World’s Most Dangerous Roads

World’s Most Dangerous Roads is a British BBC TV series first aired in 2011. Two celebrities per episode are filmed as they journey by a 4×4 vehicle along roads considered among the world’s most dangerous. Episodes include the Death Road in Bolivia and the Ho Chi Minh trail in Vietnam . Many of the chosen celebrities are comedians so some humour is added to what otherwise is a fascinating and educational watch.

Long Way Round

In 2004, Ewan McGregor , Charley Boorman and cameraman Claudio von Planta, travelled from London to New York City on a motorbike. In the process, they created some awesome travel documentaries. The journey visited thirteen countries, starting in the UK, then passing through France, Belgium, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Canada, and the USA, ending in New York City for a cumulative distance of 18,887 miles (30,396 km).

They take the time to visit a variety of sights and landmarks while travelling, including the Church of Bones in the Czech Republic, the Mask of Sorrow monument in Magadan, Russia, and Mount Rushmore in the USA. They, of course, encounter many hurdles along the way. It wouldn’t be a great adventure without them.

Top Gear: Road Trip Specials

This one’s a bit of a wild card as Top Gear does not usually fall in the travel documentaries category. However, we love the Top Gear road trip specials. Why? Because they take place in some incredible world locations. Typical Top Gear antics include driving around Africa trying to find the source of the Nile, going off road from Bolivia to Chile and getting across the length of Vietnam on two wheels with a budget of just $1000. We know a lot of what happens is scripted but we still can’t help but enjoy these adventurous episodes.

An Idiot Abroad

An Idiot Abroad is a British travel documentary / road trip comedy television series broadcast on Sky 1. It’s  created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant and starring Karl Pilkington . The ongoing theme is that Pilkington has no interest in global travel, so Merchant and Gervais make him travel to the Seven Wonders of the World while they stay in the UK and monitor his progress.

Most of each episode focuses on Pilkington’s humorous reactions to cultural differences and idiosyncrasies in the countries he visits. He also gets set hilarious tasks, often not related to why he believed he was there. The silliest of our travel documentaries but well worth a watch. 

Asian Provocateur

Comedian Romesh Ranganathan is sent by his mother on a ramshackle odyssey around his parents’ homeland of Sri Lanka in an attempt to connect him with his roots. Romesh is the kind of guy who likes his home comforts and finds friendliness uncomfortable so Sri Lanka is not his ideal place to visit. As he quotes, ‘I was a bumbling Englishman in a Sri Lankan disguise’, so you can imagine the funny situations he gets himself into.

Our Guy in India

Motorbike racer  Guy Martin buys a Royal Enfield motorbike at a Delhi market, gets a traditional Hindu blessing and sets off on a 1000-mile motorbike trip.  Guy explores a rarely-seen side of modern India as he heads to one of the world’s maddest bike races. He travels through various parts of the country coming across all kinds of interesting people and sights on the way. Does he win the race at the end? You’ll have to watch to find out.

The Mekong River with Sue Perkins

TV presenter Sue Perkins embarks on a life-changing, 3,000-mile journey up the Mekong , South East Asia’s greatest river, exploring lives and landscapes on the point of dramatic change. It’s a really interesting watch, learning how 1000s of people live on and around one of the world’s great rivers. There’s plenty of smiles and tears as Sue listens to the locals stories and changing way of lives.    

The Secret Caribbean with Trevor McDonald

The newsreader and journalist, Sir Trevor McDonald embarks upon a stunning and epic journey across the Caribbean. From the Bahamas in the North to his birthplace Trinidad in the south, uncovering the sun-kissed islands along the way.

In this three part series, Sir Trevor visits The Bahamas, Cuba, Jamaica, British Virgin Islands, Montserrat, Barbados, Grenada and Trinidad. It’s an unforgettable expedition as he experiences the huge contrasts in cultures and lifestyles these islands have to offer.

Travel Man 48 hours

If you’re looking for more laughs with your travel documentaries then Travel Man is the British documentary series for you. It features presenter Richard Ayoade , travelling to a different location each episode with a celebrity guest. Ayoade takes a ruthless approach to getting the maximum from each city break. Cramming as much as he possibly can in 48 fast and funny hours. His unique presenting style has us laughing through every episode.

Charley Boorman by Any Means

By Any Means , also known as Ireland to Sydney by Any Means , is a television series following Long Way Round star Charley Boorman . Travelling from Wicklow , Ireland, to Sydney , New South Wales, Australia, it features him completing the journey using 112 modes of transport and only travelling by plane when absolutely necessary. A real epic adventure!

Joanna Lumley’s Trans-Siberian Adventure

Joanna Lumley embarks on the world’s greatest train journey for this three-part documentary series. Travelling from East to West, she departs from Hong Kong across 5,777 miles of both Asia and Europe. Joanna travels through seven time zones, taking in an immense panorama of vistas and cultures, people and places, before her final arrival in Moscow.

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• 15 Travel Documentaries That Tell Inspiring & Compelling Tales Of Wanderers

“The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life.” – Agnes Repplier

How true. For a die-hard traveler, every bend in the road is a new opportunity vying to be explored. The visceral feeling to flee to a new spot and finding the divine sense of joy in ticking a new destination on the map on your bedroom wall, can only be felt by the hopeless traveler.

Unadulterated and unhampered, travel documentaries showcase the chronicles of travelers and focus on their share of perilous and euphoric moments. Whether it is a planned excursion to a beach or an instinctive venture to a remote location, if you are seeking inspiration for your next travel, travel films can act as the fodder for your famished nomadic soul.

Here I bring you a list of best travel documentaries that will push you out of your boring couch (read; routine) and compel you to move out and travel the world.

Top 15 Travel Documentaries From Around The World

Here is a list of the best  travel documentaries from around the world , read on what these contain and add these to your list of must watch films & documentaries.

• Around The World In 80 Days (1989)-  Excitement Of Venturing
• Baraka (1992)-  A Kaleidoscopic Retreat
• Sahara With Michael Palin (2002)-  Explore The Hidden Gems
• A Map For Saturday (2007)-  A Solo Traveler’s Love
• Antarctica-  A Year On Ice (2013)
• K2- Siren Of The Himalayas (2012)
• Sacred Planet (2004)-  Know The Mesmerizing Places
• 180 Degree South (2010)-  An Epic Tour
• Encounters At The End Of The World (2007)-  All About Fascination
• The Maidentrip (2013)-  A Great Watch
• Hit The Road-  India (2013)
• The Edge Of Never (2013)-  About A Group Of Skiers
• Austin To Boston (2014)-  A Musical Documentary
• Life In A Day (2011)-  An Insight To Amazing Things
• Frozen Planet (2011)-  Fall For The Ice

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1. Around the World in 80 Days (1989)- Excitement Of Venturing

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Runtime: 7 episodes of 52 minutes each IMDb Rating: 8.8 Genre: Globetrotting Filming Locations: 17 countries across North America, Europe, Africa and Asia

Synopsis: Around the World in 80 Days is a 7 part BBC travel series written and presented by actor-comedian, Michael Palin, based on the famous adventure novel by Jules Verne with the same name. Similar to the novel, Palin accepts the challenge to circumnavigate the globe in 80 days and closely follows the road and sea route, as taken by the protagonist in the novel.

The 80 days adventurous voyage showcases the excitement of venturing into new lands and filming exotic locations through numerous gridlocks. Considered as one of the best travel documentaries ever, the series broadcasted in 7 episodes follows Michael Palin’s travel and exploration across 17 countries. He takes you across Europe, Africa, Asia and North America through nearly every possible means of transport, except for the aircraft. This is no doubt one of the must watch  best travel documentary.

What makes it an interesting read for travel lovers: The novel was published in 1873 when there was no air travel and Michael Palin and his crew replicate the same sea and land route. From crossing the English Channel, passing through the Alps, traversing through the arid regions of the Middle East, entering Bombay on a dhow to voyaging through the South China Sea and finally arriving in the United States, Michael Palin shares his adventures of traveling the world in eighty days.

Do you really need more reasons?

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2. Baraka (1992)- A Kaleidoscopic Retreat

Runtime: 1 hour 36 minutes IMDb Rating: 8.6 Genre: Nature and philosophy Filming Locations: 150 locations in 23 countries

Synopsis: Baraka, also known as among some of the best travel documentaries ever is non-narrative documentary is a kaleidoscopic retreat into the different hymns of nature and its impact on various cultures. From the cacophonic chants of hundreds of monks huddled together for a cosmic yajna to the frenzied thumping of the whole village, the documentary highlights the phenomena of nature and how it forms the core of various cultures.

Baraka ventures its viewers into the hidden realms of the nature while focusing on the man’s prowess to destroy his countless blessings.

What makes it an interesting read for travel lovers: Baraka is a satirical take on the unabashed human nature with cinematic brilliance featuring the most spectacular pictures, on one hand, would enrich your love for nature and the perils of industrialization and destruction of nature, on the other, move you deeply. Should definitely add this to the best travel documentary series.

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3. Sahara with Michael Palin (2002)- Explore The Hidden Gems

Runtime: 4 episodes of 50 minutes each IMDb Rating: 8.1 Genre: Exploration Filming Locations: 10 countries in Northern and Western Africa

Synopsis: The travel documentary is a colorful account of the various cultures and regions dotting the beautiful Sahara desert. From the arid beaches in Morocco, refugee camps in Algeria, to the mysterious deserts of Timbuktu and spectacular starlit nights in Nigeria, this 4 episode feature also considered as one of the best travel documentaries of all time dwells deep into the seductive African odyssey.

Apart from exploring the various hidden gems of the great desert, the feature also includes Palin’s rendezvous with numerous Muslim scholars, tribes and refugees to highlight the various religious and cultural beliefs which the people of the desert abide by.

What makes it an interesting read for travel lovers: The documentary not only highlights the vastness of the isolated desert locations but also beautifully highlights the various prevalent cultural influences in Africa and practices such as polygamy and female genital mutilation.

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4. A Map for Saturday (2007)- A Solo Traveler’s Love

Runtime: 1 hour 30 minutes IMDb Rating: 7.9 Genre: Backpacking and Solo Travel Filming Locations: Australia, Thailand, India, London, Brazil and Nepal

Synopsis: Every day is like a Saturday when you are on a long travel around the world. Solo traveling is not only about meandering through unknown lanes of a forbidden place. But it is also a great way to delve deep inside one’s own existence. The story brings out the chronicles of trekkers on four different continents. The documentary also includes interviews from other backpackers and highlights how the road can form unbreakable bonds.

What makes it an interesting read for travel lovers: A Map for Saturday is a beautiful insight into the life of a backpacker. A must watch for people who believe that there is more to life than the confined walls of their office or workstation. It also highlights that if the intent to travel is immense, nothing can deter you in your quest. Looking for best online travel documentaries? Try watching A Map for Saturday! It is one of the best travel documentary  that you should definitely add to your list.

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5. Antarctica: A Year on Ice (2013)

Runtime: 1 hour 32 minutes IMDb Rating: 7.6 Genre: Expedition Filming Locations: Antarctica

Synopsis: How is it like living on the coldest place on earth for a year? The harsh climatic conditions make Antarctica almost inhabitable and an enigma for the world. This visual masterpiece highlights the inhabitable features of the continent and traverses the viewers through the lives of technicians and scientists living in isolation on the continent, braving the unforgiving winters. If you are a nature lover, you will appreciate its opulence even in its bitter hardness.

What makes it an interesting read for travel lovers: Traveling is not just about pristine beaches, romantic lanes, and verdant valleys. Living in a place where the sun doesn’t shine for months and when it does, it forgets to set, is something that you ought to experience. Ever heard of Survival of the Fittest? You ought to witness one of the best travel documentaries of all time. Get up, close and personal with it here!

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6. K2: Siren of the Himalayas (2012)

Runtime: 1 hour 15 minutes IMDb Rating: 7.3 Genre: Mountaineering Filming Locations: Mount K2

Synopsis: K2: Siren of the Himalayas is a multilingual travel film shot in English, German, and Nepalese. The travel documentary forays into the dangerous world of high altitude mountaineering and follow a group of mountaineering experts as they venture on this epic journey to mark Duke of Abruzzi’s 1909 expedition. This  best travel documentary is a peep into the mountaineering group as they try to scale the perilous Mount K2 and meander their way through its deathly cliffs, braving the hideous climate.

The spectacularly captured snow-covered mountains pitted against the vast expanse of the blue sky and the exclusive footage from the world’s second highest, yet most challenging peak will leave you out of breath.

What makes it an interesting read for travel lovers: If you want to know why mountaineering is considered as a rewarding activity, then you must watch it.

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7. Sacred Planet (2004)- Know The Mesmerizing Places

Runtime: 40 minutes IMDb Rating: 6.3 Genre: Biodiversity Filming Locations: Malaysia, Sarawak, Mulu

Synopsis: The earth is a queer place and this documentary encapsulates the beauty of the most mesmerizing places, people and wildlife on the planet in straight 40 minutes. Narrated by Robert Redford Jr., this Walt Disney production will take you up on an enchanting roller coaster ride starting from the ancient ruins of Thailand, canyons of Arizona, deserted lands of Namibia to underwater mysteries of Borneo, white sand beaches of New Zealand and many such exceptional places that our good old earth houses. Sacred Planet is one of the best travel documentary films you have seen in awhile.

What makes it an interesting read for travel lovers: The awe-inspiring odyssey not only takes you deep into the magical realms of the earth but also makes you take a stand for preserving our beautiful planet and its biodiversity.

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8. 180 Degree South (2010)- An Epic Tour

Runtime: 1 hour 25 minutes IMDb Rating: 7.7 Genre: Drama, Sport Filming Locations: Chile, Mexico, California, Columbia, Equador, Peru, Pacific, California

Synopsis: 180 Degree South is an assimilation of the memorable journey undertaken by Jeff while recreating the epic tour pulled off by Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins during their road trip in 1968. Jeff’s journey was more adventurous as he chose to surf, sail, and climb before finally making it to Chile.

What makes it an interesting read for travel lovers: Watch it for exciting adventures, gritty traveling, and the proper technique devised before pulling off such endeavors.

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9. Encounters at the End of the World (2007)- All About Fascination

Runtime: 1 hour 39 minutes IMDb Rating: 7.8 Genre: Documentary Filming Locations: Antarctica

Synopsis: Encounters at the End of the World is a further investigation of McMurdo Station in Antarctica. In the documentary, the filmmaker travels all the way to explore the hidden riches and beauty of the pole, and take a peep into the lifestyle of everyone surviving there. While people at the research station had exciting tales to narrate, the plight of living beings there left the director moved.

A powerful travel film, Encounters at the End of the World features some amazing shots taken by the filmmaker.

What makes it an interesting read for travel lovers: The extreme conditions at the poles, lovely escapades, and exciting tale of survivors make this travel documentary a must-watch.

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10. The Maidentrip (2013)- A Great Watch

Runtime: 1 hour 22 minutes IMDb Rating: 7.6 Genre: Adventure, Biography Filming Locations: Netherlands, South Africa, Australia, Ecuador, Panama, French Polynesia

Synopsis: One of the best travel documentary series ever, The Trip is a remarkable journey of a 14-year-old who sets to sail around the world and is a great watch. Laura Dekker’s a year and a half journey takes her to St. Martins, Panama, the Galapagos Islands, Australia, and the Cape of Good Hope before getting back to St. Martins. The youngest person ever to sail around the world, Dekker is a true inspiration for all the aspiring travelers.

What makes it an interesting read for travel lovers: Dekker captured the world in her lens, presenting the beautiful places along with all her experiences thus making it an incredible story.

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11. Hit the Road: India (2013)

Runtime: 1 hour 20 minutes IMDb Rating: 7.8 Genre: Documentary, Sport Filming Locations: India, Armenia

Synopsis: Recognised by Lonely Planet as one of the best travel documentaries of 2012, this film is a story of two friends participating in rickshaw rally from Chennai to Mumbai spanning for 12 days covering over 2000 km.

The uniqueness of the movie lies in the way both the guys pull off this trip, battling adverse climatic conditions in the difficult terrains. Rickshaw being one of the lightest motor driven vehicles in India turns out to be cost effective and an easy drive. Yes, they had to suffer plenty of breakdowns along the way.

What makes it an interesting read for travel lovers: 2 guys racing through the coast and ghats in southern India driving one of the lightest vehicles make it a rally worth a watch.

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12. The Edge of Never (2009)- About A Group Of Skiers

Runtime: 1 hour 41 minutes IMDb Rating: 7.3 Genre: Documentary Filming Locations: USA, Canada, France

Synopsis: Shot in the snow clad mountains in the North America region, this travel documentary is about a group of skiers who scale treacherous mountains in the pursuit of accomplishing what was left incomplete by the mentor’s father, who died skiing in Chamonix, France. Full of adventure, thrill, and surreal landscapes, this documentary is for extreme travelers.

What makes it an interesting read for travel lovers: Skiers challenging the biggest and extreme mountains in the world.

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13. Austin to Boston (2014)- A Musical Documentary

Runtime: 1 hour 12 minutes IMDb Rating: 7.2 Genre: Documentary, Music Filming Locations: USA

Synopsis: The film is a musical documentary, that narrates an exciting tale of a group of bands on the move. They travel thousands of miles from Austin to Boston, and en route live memorable moments. The journey has everything from traveling places, to pulling off adventures, to making memories, and also surviving through the hardships.

What makes it an interesting read for travel lovers: The journey of musical bands spanning over 2 weeks and covering 3000 miles, performing at places, looks like a dream journey. Highly recommended for all the music lovers who travel!

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14. Life in a Day (2011)- An Insight To Amazing Things

Runtime: 1 hour 35 minutes IMDb Rating: 7.7 Genre: Drama Filming Locations: Multiple locations across Earth

Synopsis: This travel film is a jukebox of thousand of hours from the lives of as many people on July 24th, 2010. The submitted videos containing beautiful and personal moments that people lead every day gives an insight into amazing things happening around us and how we choose not to acknowledge and celebrate them. This best travel documentary inspires everyone to be more thankful for things around and cherish beautiful moments.

What makes it an interesting read for travel lovers: The assimilation of thousands of video clips containing precious moments from the lives of people make you realize what a beautiful life you have been leading all this while.

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15. Frozen Planet (2011)- Fall For The Ice

Runtime: 1 hour IMDb Rating: 9 Genre: Documentary Filming Locations: Arctic, Antarctica, Greenland, Russia, Norway, USA, Canada

Synopsis: Primarily focussed on the life and environment in the Arctic and Antarctica, Frozen Planet highlights how the climatic change is affecting the earth and its inhabitants. The winner of 4 Emmy award winner TV show has critically put forward the challenges faced by the polar animals like bears and wolves for their survival. Striking the right chord with a grave environmental issue, this mini-series is a must – watch.

What makes it an interesting read for travel lovers: The engrossing narrative, spectacular locales, and enchanting music are all that it takes to charm a discerning traveler. A perfect set-up for travel-lovers!

For those with an insatiable hunger for exploration and action, documentaries are a way to discover what explorers around the world are living and experiencing. The thrill of venturing into the unknown – exclusively shot, felt, and expressed by real people – has an impact on the mind of the viewers that cannot be measured.

Further Read: 20 Best Travel Movies That Will Ignite The Wanderlust In You

With list of best travel documentaries live the adventures of world’s finest explorers and yes, don’t forget to share your favorites from (or outside of) the list!

Frequently Asked Questions About Travel Documentaries

Is it feasible to travel during Covid-19?

As the travel industry is opening up slowly, yes traveling is feasible abroad and across India during Covid-19. But make sure you follow the given guidelines and precautionary measures for Covid. Also, remember to read the latest updates for Covid before making any travel plans.

What are the top 5 best travel films?

Other than the above-mentioned list of 15 best travel documentaries and films, here are 5 best travel films that you should definitely watch: The Way, Lion, On The Road, Captain Fantastic, Into The Wild.

Where can you watch the travel films?

You can watch the travel films on various OTT platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Sony Liv, Hotstar, Airtel Tv, and many others. Apart from these platforms you can simply search the films online and find the links on google.

Which are the top locations for film shooting?

Although there are many locations for film shooting, here are the top 8 places for film shooting: Monument Valley, London, Prague, New Zealand, Cape Town, Greystone Mansion, Morocco

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The best travel documentaries to stream right now

By Condé Nast Traveller and Antonia Quirke

There are films that make you want to travel . But that’s easy. Just point a camera at an April meadow or a Sicilian back street and most of us salivate. And then there are films that make you feel like you have actually, physically travelled to a place. That leave you suffused with the sensations of its air and sounds. As though the camera lens has been your own eyes, noting details of light against brick, hills stepping inland, fruit and cigarettes on a table, springs gushing out of rocks, courtyards hanging with people and flowers, shirts on a line across a high, unstable balcony. So much that it can begin to feel spooky: you muddle the movie’s memories with your own.

Passing Stromboli on a boat one summer I thought, ‘Been there.’ I hadn’t. I’d just seen the movie, and more recently Ingrid Bergman’s own cine-film footage of the shoot (see below.) But still, I got off, and walked around. And it was true. I had been there already. The mesmerising, almost drugging déjà vu! Here are some more of the best travel documentary films that have that very singular effect.

My Octopus Teacher (2020)

Be immersed in the wonders of nature with this uplifting Netflix original, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature at the 2021 Academy Awards. Directed by Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed, it follows the unexpected friendship between filmmaker Craig Foster and a wild octopus in a South African kelp forest. After swimming in the remote location near Cape Town and discovering this curious marine animal, Foster decided to visit the same spot every day to learn and understand more about the creature and subsequently form a strong bond with it.

In one hour and 25 minutes of beautiful imagery and filmography, this documentary leaves you feeling sentimental about human connections, our extraordinary interactions with other life – and intrigued about what else lies below the ocean’s surface… By Cordelia Aspinall

'My Octopus Teacher' is available to stream on Netflix now

Cher and the Loneliest Elephant documentary (2021)

Watch the trailer below

Released in the USA on Thursday 22 April to mark Earth Day 2021 , this heart-warming wildlife documentary follows singer Cher’s mission to rescue a captive elephant named Kaavan. Kaavan, a Sri-Lankan born elephant, was sent as a gift to the daughter of the president of Pakistan and ended up, confined, in Islamabad Zoo. After a global petition via Change.org and Twitter received more than 400,000 signatures, a five-year fight for his freedom began, with none other than global pop superstar Cher stepping in after she spotted the campaign online. Having been confined for more than 35 years (the duration of its life) and given the title ‘the loneliest elephant in the world’, the five-tonne animal was relocated across Asia to a 30,000-acre Cambodian wildlife sanctuary.

With teary moments and incredible footage of the massive process involved in the transportation of Kaavan to Cambodia, this is a moving story focusing on the unsettling trauma the elephant was forced to experience, yet it has an uplifting end. Not only does the film with Cher’s narration walk you through this elephant’s long struggle of neglect and maltreatment, it also shines a light on the cruelty that so many animals around the world endure every day. It is a moving yet educational documentary hooked on a powerful true story. Cher co-founded the animal rights organisation Free the Wild as a result and even released the song 'Walls' inspired by her experience. By Cordelia Aspinall

'Cher and the Loneliest Elephant' is available on Smithsonian Channel from Wednesday 19 May 2021

MAN ON WIRE (2008)

‘I remember the vastness of New York . The altitude! It was all so alive!’ Was a city ever so breathtakingly captured as in this celebrated account of the mist-swagged August morning in 1974 when French wire-walker Philippe Petit illegally rigged a cable between the twin towers of the World Trade Center and made eight entirely improbable crossings in 45 minutes. Dressed all in black, his slender figure carrying its long balancing pole occasionally kneels on the thin wire (he even lies down – how your stomach heaves!), saluting the dazzling morning, and his own skill and chutzpah, as the startled pedestrians on the streets far below gaze up weeping and gasping while steam filters up through cracks in the pavement in that quintessential NYC way. Even though the crossings themselves are all in fact captured only in stills taken at the time by Petit’s assistants and friends you somehow remember the whole marvellous incident in moving images. It’s the city itself that’s doing that to you: its inherent dynamism, its irrepressible atmosphere of perpetual motion.

John O'Ceallaigh

Olivia Morelli

Lauren Burvill

Monisha Rajesh

We see Manhattan photographed here from so high above (much as we see it in the 1933 King Kong ), the Hudson spreading like glitter – like nitrate itself – in any black-and-white images. And the colour of apricot in colour stills, under blue swags of cloud and summer sky. ‘Everyone was spellbound by the watching of it,’ exhales a policeman dispatched to arrest Petit, who was ultimately charged with trespass and disorderly conduct. But the city embraced him.

Stream on Amazon , Google Play and YouTube

FREE SOLO (2018)

An immense, waning moon stares into a canyon’s abyss of sharp stones. A fierce river below spurts along the valley, wild grasses on the banks rolling in the wind like feathers or fur. All this the free-climber Alex Honnold sees – or does he? Fixed like Spider-Man to the side of a cliff, climber’s white chalk clinging to the back of his blistered hands, as the evening flushes rose right across Yosemite National Park. A film that follows Honnold in 2017 preparing to climb the infamous El Capitan – ‘3,200 feet of sheer vertical granite… the centre of the rock-climbing universe’ – without ropes. You sweat in sickly fear for his safety while also completely revelling in the fresh air every frame seems to blow your way, the bright warmth of sun on boulder, the absurd beauty of distant trees, the sight of a rainbow slicing through the foaming heart of a waterfall. You emerge healthier and freer somehow, just for having watched it. Your own limbs spasm as though you walked all day. Despite it being a compelling story of self-induced terror (what drives the angel-faced Honnold remains a mystery), you remember more the awesome sights, the very visceral sensation of movement.

Stream on All4

SEASPIRACY (2021)

Not one for the faint of heart, this 90-minute Netflix documentary has been hitting audiences hard in quite a few ways. It’s from the team behind C owspiracy: The Sustainability Secret (another in-depth spotlight, this time on the impact of agriculture on our planet), and you can expect to see similar themes, upsetting footage and quite controversial interviews with figures in the global fishing industry. The film, directed and narrated by British filmmaker Ali Tabrizi, sets out to explore the damaging effects of mass-scale commercial fishing on marine life and the levels of pollution in waters around the world. Expect to learn about the importance of dolphins, sharks and whales for our oceans ’ ecosystems, that sustainably sourced seafood might not be all that it seems, and that, ultimately, we should all be reducing our fish consumption. You might very well be off fish by the end, but it’s also worth reading around some more: there are some conflicting views about the film and whether the scientific points it makes are factually out of context. Katharine Sohn

Seaspiracy is available to stream on Netflix now

Chasing Coral (2017)

You may not be able to travel to see the Great Barrier Reef , the subject of this Netflix documentary, for much longer if we don't do something about climate change and ocean warming. The film uses hi-tech camera equipment and time lapses to show the deterioration of the coral as it turns from 'colourful, vibrant ecosystems into barren, lifeless wastelands,' writes Condé Nast Traveler US 's Sebastian Modak. You'll feel truly gutted once the movie's over, but it will have you planning a trip to Australia , and other areas with endangered natural wonders, within minutes of the rolling credits.

Stream Chasing Coral on Netflix

THE WHALEBONE BOX (2020)

Here’s a treat. Andrew Kotting – our most quietly influential experimental filmmaker – released a film online that sweeps us up on a pilgrimage to return a box made of whalebone to a far beach on the Hebridean Isle of Harris, whence the whale bones originally came. So, we cram in a car with Kotting and the psychogeographer Iain Sinclair and rumble north (filming mostly on a camera-phone) all overseen by Kotting’s daughter Eden, who wears a pagan crown of ivy and seems to be conjuring the whole mysterious and somehow healing road trip in a fever-dream. It’s a perfect evocation of that desire to travel. To move, to be en route, to feel twinges of uneasy excitement, to spin out illusionary ideas of a distant location. The place names whirl by: Ardlui, Mallaig. (At one point we suddenly find ourselves in a Templar castle in the Pyrenees.) Inside the car there’s that super-seductive sense of a gang travelling light, seeing what happens and who they might meet along the jagged coastline. ‘There are places you go, to access time,’ Kotting tells us, as the startling white sand of Harris glows in its near-sinister, beckoning way, under racing skies full of clouds like shredded curtains, and sudden glimmers of wet, green Hebridean sunlight.

Streamed exclusively on MUBI

BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB (1999)

A phenomenon as much as a movie, the spectacular success of the Buena Vista Social Club album and film had a limitless impact on the Cuban tourist industry. Some 20 years later, the music you hear on street corners in that city is more likely to be the music of pre-revolutionary Cuba defined in the film, by a cadre of musicians (some in their 70s and 80s) who had long fallen out of favour, only to be made world famous in their dotage.

I especially love when the camera sways out onto the streets of Havana, filming fast and in natural light the life there: the men working on immense old cars observed by stray dogs the colour of a sweet cold beer; the breeze off the sea playing against shirts; children rolling wooden toys before them; the unloading of mountains of bananas; residents of stuccoed tenements easing vast, scratched and defunct Fifties American fridges out of doors past murals of Che, as though demonstrating the very sickness of capitalism that Guevera railed against. Guitarist Compay Segundo recalling how, aged five, he would light his grandmother’s cigars in Santiago. Or baritone crooner Ibrahim Ferrer showing us the wooden carving he has always kept of Lazarus, and the little bowls of honey, rum and perfume he would offer to it, for good luck – which finally came to him after years of penury and shoe-shining in Havana after the film was released. Every frame takes you to that city, that climate. The smoky smell of the pavements as the sun grows stronger.

Stream on Google Play and YouTube

THE BEACHES OF AGNÈS (2008)

‘The North Sea and the sand is the start for me…’ says Agnès Varda, esteemed filmmaker of the Nouvelle Vague and photographer of genius, who aged 80 in this autobiographical collage of personal memory and feeling, takes us to the beaches that shaped her childhood, her marriage, her art and beyond. ‘Time passes, except on the beaches, which are timeless…’ she reasons, remembering with fondness Belgian sands at La Panne and Middelkerke. And especially the port city of Sète in France ’s southern region of Occitanie, where she speaks of seeing fishermen in the 1940s living in rough tents on the dunes, canvas walls slung with storm lamps and old pans. Noirmoutier, the French island in the Bay of Biscay, she recalls her husband Jacques Demy particularly loving, and she films it here in tribute and with such freshness it’s since become a destination for fans of the movie. ‘What is cinema?’ Varda asks, ‘It is LIGHT coming from somewhere…’ We see her sailing up the Seine in a wooden boat, right under the Ponts des Arts, the craft itself painted the sun-flashing yellow of the Provençal sunflowers that Varda always seemed to feature in her movies. I had the good fortune to interview Varda when she was 90, just months before she died, and I took a bunch of sunflowers as a gift – she received them with a yelp of happiness, saying they reminded her of French summers, her wise eyes warm as landing lights.

GRIZZLY MAN (2005)

‘Sometimes images themselves develop their own mysterious stardom…’ narrates German director Werner Herzog, over this his most heart-rending film. Part ‘kind warrior’ part ‘samurai’ the conservationist-activist Timothy Treadwell lived for 13 summers with wild Kodiak bears in remote areas of the Alaskan peninsula, shooting 100 hours of footage of those bears in their natural habitat. Styling himself as a Prince Valiant, his eventual death-by-Kodiak was shockingly violent, and Herzog shapes Treadwell’s sad, strange story as a tribute to ‘wild, primordial nature’ where his subject was truly at home. As you watch, you’re convinced you too can feel the fresh air on your own skin, the nip of mosquitoes, the pelter of rain. The long evenings spent alone, the vast plateau of mountains, the tide flats, the tumbled jags of glaciers, the sensation of Treadwell’s hands calloused like leather, the yelp of light in the mornings, the changing Alaskan sky.

In one scene, little slim foxes (called Ghost and Spirit) wake him by pressing their noses and paws against the walls of his tent, and he runs with them across a flower-studded meadow, delirious with the surprising gift of such companionship and freedom that would make any child’s heart explode. To be friends with the animals! ‘He captures such glorious improvised moments the likes of which studio directors with their union crews could never dream of,’ says Herzog, with patent admiration, himself an absolute master of putting not just nature, but the profound euphoria of travel on film. Think of those moments in Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre, when the hero walks the High Tatra mountains of northern Slovakia, or the Partnach Gorge in the Reintal valley in southern Germany . Rhapsodic.

JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI (2011)

Even though this documentary is almost entirely set inside a 10-seater Tokyo restaurant with no view, its location somehow comes to feel as though the whole history of Japan might be contained within its temple-like walls. Jiro Ono (now 94) is Japan’s most famous sushi master. He left home aged nine to become an apprentice, opening his own restaurant in the 1960s that now has a three-Michelin-star rating, which means (says one food critic) ‘It’s worth visiting that country just to visit the restaurant.’ Jiro is modest and stern, and we glimpse snatches of his past – anecdotes about his harsh infancy or an alluring black-and-white photograph of his father formally seated in 1927 wearing a sheeny kimono, an image with unforgettable resonance and romance, that seems to far, far predate the Taisho era.

Inside the restaurant – a capsule of absorption, firmly sealed in its own private weather – every day proceeds without alteration. The rice is steamed and hand-fanned, the halibut and squid and eel finely sliced and pressed together. ‘Press the sushi like you’re pressing a little chick,’ Jiro advises. ‘The world has turned outside, but he has remained the same,’ someone says, as the camera occasionally takes us outside to the brooding, energetic Tokyo streets, where it always seems to be raining and the crowds hurry. Down to the fish market full of tottering porters and barrow-pushers rhythmically going to and fro, where the best tuna trader drags frowningly on his hand-cupped cigarette, his hair slicked like Elvis, dreaming of the days when the fish were fat as pianos.

Stream on Amazon , and Netflix (US)

THE EPIC OF EVEREST (1924)

Not just one of the most important travel films ever made, but a precious artefact. A time capsule, a relic. If the third attempt to ascend Everest culminated in the sad deaths of the determined English climbers George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, the moving image of their expedition (shot by Captain John Noel with a hand-cranked camera sometimes using high-powered telescopic lenses) has thankfully survived. Some of the earliest filmed records of life in Tibet are here, and several frames have been tinted in the original reds and purples of the first screenings in 1924, thanks to meticulous restoration by the BFI.

Every second is a marvel, the images profound. Mallory and Irvine facing the climb of their lives in modest tweed jackets. Tibetan babies in stone villages, their skin slathered in yak butter, lying out happily in the sun. A Tibetan gentleman showing his glimmering ear to the camera, dangling its pendant earring of gold and aquamarine. A baby donkey born during the long march west, expected to walk 25 miles on its first day of life, collapsed in the mud (‘How tired and sleepy he is!’). Ancient castles and monasteries stud the mountains, hermit lamas dwelling in cliff-built cells predicting doom for the mission, climbers snow-blind and in states of collapse or trudging past ice-caves and picking off stalactites, as though they were great jags of lickable sugar on a fairy palace.

The mountain itself – Tibet’s Goddess Mother of the World – seems to physically pulsate with (as a title card tells us) ‘lofty solitude. Grand, solemn and unutterably lonely.’ And then the image of Mallory and Irvine ascending up, and up, and up, only to disappear, eternally out of sight. ‘We may think of ourselves and nature,’ warns the original text on screen, with what feels like definitive prescience. ‘We spring from nature. In life, we defy her.’

Stream on BFI Player

JAZZ ON A SUMMER’S DAY (1959)

Perhaps the ultimate concert film, made during the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival on Rhode Island, headlined by (among others) Thelonious Monk and Dinah Washington, Gerry Mulligan and Chuck Berry. How many times you wish yourself into the frame! To be among that happy, confident, peanut-crunching crowd. Because the camera has such a lovely, casual eye, it’s like a friend describing little moments and scenes, interested, curious, relaxed.

We see Monk take the stage with his bamboo-rimmed dark glasses. Sal Salvador on guitar with a buzz cut, eyes closed in bliss. Anita O’Day singing Tea for Two in a black hat fringed in white feathers, snapping her fingers as she sings, her gloves immaculate. The crowd sways and giggles and sighs, a jewel-box of capri pants and Breton tops. Strappy yellow sundresses and cat-eyed shades, baked shoulders and freckled clavicles draped with hipster cardigans. Well-fed babies are passed down rows to be greeted with kisses by mothers waving choc-ices. Beyond, the water of Narragansett Bay is a sparkling blur dotted with pretty racing boats called Nomad and Pixie. ‘The weather out here is summery, with a smoky haze on the horizon,’ someone thrills over a tannoy, as the camera picks out brown, sandalled feet dangling from a crow’s nests during a race.

Sometimes it feels like everything is reflected in the glistering water of the movie; all of the USA’s post-war reach and ambition. It has the optimism of a Cadillac. The ‘Dionysian potential of American life,’ as John Updike put it; that ‘carnival under the dome of heaven, every fair day.’ To me, this film captures precisely that gorgeous, lost moment in time and place, when Ted Hughes was gazing at his new and glamorous wife, Sylvia Plath, recalled in the poem 18 Rugby Street, ‘So this is America, I marvelled. Beautiful, beautiful America !’

60th-anniversary edition available on DVD

INGRID BERGMAN: IN HER OWN WORDS (2015)

‘I don’t want any roots. I want to be free.’ Ingrid Bergman’s will to travel came from deep within her. Sweden , California , Italy , France, London – she was able to up and move, reinvent herself, leaving lovers and children behind, documenting it all with a cine-camera – and her own footage occupies the majority of this powerfully alluring film. ‘I wanted desperately to get out in the world,’ she said, in letters to friends. ‘It’s as if a bird of passage is living with me.’

And so we follow her through the various stages of her life, with different husbands, and all her pretty infants blowing about like bright petals across the terraces of various villas and hotels (Hotel Raphael in Paris was her favourite). She’s here, driving around Rome in a white convertible, laughing at the paparazzi. Or clambouring with fishermen about the Aeolian island of Stromboli, sweeping shining hair from out of her tear-filled eyes. Or knitting topless in the powerful sunlight, all broad shoulders and witty expression. Diving into a pool in Hollywood, using a magnum of Champagne as a life buoy. And best: her robust, salty skin tanned the colour of rosewood against an unglamorous raincoat on the isolated, harshly granite island of Dannholmen off the Swedish west coast, where she joined the local sailing school, and where her ashes were scattered after she died. ‘I love your island,’ she’d said to her third husband, seeing his modest wooden house in 1958, with its rusted anchor sitting sentinel off the grey and merciless rocks. ‘Good,’ he’d nodded. ‘Let’s get married, then.’

Stream on Amazon

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat (2018)

Chef and food writer Samin Nosrat’s four-part series focuses on the four ingredients she thinks makes food delicious. In Italy she explores fat, in Japan she finds salt, in Mexico it’s acid and in the USA there’s heat. Her smile and spontaneous dancing are irresistible viewing, not to mention the sizzling close-ups of her adventurous, elemental cooking. Meredith Carey

Stream Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat on Netflix

Chef’s Table Pastry (2018)

This is a four-episode-only spin-off from the Emmy award-winning Chef’s Table. The show kicks off with Christina Tosi and her New York Milk Bar empire, an instant hit into the series. Also on the menu: Jordi Roca, Will Goldfarb and Corrado Assenza. Mesmerising and delicious – don't think about watching without sweet snacks to hand. MC

Stream Chef's Table Pastry on Netflix

Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories (2016)

Set in a tiny Tokyo diner that's only open from midnight to 7am, the fictional show follows the Midnight Diner's owner and clientele as they share their trials and joys, all while eating whatever the owner, called Master, dishes up. In the diner, pork miso soup is the go-to, but Master will cook visitors anything they order, as long as he's got the goods to make it. Episodes are a little more than 20 minutes long, so it's the most bingeable of the bunch. Watch with subtitles and don't - seriously, don't - watch while hungry. MC

Stream Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories on Netflix

Travels with My Father (2017)

Follow stand-up comedian Jack Whitehall and his father, Michael, in this six-episode Netflix original across Southeast Asia . The series tracks the duo as they finish the gap year Jack never got to complete, just a few years late (eight, to be exact). MC

Stream Travels with My Father on Netflix

Stephen Fry in America (2012)

In this six-part mini-series, Stephen Fry drives around all 50 US states in a London cab. Football games at the University of Alabama and lobster fishing in Maine are on the menu. Expect a lot of laughs and a surprise appearance from Morgan Freeman. MC

Stream Stephen Fry in America on Netflix

Chef's Table (2015)

If you've ever raised an eyebrow at food as art, set aside some time to watch this Netflix original docu-series. Each 50-minute episode profiles one of the world’s most extraordinary chefs (such as Peruvian Virgilio Martínez, pictured, the owner of Lima's Central restaurant, and Swede Magnus Nilsson) as they create impossibly complicated dishes. MC

Stream Chef's Table on Netflix

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Best Documentaries 2023

For his latest film, acclaimed documentarian Davis Guggenheim focused his camera on Michael J. Fox, the beloved actor who gave us Alex P. Keaton, Marty McFly, and Teen Wolf , and the result was a thoughtful, intimate portrait of Fox’s personal and professional life that earned nearly universal acclaim and a spot at the top of our Best Documentary category.

Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie (2023) 99%

KOKOMO CITY (2023) 99%

20 Days in Mariupol (2023) 100%

The Disappearance of Shere Hite (2023) 100%

Beyond Utopia (2023) 100%

A Disturbance in The Force (2023) 100%

It Ain't Over (2022) 98%

The Pigeon Tunnel (2023) 96%

Little Richard: I Am Everything (2023) 95%

Joan Baez I Am a Noise (2023) 96%

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The Best Documentaries of 2023

Here’s a brief history of documentary moviegoing.

In the 1960s, the documentary as we know it was being invented, but hardly anyone saw them. In the ’70s and ’80s, a new generation of masters — Barbara Kopple, Ken Burns, Errol Morris, Claude Lanzmann — came to the fore, and mainstream audiences began to take notice. In the ’90s, people at film festivals starting saying things like, “The documentaries are the best part!” And now?

We think of each of the films on this list as a kind of moviegoing adventure. Today, the sheer range of nonfiction film — the subjects, the styles, the voices — is extraordinary in its reach. Does that mean that we’re in a renaissance era? You might say that. But you could also say that when it comes to this form of filmmaking, the art of reality knows no season.

To see Variety’s collection of the best films of 2023, read here.

American Symphony

In Matthew Heineman’s lovely portrait of an artist and a marriage, Jon Batiste, with his inner light that doesn’t seem to have an off switch, comes across as the most ebullient performer in all of popular music. Yet he’s dealing with grim stuff behind the grin. His wife, Suleika Jaouad, is waging a war against recurring leukemia, and Batiste is having his own skirmishes with anxiety and panic attacks related to her illness, even as he’s making headlines as the surprise Grammy hoarder of 2022. “American Symphony” gets into some of the lesser battles Batiste is facing, like resentment from the classical world as he prepares the film’s title work for its world premiere at Carnegie Hall. The movie’s ultimate inconclusiveness feels like a feature, not a flaw: Music is forever, and so is chemo, in some cases. Holding those elements in balance is one way to create a symphony. —Chris Willman  

Not enough directors have capitalized on the ability of 3D to convey a sense of physical depth; fewer still have seized on the possibility of adding philosophical depth. Thank goodness, then, for Wim Wenders, whose tour-de-force 3D 6K portrait of the artist Anselm Kiefer is both rich in ideas and breathtaking in technical execution. We see Kiefer using flamethrowers to torch and distress his materials, and we experience the brutal beauty of molten metal destroying the surfaces Kiefer ladles it onto. The stereoscopy and sharp focus push our noses into the physical texture of the work, while also pulling us forward and backwards through time. Time is the film’s fourth dimension, as it presents each of Kiefer’s past selves overlapping, sometimes literally, with the images functioning as both eye and mind’s eye. —Catherine Bray

Beyond Utopia 

As you watch Madeleine Gavin’s staggering film, which is about what really goes on in North Korea, and about a handful of desperate souls who attempt to defect from there, you see life inside the totalitarian cult state — the full nightmare of the place — as never before. The filmmaker got ahold of forbidden footage that was smuggled out of the country. She uses it to make the case that North Korea is a place of such relentless terror that the only country it’s comparable to is Nazi Germany. But the film also chronicles, with footage shot on a cell phone, the attempt by five members of a family to leave this bad dream of a nation, and their escape story has a scary, suck-in-your-breath suspense. In recent years, North Korea’s nuclear weapons, with the mobster-autocrat Kim Jong Un in charge, have seized our attention. What we’ve forgotten about for too long is the North Korean people. For years, their misery has existed under a blackout. “Beyond Utopia” looks behind the wall and shines a light. —Owen Gleiberman  

Bobi Wine: The People’s President

The political activism of pop stars is, as a rule, on the restrained side. Yet for Ugandan singer Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu — better known to his adoring fans as Bobi Wine — there’s both everything and nothing to lose by getting more involved in national politics than most celebrities would dare. Entering a presidential election against corrupt, long-ruling incumbent Yoweri Museveni is, he knows, both a folly and a necessary stand to take in a country still reeling from the brutal military dictatorship of Idi Amin in the 1970s. Christopher Sharp and Moses Bwayo’s punchy, plainspoken film documents his journey with angry urgency and bitter gallows humor. At moments, the movie startles you with its immediacy, not least of all in the moving, spontaneous scenes of Wine’s young children grappling with his absence. — Guy Lodge

The Disappearance of Shere Hite

Nicole Newnham’s astonishing documentary is about who Shere Hite was — and about why we even have to ask. It‘s a beautifully made corrective to the amnesia that for decades surrounded Hite, the author of “The Hite Report,” a landmark 1976 survey on female sexuality that is still ranked as the 30th best-selling book in history. A former model with a gorgeous cloud of strawberry blonde hair, Hite had a casual, soft-spoken way of deploying words like “clitoris,” “penetration” and “masturbation” that, back then, seemed to make everyone uncomfortable but her. The film is put together with such visual verve that even its most prickly passages are compulsively enjoyable. But to what extent have we been gaslit into excising Hite’s place in feminist history? It’s hard to definitively say, though by the end of Newnham’s film we are unlikely ever to forget her again. —Jessica Kiang

The Eternal Memory

Dementia and neurodegenerative disease have been extensively portrayed onscreen. But Maite Alberdi’s film treats inexorably sad material with a lighter, more lyrical approach than most, focusing less on the day-to-day ravages of living with Alzheimer’s than on the slippery, transient concept of memory itself. Key to the film’s thesis is that its subject is Augusto Góngora, a veteran Chilean political journalist who labored through the 1970s and ’80s to bring the iniquities of the Pinochet regime to public consciousness, and later dedicated himself to conserving that national memory for future generations. Yet it’s the simple love story between Gongóra and his devoted wife and carer, former Chilean cultural minister Pauline Urrutia, that gives Alberdi’s film its spine and heart. The film is a powerful reminder of how our best efforts to keep and curate memories — for ourselves and others — can be thwarted by time. —GL     

Four Daughters

Kaouther Ben Hania’s gripping true story of a Tunisian mother whose two elder daughters joined ISIS is overlaid with fictional, self-analyzing elements. The real Olfa Hamrouni appears throughout the film, but she’s also played by the Egyptian-Tunisian star Hend Sabri. Were Olfa’s daughters, 16 and 15 at the time of their disappearance, eaten up by their overprotective mother, or were they consumed by the predatory wolves of religious fundamentalism, cultural indoctrination and ISIS itself? The film may operate better on a scene-to-scene basis than as a holistic narrative, yet its effect is cathartic — for the way it reveals Olfa as both sympathetic and repellent, charming and chilling — and also because we’re so unused to seeing this experimental an approach applied to the daily struggles of Arab women in a majority-Islamic North African country. The elliptical strategy of “Four Daughters” is to uncover some truths and leave others veiled. —JK   

Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project

The title teases galactic possibilities and plays with the concept of the unfinished work. One of the luminaries of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s into the 1970s, the now 79-year-old poet Nikki Giovanni continues to address the pain and joy, the anger and resilience of the descendants of the Middle Passage, who know much about uncertain and dangerous journeys. Michèle Stephenson and Joe Brewster’s beautifully crafted film takes us on an adventure, responding creatively to the call of its ingenious subject by touching on themes of aging, ailing and the oppressions with which she’s still reckoning. The filmmakers exhibit a soulful grasp of Giovanni’s poetry (voiced in the doc by executive producer Taraji P. Henson), but they also honor the untidy realities of the writer herself. —Lisa Kennedy   

De Humani Corporis Fabrica

It’s been nearly 30 years since the global franchise of Body Worlds exhibitions — collections of dissected and plastinated human cadavers — racked up ticket sales. That sense of revelation is recalled, without the circus-sideshow dimension, in Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s extraordinary documentary, which delves dizzyingly beneath the flesh to show organs, systems and actions that we know are inside us but tend to keep tidily out of mind. The movie takes us into the living, heaving, breathing body, using microscopes, ultrasounds and endoscopic and scialytic cameras to present its inner workings as vividly as any nonfiction film has managed. There’s a psychedelic spell to the imagery that suggests a state-of-the-art “Fantastic Voyage,” except that there’s no fantasy here: Every body probed is a real-life patient at once of several Parisian hospitals, their lives hanging in the balance as we gawk at their insides. —GL   

In the Court of the Crimson King

Can a band that seems to operate under rigidly precise conditions still produce music that sparks spontaneous ecstasy in listeners? The question might not seem unusual if it were a classical ensemble we were talking about, or the ballet. But Toby Amies’ film is about King Crimson and its natty genius of a leader, Robert Fripp, who’s as tough a taskmaster as anyone in the so-called finer arts. Amies gets the eight current members of the group on-camera, but he also goes back and interviews what we might think of as disgruntled ex-employees (notably Adrian Belew). It’s up to you whether you identify more with the many players who couldn’t hack the stress and got out or the ones who decided it was worth the high expectations and frayed nerves to remain in the court of prog-rock’s most enduring royalty. Fripp, almost always clad in a formal vest and necktie, is the ultimate English gentleman whose willingness to suffer fools even half-gladly is often being tested, not least by the filmmakers he commissioned to make this document. —CW

Judy Blume Forever

In Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok’s Crayola-bright documentary, the author Judy Blume is as sparky as ever in her mid-80s — and she has a game storytelling presence. The film encapsulates the trailblazing, still-rare appeal of her work, which presents adolescent social and sexual insecurities with both the uncanny recall of a child’s in-the-moment perspective and the reassuring wisdom of a grown-up who’s been through it all. “Come for the female masturbation, stay for the empowerment,” quips one interviewee. Yet anyone imagining Blume as a righteous, bra-burning feminist of the era may be surprised by the doc’s touching portrait of a young woman caught between demure domesticity and itching rebellion, her calling to write driven by the more repressed aspects of her upbringing in postwar suburban New Jersey. “Judy Blume Forever” is a study of one woman finding herself through the liberties of storytelling, though it’s also lent a stirring dimension by its focus on Blume’s work as an ardent correspondent to legions of fans. —GL

Kokomo City 

The title doesn’t refer to a real place. It’s more like a state of mind, invented by director D. Smith, who is Black and trans, to describe the space that her sisters occupy in the world. Theirs is an identity that is barely understood by the public and frequently misrepresented by the media, but is here defined by a handful of tell-it-like-it-is trans sex workers who offer snappy, whip-smart insights into their lives, dreams and the down-low dudes who adore them. In Smith’s unforgettable, format-defying, micro-budget doc, the t-girls spill the tea, totally reframing the conversation, opening up about the stuff that more mainstream trans-empowerment movies tell us should be off-limits, like their bodies and what they do in the bedroom. Smith’s subjects aren’t afraid to offend, but they’re irreverently eloquent in their assessment of how the world works, dishing on everything from image culture to what one of them, Daniella Carter, sees as the hypocrisy of her fellow Black people ­— one of the film’s key themes: “We all scream the narrative that we oppressed … but we’re the first motherfuckers to turn our nose up to the next person who wants to stand out and be different.” —Peter Debruge

Lakota Nation vs. United States

Jesse Short Bull and Laura Tomaselli’s unprecedented Native-issues essay film puts the question of Land Rights front and center in a lucid and uplifting way. Central among the film’s concerns are promises made, and later broken, by the United States in the peace treaty of Fort Laramie, which established the Great Sioux Reservation in 1868. The film explains how those 60 million acres were then taken away, how guns were confiscated and buffalo killed to force Natives into a European-style farming system, how Indigenous religions were outlawed and children were sent away to be Christianized in boarding schools. It also deconstructs how mainstream American media otherized the Natives, making “invasion look like self-defense.” Solutions don’t come easy when attempting to rectify decades of dehumanization and erasure, but “Lakota Nation” offers a clear-eyed look at some of the murkiest corners of American history. —PD  

Little Richard: I Am Everything 

The enthralling documentary that Little Richard deserves. Lisa Cortes’s movie understands, from the inside out, what a great and transgressive artist he was, how his starburst brilliance shifted the whole energy of the culture — but also how the radical nature of what he did, from almost the moment it happened, got shoved under the rug of the official narrative of rock ‘n’ roll. The documentary uses stunning archival footage to channel the electricity of Little Richard, and the eruptive glory of his volcanic gospel-on-amphetamines music still hits you like a revolution. Yet the movie also takes a deep dive into how Little Richard, a Black queer man who was not about to conceal who he was, intertwined the very DNA of rock ‘n’ roll with the perverse power of his identity. His story becomes the stirring and, in some ways, tragic tale of an artist so ahead of his time that even his own life couldn’t catch up with how he’d changed the world. —OG

Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros

It’s the quiet that strikes you in Frederick Wiseman’s languidly mesmerizing 240-minute documentary about one the world’s greatest restaurants. The film is a rejoinder to every image of cacophonous haute cuisine environments — clattering pans, hissing steam, chefs screaming invective — that’s been fed to us by “Hell’s Kitchen”-style reality shows and the propulsive drama of “The Bear.” The masters and staff of Le Bois Sans Feuilles, a three Michelin-star establishment in France’s Loire region, work with a hushed intensity of concentration. And that suits Wiseman, who explores every dimension of this culinary cathedral from the inside out. The astonishing plates on display resist “food porn” categorization, and it’s the human element of the restaurant that most interests Wiseman: a family business with a tradition of gastronomic innovation, here found at a compelling tipping point between father and son. —GL

Milli Vanilli

It’s one of the inside-out realities of our era that scandal, if you give it enough time, turns into myth. So it is with Milli Vanilli, the German-French R&B pop duo of the late ’80s and ’90s who, having sold close to 50 million records, were revealed to be a fake: a pair of lip-syncing Euro pretty boys who hadn’t sung a note on any of their hits or at any of their concerts. Luke Korem’s captivating and surprisingly moving documentary adds another, richer layer to the saga. It tells the Milli Vanilli story from the point-of-view of Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan themselves — especially, Fab, who unveiled himself to the filmmaker (Rob died in Los Angeles in 1998). We see how they started, why they struck their “deal with the devil,” and who, exactly, the devil was. Were they complicit in a deception that was sleazy and greedy? Yes. But by the end of the movie, a wide circle of influence has been implicated: the Svengali who pulled the strings, a music industry full of people who saw through the ruse yet rationalized it away, and, in a sense, the public itself. There’s no way that we could have known, yet the movie captures how the myth of Milli Vanilli now touches on the pathology of image-making that’s at the very core of pop music. —OG

The Mission

The world will never know what was going through 26-year-old Christian missionary John Allen Chau’s head when he was shot and killed by arrows off the coast of North Sentinel Island. Was he an evangelical martyr-hero who answered God’s calling and gave his life trying to convert a remote and hostile tribe? Or was he an arrogant and unprepared American, brainwashed by the church into undertaking a suicide mission? The filmmakers, Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine, reconstruct his story à la Herzog’s “Grizzly Man,” creating a haunting meditation on the very nature of missionary work. “The Mission” becomes a kind of philosophical quest in which wild ambition goes hand in hand with folly at the very limits of so-called civilization. —PD    

Money Shot: The Pornhub Story  

It’s not a movie about the cultural prominence or significance of porn in our time, though it does touch on key aspects of how pornography today is manufactured and consumed. Instead, Suzanne Hillinger’s documentary mostly tells the story of how Pornhub, the largest porn site in the world, became a lightning rod of controversy when it was accused of being a place that abetted sex trafficking and the sexual abuse of children. You’d think there wouldn’t be two sides to that issue. But “Money Shot,” in chronicling the war against Pornhub as led by activists like Laila Mickelwait and journalists like Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times, reveals what it means when porn evolves into a corporate entity. The film captures the ambiguity of the real Pornhub revolution, which is that every viewer of pornography is now viewed as a consumer . The dark message of the film is that in the no-boundaries world of the web, you can police a company like Pornhub but you can’t make what it’s selling go away. —OG

Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV  

There are a lot of people who know the name Nam June Paik, or even got to experience one or more of his video installations, yet still don’t know very much about him. Amanda Kim’s gorgeously crafted documentary does a splendid job of filling in what a visionary figure Paik was — the way he interfaced with people like John Cage, lived for years as a starving artist in New York and built his surrealist TV museum exhibits from the ground up, literally inventing an art form. Paik’s art had a let’s-try-it-on spirit that was cosmic but playful, and the opposite of pretentious. After all, he was creating high art… on television! And what’s most intoxicating about the film is that it becomes a supreme vehicle for experiencing the psychedelic majesty of Paik’s creations, which were driven by his obsession with finding the hidden soul of technology. In “Moon Is the Oldest TV,” Paik, who died in 2006, emerges as a figure both impish and daunting — the artist as explorer of uncharted terrain, with an almost mystical connection to the arsenal of electronic media he wielded like a plugged-in paintbrush. —OG

Orlando, My Political Biography

Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando: A Biography” is a centuries-spanning tale of a nobleman who, after a slumber of several nights, metamorphoses into a woman. And Paul B. Preciado’s docu-manifesto is an ode to the many Orlandos who walk the world. Playful, urgent and brilliantly innovative, the film is predicated on the notion that if society is a set and gender a performance, what better way to capture that than to revel in the very constructed nature of filmmaking? The movie’s aesthetic creates a trans cinematic archive that reaches back to images of Christine Jorgensen, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera — all to tell a mosaic of a collective story. —Manuel Betancourt

The London-born French filmmaker Claire Simon has amassed a body of work somewhat comparable to that of the American master Frederick Wiseman. Her latest outing, luxuriant in length but never less than eye-opening, immerses us in the interactions between female patients of all ages and the medical professionals in a French hospital, with typically compassionate and insightful results. Typical, that is, until Simon herself unexpectedly becomes one of her own subjects. Her personal journey is sketched in roughly the same number of scenes she dedicates to anyone else’s, so that she becomes one more strand in the film’s breathing, sometimes bleeding tapestry: just one of “Our Body’s” vital organs. What happens in the course of the film is sometimes tragic, often painful, but it is always instructive — demystifying and de-objectifying the female body, still the locus of so much secrecy and mystery. —JK     

The Plains 

Australian filmmaker David Easteal’s first feature is a striking docu-hybrid filmed almost exclusively inside a car during the peak-hour commute. The movie places viewers in the back seat to observe a middle-aged Melbourne lawyer, Andrew Rakowski, during his drive home from work over the course of a year. It’s remarkable how fresh and spontaneous the result feels. As we listen in on Rakowski’s phone conversations with his wife or his in-car chats with the filmmaker, a picture emerges of a man who is traveling long distances but feels like his life momentum has stalled. And yet the movie achieves the feat of making three hours fly by. —Richard Kuipers

Radical Wolfe

It was Tom Wolfe, more than anyone, who taught journalism to dance. Richard Dewey’s impeccably chiseled portrait, the story of how he did it, and the heights he rose to, makes for an irresistible watch. The tale of how Wolfe’s celebrated style came into being — the exclamation points!! The spontaneous but knowing word salad!! — is one for the ages, and the documentary tells it exquisitely. It also does a memorable job of exploring his strategy and achievement in writing “Radical Chic,” the New York magazine cover story in which he spent 20,000 words describing a party thrown by Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia, at their Park Avenue apartment to raise funds for the Black Panthers. (It’s as if Wolfe defined the concept of bourgeois political correctness and disemboweled it in the same moment.) The documentary is full of photographs and film footage of Wolfe, and we see how vital his floppy-haired-ironic-Southern-gentleman look was to the whole Wolfe mystique — the white suits that made him seem like he’d arrived from another planet. Yet Tom Wolfe was hipper than the hipsters, with feelers that allowed him to see all, and in 76 highly entertaining minutes “Radical Wolfe” packs in more or less everything you need to know about him. —OG    

Smoke Sauna Sisterhood

In Estonia, in a log-cabin sauna nestled in a pretty woods by a lake, a group of women gather on and off through the changing seasons to sweat out their secrets and heal each other with heat, talk and arcane sauna-based rituals. The small smoky miracle of the movie is that it creates something so intangible, so lyrical, from the absolutely elemental: fire, wood, water and lots of naked female flesh. We don’t necessarily get to know the women as individuals, despite how intimate and sometimes harrowing their shared stories are. Instead, the director, Anna Hints, lets their soft chatter narrate a kind of choral experience of modern womanhood, operating on the most practical yet optimistic of assumptions: that with the application of enough heat and fellowship, everything painful can be soothed and everything dirty can be made clean. —JK   

Squaring the Circle: The Story of Hipgnosis

Anton Corbijn’s documentary about Hipgnosis, the legendary 1970s album-cover design team, is full of great stories about how pop music’s most indelible visual form arrived at all that unforgettably strange imagery. Only Hipgnosis could shoot a photo of a cow against a blue sky, put it on a Pink Floyd cover (“Atom Heart Mother”), and make it look like an act of mysterious profundity on a level with the works of Magritte. The two main creatives of Hipgnosis were the late Storm Thorgerson, the prickly visionary of the pair, and Aubrey “Po” Powell, the long-suffering partner who oversaw the execution of Thorgerson’s insane ideas. “Squaring the Circle” is nothing if not a testament to absurdly high record-company budgets in the ’70s, which couldn’t all be spent on analog tape and blow. The movie doesn’t ask what transpired after the story abruptly ends, amid financial ruin and changing tastes in 1982. But it’s clear that Corbijn, well-known for his own album design work, is a true believer, just like all of us who grew up in a golden age of album art and lament that it was the pictures that got smaller. —CW

Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie

It’s a lot funnier and more entertaining than you might think. Michael J. Fox tells his own story in “Still,” which director Davis Guggenheim treats as “a Michael J. Fox movie” by remixing clips from the Emmy-winning actor’s career with cleverly restaged scenes from his private life. The “Family Ties” and “Back to the Future” star was one of the most beloved personalities of the 1980s, and though his personal story has been overshadowed by his struggle with Parkinson’s disease (diagnosed when he was just 29), Guggenheim’s upbeat, ultra-polished documentary reminds us what a peppy and relatable actor Fox was — and is. The film presents him as a trouper, focusing on how he fought to hide his symptoms for years, burying himself in his work so as not to face his handicap head-on. Today, Fox is a good sport, cracking jokes about his tremors. And looking back, he always made it look easy, coming across as laidback and cool even while secretly stressed. He never wanted to be the poster boy for Parkinson’s, but if Michael J. Fox could sell Pepsi to a generation, he realized it was within his power to raise awareness of the disease he’d been dealt. —PD  

Sam Green has crafted a documentary the likes of which you’ve never heard before. Meant to be watched with headphones, this unique, immersive, audio-driven essay film invites audiences to reconsider their relationship to sound: how it works, what it can do and the way that specific noises can unlock memories or spark entirely new ones. The director investigates the source of certain sounds (like a tree falling in the forest), though he’s generally more interested in how we receive them, literally and emotionally. The film has an uncanny quality, yet it wouldn’t be as rewarding if not for its human subjects, such as the experimental musician Annea Lockwood, who once set a piano on fire to hear how it would sound, or Nehanda Abiodun, an African American revolutionary, holed up in Cuba, for whom the 1979 disco song “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” opens a wormhole of memory. —PD

20 Days in Mariupol

Offering a refresher in outrage on Ukraine’s behalf, Mstyslav Chernov’s bleak but essential film is a nerve-jangling piece of on-the-ground combat reportage. It’s built around a team of Associated Press correspondents who traveled to the port city of Mariupol on Feb. 24, 2022, the day Vladimir Putin launched the war. They assumed that this key city, just 30 miles from the enemy border, would be an early objective — the hunch was correct. Within hours, the bombs began to fall; the documentary is a strikingly immediate record of citizens under siege. The grotesque injustice of the situation is reinforced by our periodically hearing Russian leaders’ flat denials that civilians are being targeted, even as we spend 90 minutes witnessing apartment buildings, hospitals, and more reduced to charred ruins. There’s no sermonizing, just a punishingly up-close look at the toll of modern warfare on a population. “What did we do to deserve this? What are these people guilty of?” a mother asks — questions to which there can be no answer. —Dennis Harvey

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The Best Documentaries and Docuseries of 2023

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There were some heavy hitters working in 2023. Matthew Heineman, Maite Alberdi, Steve James, and Errol Morris all delivered impressive new pieces. Breakthroughs came screaming to the forefront as well, many aided by festival or critical support (or both). Films like “Kokomo City,” “Beyond Utopia,” and “A Still Small Voice” managed to crack the zeitgeist and pique cinephiles’ interest. While over in television, genre hybrids like “Paul T. Goldman” and experimental adaptations (like “The 1619 Project”) got people talking, and plenty of powerful stories found room to grow and expand along with their audience. (“How To with John Wilson,” you will be missed .)

The documentary landscape is shifting, along with an industry adapting to a new reality. To some, the end of the “too much TV” era and the studios’ slow pivot away from streaming indicates less space for documentaries, even if there’s more demand for true crime tales and continuations of established hits. (Get ready for “The Jinx 2” in 2024 — no, really .) But to others, it’s just another sea change. Hollywood has seen them before, and we’ll see them again. Documentaries always find a way through, and this adjustment will be no different. Instead of feeling worried or threatened, take heart in the abundant offerings that broke through in 2023. Below, we’ve listed the best documentaries of the year — listed in alphabetical order — for both features and series. Enjoy, and don’t worry: There will be even more next year.

Kate Erbland, Marcus Jones, Ryan Lattanzio, Tony Maglio, Mark Peikert, Sarah Shachat, and Brian Welk contributed to this list.

1. “American Symphony”

What starts as a fascinating portrait of Oscar- and Grammy-winning New Orleans musician Jon Batiste attempting to expand the definition of a symphony with his pending Carnegie Hall debut contracts into something much more intimate. Director Matthew Heineman, more often known for taking audiences to the frontlines of war, is uniquely adept at capturing the former “Late Show” bandleader and Suleika Jaouad, his successful author and wife, battle some of the greatest challenges that life can throw. Meanwhile, Batiste’s emotional rollercoaster of a personal life runs parallel to the pinnacle of his career, as he becomes the first Black artist to win Album of the Year in over a decade. Quite simply, “American Symphony” needs to be seen to be believed. —MJ

2. “Beyond Utopia”

This nonfiction exposé reveals what it’s like to live in North Korea — and to try to escape. Editor-turned-director Madeleine Gavin (“City of Joy”) tracks two riveting and dangerous attempts at defection in this eye-openier which won the U.S. documentary audience award at Sundance 2023. After some reluctance to tackle the subject of North Korea, Gavin’s deep research persuaded her to dive in, including hidden camera footage that had been brought out (some of which is in the film). Gavin tracks two narratives, as heroic underground railroad leader Pastor Kim steers the Roh family of five (including two children and an 80-year-old grandmother), with the help of 50 brokers, on a torturous journey over jungles, mountains, and rivers, through Communist countries China, Vietnam, and Laos before they reach safety in Thailand. He also tries to help a mother, Soyeon Lee, who — having successfully defected to South Korea — struggles to bring her 17-year-old son to join her.

As much as the Roh story is riveting, dangerous, and rigorous — often shot with iPhones by the participants themselves — the heartbreaking narrative is Soyeon Lee’s unsuccessful attempts to rescue her son, which we watch unfold in real time. Gavin expertly threads the two storylines, while also providing snippets of history and what it’s like to live in North Korea. “Beyond Utopia” is landing key documentary nominations on the road to the Oscars. The film nabbed four Critics Choice nods, including Best Feature, and will vie for the Cinema Eye Honors audience award. —AT

3. “Bill Russell: Legend”

The savvy and power of “Bill Russell: Legend” can be gleaned from one seemingly innocuous detail: The two-part documentary features plenty of talking heads, from NBA greats Magic Johnson and Stephen Curry to Russell’s family members and the titular legend himself. It’s also narrated, quite well, by Corey Stoll. But there’s another voice that’s instrumental to director Sam Pollard’s story: Jeffrey Wright’s. The “American Fiction” star reads passages from Russell’s memoirs, pulling key quotes directly from the legendary center’s writing, by way of providing insight into times long past and memories that risk being forgotten.

“Bill Russell: Legend” is dedicated not just to its subject, but to each of his many sides: a basketball great worthy of study for his sheer skill alone; a winner with more team titles and personal triumphs than many dare to dream possible; a civil rights icon whose unflinching fight for racial equality began long before he became a beloved American athlete and continued long after he could sprint from one end of the Boston Garden to the other. Pollard’s film leaves no stone unturned, without bloating itself beyond its most potent version. Including Russell’s memoirs — his memories, his own recollection of events — by way of Wright’s distinct yet expressive recitation not only shows the film’s commitment to reflecting Russell’s fascinating life, but also to ingraining it in as many memories as possible. It’s a story worth telling, and a story that demands to be told well. —BT

4. “Break Point”

Netflix released the first part of “Break Point” Season 1 on January 13, 2023; the back half would wait until June 21. The “break” in “Break Point” kept tennis fans in suspense, but it was really a production necessity. Like “Formula 1: Drive to Survive” (the two share the same production company), 2023 IndieWire honorable mention “Quarterback,” and other similar Netflix sports docuseries, you don’t have to be a fan of the sport to be a fan of the show. These well-done documentaries are about the personalities and the stakes, not just the matches, races, and games. “Break Point” makes viewers love Ons Jabeur — and love to hate Nick Kyrgios (if you didn’t already).

The first set in “Break Point” covers the Australian Open, Indian Wells, and the French Open. It’s enough to capture viewers and a Season 2-renewal from Netflix. Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, and the WTA and ATP Finals have to wait for summer. —TM

5. “The Deepest Breath”

Laura McGann’s “The Deepest Breath” will, forgive us, have you holding yours, as the filmmaker spins through a heart-stopping true story (and a tragic one at that), framed through gut-churning footage that approximates the feeling of being a freediver (like the subjects of the film) as they plunge ever-deeper in pursuit of a crazy dream.

While the story at the heart of the Netflix feature — which follows the paths of freedivers Alessia Zecchini and Stephen Keenan as they pursue their passions (and, for awhile, each other) — is compelling enough (and that’s even without knowing both of the film’s subjects don’t make it out of this story alive), it’s how the entire outing is presented that thrills. Zecchini, Keenan, and myriad other talking heads are driven to dive to insane depths on a single breath (of note: viewers will learn significantly more about the rules of the sport), a pursuit that sounds nuts and is even more shocking in practice. McGann and her team strive to show us as much of that practice as possible, all organized around a story that somehow also feels remarkably relatable.

Think of it this way: I watched this film on a plane, and even I couldn’t catch my breath the entire time. To call it “immersive” is only breaks the surface. —KE

6. “The Eternal Memory”

A vivid docu-essay, a moving romance, and a resonant metaphor for Chilean dictatorship, Maite Alberdi’s “The Eternal Memory” documents the impact of Alzheimer’s on married couple Augusto Góngora and Paula Urruti. Working for some 60 hours of footage, Alberdi follows Góngora’s rapid mental decline and actress-turned-Minister of Culture and the Arts Urruti’s loving efforts to make his final years as joy-filled as possible, even as the COVID pandemic accelerates his condition. Góngora died in June this year, just six months after the film first premiered at Sundance, but he left behind a long legacy of keeping the atrocities of Pinochet’s rule preserved in the national memory.

“The Mole Agent” director Alberdi not only assembles archival footage and home videos spanning their 23-year relationship, but also captures intimate new footage of the couple alone at home or revisiting their past over meals or physical therapy sessions while Góngora slips away but tries to stay tethered to reality. Meanwhile, Góngora’s personal connections to Chilean national trauma, including the murder of a colleague, give the film a political urgency that — using dreamlike editing that hops, skips, and free-associates in ways memory does — threads seamlessly within a portrait of a marriage battling time. Memory is a collective experience, whether in human or political terms, and “The Eternal Memory” is a touching reminder of what shouldn’t be forgotten even amid unknowable disease. —RL

7. “Every Body”

Explaining what the “I” is in LGBTQIA+ should not be this lighthearted of a viewing experience. Make no mistake: The coming-out stories and hardship of intersex people as told in “Every Body” are emotional and difficult conversations. But director Julie Cohen (“RBG”) develops such trust with the film’s three subjects that they’re often willing to frankly discuss their genitalia, chromosomes, and other thorny identity questions in ways that are inspiring, funny, and easy to comprehend, whether you’re straight or part of that wider queer spectrum.

Cohen gets laughs out of activist and writer Alicia Roth Weigel dismantling a conservative pundit who insists there are only two genders. She repurposes a previously salacious “Dateline” story into the context of how doctors trying to impose gender norms has had ripple effects on intersex individuals for generations. She even weaves gender-flipped versions of pop staples into the soundtrack to further drive home the point of gender not being a binary. It’s essential viewing that never feels like homework. —BW

8. “How To with John Wilson” Season 3

John Wilson calls each episode of “How To with John Wilson” a movie, not a documentary. But the structure of his now-concluded HBO series shows just how emotional and personal a great storyteller can get by using building blocks of the documentary form. Each episode is constructed out of Wilson’s astonishing eye for found footage, of course. He interviews subjects and organizes each entry with voiceover narration. There is an explicit hunt for information about a topic, like how to get into bird-watching, or how package delivery works in a city as big as New York. But of course the true subject of “How To with John Wilson” is Wilson’s own interest-spirals, as each episode transforms a straightforward question into an odyssey through how bizarre and unexpected humans can be, which then ends up reinforcing Wilson’s initial curiosity.

The result is that “How To with John Wilson” doesn’t just feel factually accurate, but emotionally true. It’s a show that’s constructed and real, and somehow lives in the poetry Wilson is able to make out of real New Yorkers just waiting on the subway. “How To with John Wilson” stands as a series of sometimes absurd, sometimes profound, really funny movies. We’re so glad we watched them. —SS

9. “Judy Blume Forever”

Throughout Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok’s warm-hearted documentary “Judy Blume Forever,” the beloved American author is joined by a number of talking heads — a classy assortment, from Blume’s own kids and childhood pals to fellow authors like Mary H.K. Choi and Jacqueline Woodson, plus famous devotees like Lena Dunham and Molly Ringwald, as well as long-time fans (and Blume pen pals) Lorrie Kim and Karen Chilstrom. It should come as little surprise that the best-selling author gets (even to this day!) tons of fan mail, but that Blume delights in saving much of it, often responding to it, and truly cherishing it is just one of the pleasures to be found in this nourishing doc.

Organized mostly chronologically, Blume herself walks us through some of her biggest books and what was going on in her life at the time she was writing them (cute and kicky animations provide a backdrop when Blume reads aloud from her works). Firstly, though, there is her childhood, which sheds light on how some of Blume’s most essential obsessions formed. A child of World War II (she keenly remembers turning seven as it ended), Blume still recalls the feeling that adults weren’t being totally truthful with her about the big stuff. The war was “far away” and couldn’t hurt her. She didn’t need to worry about her father’s health. Being happy was easy. Even as a kiddo, Blume knew it was bunk.

But who could tell other kids that? Eventually, Judy Blume could, though “Judy Blume Forever” also takes us through the many years before she reached that point: swapping secrets with gal pals in high school, going to college to find a husband, always hoping to meet an ideal that didn’t actually appeal to her. Blume was a late bloomer, at least when it comes to her work, and she’s remarkably frank about the years spent not writing (and wanting to) and then early attempts (that were not appreciated). But Blume’s belief that what she was doing was important and was going to help kids feel less alone drove her, and — guess what? — proved to be totally true. —KE

10. “Kokomo City”

D. Smith’s Sundance sensation “Kokomo City” is a rollicking first feature that focuses on the lives of four Black trans sex workers who live in Georgia and New York, illuminating the joy and hardships they face, and imbued with plenty of wit as we get to know this fascinating quartet and their hard-won points of views while living ever in flux. “Kokomo City” in 2023 feels as urgent and revolutionary as something like Jennie Livingston’s ball-culture panoramic “Paris Is Burning” did in 1990.

A lively black-and-white portrait of trans women delivering hope, wisdom, and cutting truth, “Kokomo City” was unfortunately mired in a real-life tragedy that brings an unfortunately timely resonance to the film, given the current forces working politically against LGBTQ people in America. One of the film’s subjects, Koko Da Doll, was murdered this past April not long after the film’s Sundance premiere. Songwriter-turned-filmmaker D. Smith is the ideal and compelling cinematic voice to tell this story — in the documentary’s contrast of black-and-white lighting, its needle drops and deep-cut tracks, and an indie spirit that suffuses every frame. Smith waxes as poetic as her subjects. —RL

11. “Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York”

Serial killer true crime stories are a genre in and of themselves — so much so that the repeated revisiting of murderers like Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy almost turn them into clichés that threaten to trivialize the very real consequences of their killings. But rarely are true crime and social justice as cohesively intertwined on the small screen as they are in “Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York,” a four-part docuseries from HBO.

Directed by Anthony Caronna and executive produced by Howard Gertler from Elon Green’s 2021 nonfiction book, “Last Call” pulls back the curtain on the killing spree of Richard Rogers, a male nurse who, as far back as the 1980s and until 2001 (when he was eventually caught by authorities), targeted gay men in New York and New Jersey. (Prior, in 1973, he was acquitted of killing his college housemate in what he alleged was a fit of gay panic.) His reign of terror also fell at a time when queer people were under siege by the NYPD and whose stories were largely ignored by the mainstream media amid the AIDS crisis and the still-felt influence of the Anita Bryants of the world. Through sensitively conducted interviews with the victims’ surviving family members, friends, and lovers, and through noirish reenactments that recall the work of Errol Morris and “The Thin Blue Line,” “Last Call” seeks to reclaim those stories and the socially vulnerable people who tell them. —RL

12. “Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God”

The world is so much more fucked up than we can ever know. That’s what I kept thinking watching Hannah Olson’s HBO docuseries “Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God,” the sort of portrait of a sick-at-the-roots fanatical American underbelly that makes you feel like you have the flu watching it, its bad vibes imbuing your own. Executive-produced by the Safdies among others, “Love Has Won” centers on the rise of Love Has Won cult leader Amy Carlson, aka Mother God, whose body was found mummified in April 2021 in her Crestone, Colorado compound, ensconced in a sleeping bag and Christmas lights, her skin a dark steely blue after years of chronically ingesting colloidal silver.

After opening with that harrowing image of Carlson’s desiccated corpse as Saguache County authorities raid Love Has Won’s stomping grounds, the docuseries retraces how Carlson convinced a few dozen impressionable conspiracy theorists and lost souls to follow her out West. The group’s specific dogma — built around the concept that its acolytes are “lightworkers” who can communicate with aliens — is almost impossible to parse, often emerging out of Carlson’s drunken and drug-addled ravings and stupors. She also believes she’s the reincarnation of some 500 luminaries, from Harriet Tubman to Robin Williams. (When she goes into an especially drunken rampage, one follower says that’s in fact Robin in the room.)

While cult documentaries are a dime a dozen dating back to Netflix’s smash “Wild Wild Country,” Olson’s “Love Has Won” is exceptionally well-crafted from the talking-heads interviews with subjects still mentally in the cult and those who escaped. There’s no moral astringence or reckoning with trauma, as the cult is still so new and still has its hooks firmly in a few who remain unable to reframe their brainwashed delusion as just that. Already the word-of-mouth nonfiction hit of the winter TV season, “Love Has Won” is worth a rewatch for the cult’s dense and unfurling mythology, but there are so many “WTF did I just watch?!” moments that it succeeds as a true, tawdry piece of entertainment on its own terms. —RL

13. “The Luckiest Guy in the World”

Steve James doesn’t miss. Not when he’s directing one of the most influential documentaries of all time, not when he’s pivoting to streaming via top-tier docuseries, and not when he’s making one entry in ESPN’s long-running “30 for 30” franchise — a chapter about the famed basketball star and commentator, Bill Walton. While providing a thorough portrait of the Oregon athlete’s life and profession, James also challenges Walton, whose easygoing nature helped make him one of the cheeriest sports stars of his era. The director does this in both storytelling structure and interview style. He dives headfirst into Walton’s successful career on the court, showing highlight reels that emphasize his dominance, while still finding time to speak to his shifting public image.

Walton’s college-era protests of the Vietnam War cast him as an agitator, even in hippie-friendly California, while injuries in the NBA cost him years of his prime. Seeing Walton prickle at accusations that he was cashing a paycheck while feigning pain only speaks to his character, his commitment, and his love of the game. They draw you closer to him, even though they clearly created a gap between filmmaker and subject. Walton wants you to be happy for him; he’s the self- (and oft-)described “luckiest guy in the world.” But James’ job is to showcase not just why he believes that, but what challenges Walton overcame to maintain such a positive perspective, as well as what he may be overlooking to make those views easier to hold onto. With so many over-polished vanity docs out there, James reminds us what a great documentarian can do with an objective lens. No matter the assignment, James just doesn’t miss. —BT

14. “The Mother of All Lies”

At the beginning of Asmae ElMoudir’s innovative hybrid documentary, which uses clay puppets fashioned by the filmmaker’s father to recreate incidents from her family’s past, we meet her formidable grandmother Zahra. She has long refused to allow any photographs in her home, preferring to keep the past under lock and key. Only after three years, when ElMoudir threatened to hire an actress to play her, did Zahra agree to play herself.

The film took eight years to finish; the filmmaker was determined to blow things up by bringing people in to interact with the dolls in their atelier three hours from Casablanca, to provide space away from their homes. The strategy is effective, as grown men are reduced to tears. One man recalls being thrown in a prison cell full of dead bodies during the 1981 Casablanca bread riots, among other horrors.

Although the co-production between Morocco, Egypt, Qatar and Saudi Arabia shared the documentary prize at Cannes, won the Un Certain Regard Best Director award, was selected as the Moroccan Oscar entry, and nominated for Best Documentary at the Indie Spirits, the film still lacks distribution. —AT

15. “Paul T. Goldman”

We’re going in the way-back machine for this blurb — or at least as far as you can go back in 2023. “Paul T. Goldman” debuted January 1 on Peacock, but we were already hooked by its trailer in late 2022.

Where do we even start in attempting to explain “Paul T. Goldman” to someone who hasn’t seen it? OK, so… it goes like this: Jason Woliner’s “true”-crime docuseries is an adaptation of Paul Finkelman’s semi-autobiographical self-published book. Who adapted the book, you might ask? Finkelman did, turning it into a screenplay and later the TV series. If only Finkelman could find the perfect leading man— oh right, he did all the acting too.

Goldman/Finkelman’s life story, including the discovery that his wife was running an international sex-trafficking ring, is almost too crazy to believe. That’s probably a good catch though, because it’s not true — not beyond being the story Paul tells himself (and others) to escape his mundane reality. Believe it or not, this zig-zagging summary only scratches the surface of one of the year’s most ambitious series. If you like cringe-watch TV, cringe-stream this one. —TM

16. “The 1619 Project”

An adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning project from The New York Times magazine sees its public face, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, lead a discussion of six different facets of Black life in America. Trying to have a nuanced, exhaustive conversation about the African American community’s relationship with capitalism or democracy is incredibly daunting, but Hannah-Jones makes it all work by leading with vulnerability. Her own life experience as a biracial woman from Iowa works well in disarming her interview subjects, often leading to conversations that end with healing tears. The “Music” episode is a particular highlight as a lot of people have interviewed legendary music producer Nile Rodgers over the years, but none have tapped so well into his singular genius. Coming from producers Roger Ross Williams and Shoshana Guy, who also worked on Netflix’s “High on the Hog,” the Emmy-nominated Hulu series is also shot just as beautifully. —MJ

17. “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie”

Oscar-winner Davis Guggenheim (“An Inconvenient Truth”), whose Concordia studio has a first look deal at Apple TV+, pitched the studio a documentary based on Michael J. Fox’s four books that “feels like an ’80s movie.” And that is what he delivered, thanks to clever use of archive footage from Fox’s career, spanning his hit TV show “Family Ties” to the “Back to the Future” series. Editor Michael Harte artfully splices Fox’s iconic roles with seven Interrotron interviews with the star, who is struggling with Parkinson’s. The movie has scale: elaborate reenactments, plenty of hit singles, a lush Hollywood score, and a charming narrator, Fox, reading his book on tape. The movie takes the audience on a helluva ride.

What sucked Guggenheim in was the quality of Fox’s writing. The opening of the movie comes straight from the book: After a night of partying with Woody Harrelson, Fox wakes up in a haze and sees his pinky trembling. The movie shows the diminutive actor on the move from the start, convincing his conservative father at age 18 to take him to L.A. for auditions. When he landed some roles, his father left him behind to manage on his own. “Family Ties” arrived just in time. Gary David Goldberg hired Fox over the objections of NBC president Brandon Tartikoff, who said he couldn’t imagine seeing Fox’s face on a lunchbox. Years later, after the top-rated show had won five Primetime Emmys including three for Fox, the actor sent Tartikoff a signed “Family Ties” lunchbox, which the network czar kept in his office for years. —AT

18. “Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence”

As a Sarah Lawrence alum, when New York Magazine broke the news about a cult that formed in 2010 in one of the dorms, I thought it was the most Sarah Lawrence thing I’d ever heard. But that magazine article was in no way preparation for “Stolen Youth,” a docuseries that harnesses its outrage to build upon the horrors perpetuated by Larry Ray. Watching survivors and witnesses share their stories (often brutal, always heartbreaking) and seeing an entire family destroyed by his manipulation and machinations is not the usual voyeuristic chill that comes from a cult documentary. There was real cruelty on display (literally, thanks to the trial that made the videos Ray recorded available to include here), and the victims’ terror and disappointment in themselves is palpable. “Stolen Youth” made the bold choice to never interview Ray; his defense is meaningless in the face of such destruction. “Stolen Youth” is never an easy watch, but it always feels like a necessary one. —MP

19. “Telemarketers”

Telemarketers are not exactly well-liked. Even before the nagging hucksters interrupting your evening dinner were replaced with robo-calls, public sentiment toward the entry-level profession wasn’t exactly sympathetic. So consider what directors Adam Bhala Lough and Sam Lipman-Stern do in HBO’s three-part documentary series, “Telemarketers,” a minor miracle. Not only does it convincingly make the case that these callers were a product of their environment — both broadly (aka predatory capitalism) and specifically (largely unmonitored offices that could get wildly out of hand) — but it creates an endearing personal portrait that’s half buddy comedy, half investigative drama.

Lipman-Stern co-stars as a former telemarketer who sets out to expose an industry-wide, insanely lucrative scam with the help of his former co-worker — and favorite on-camera star — Patrick J. Pespas. Lipman-Stern started bringing his camcorder to work decades prior, often capturing the drunk and disorderly chaos that kept phone bank employees coming back to make more calls. Just as often, he would speak directly to the camera, asking questions that would persist beyond his telemarketing career. Eventually, he’s conducting interviews outside the cubicles, as he and Pespas try to get to the bottom of a manipulative plot in which they once blindly participated. Both infuriating and satisfying, hilarious and moving, “Telemarketers” is quite a ride through territory most people would never think of stepping into. —BT

20. “32 Sounds”

Sam Green’s long career of combining documentary with live performance led to “32 Sounds.” Made for $800,000, the film debuted at the virtual edition of Sundance 2022 and ever since theaters returned, it has been playing, sometimes with live narration from Green, often with the audience wearing headphones with his voice in their heads. And for the first time, sound designer Mark Mangini (“Mad Max: Fury Road”) figured out how to do a 7:1 mix of Green’s audio so it could play on surround speakers in a theater, initially the Film Forum. Green shows you how he is recording some of the sounds, like pianist Philip Glass being upstaged by a buzzing fly, but he also fakes sounds, thanks to gifted foley artist Joanna Fang, who creates the sound of a giant evergreen falling in a snowy forest in her studio. An unaccountably moving snippet of archive sound comes from the last known species of a certain bird making the mating call for its extinct companion, and it’s heartbreaking. When Green settles into talking to an older musician who has recently lost her lifelong partner, she sits on her stoop, listening to the world around her, insects, birds, rustling trees. It makes her smile. —AT

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The Best Documentaries to Watch in 2023

From historical deep dives to fresh perspectives on some of the world’s most famous stars.

Documentaries are thriving in the age of streaming, as supply meets the endless demand for deep dives into new worlds. This year is shaping up to be a great one for documentaries and docuseries, including many in the pop culture and fashion space. Just a few examples include Pamela, A Love Story , in which the sex symbol finally gets to tell her own story; a still-untitled film on the legacy of Marvel mastermind Stan Lee; a harrowing look at the dark side of sorority recruitment at Southern universities with Bama Rush; and Pretty Baby , a nuanced look at the life and career of Brooke Shields .

Read on for W ’s best documentaries of 2023 (so far).

Release date: October 4, 2023

Where to stream: Netflix

This four-part documentary series chronicles the rise of David Beckham from his humble beginnings in east London to his status as one of the biggest athlete celebrities on the planet and how his name alone has become synonymous with the sport of soccer itself. Beckham includes interviews with Beckham himself, his friends, family, former teammates and coaches—as well as a section dedicated to his highly-publicized relationship with wife Victoria Beckham. In the first trailer for the series, Victoria recounts trying to keep their early courtship as private as possible, meeting in “car parks” to evade the public eye.

AKA Mr. Chow

Release date: October 22, 2023

Where to stream: HBO Max

Mr. Chow’s iconic restaurants have been part of the cultural zeitgeist since first popping up in the 1960s, setting a new standard for Chinese-American cuisine and becoming synonymous with an upscale dining experience. A new documentary tells the fascinating story of the man behind the food empire, Michael Chow himself. Born Zhou Yinghua in 1930s Shanghai, Mr. Chow overcame incredible odds to make a cultural impact worldwide. The film takes us on this deeply personal journey, unveiling Chow’s personal philosophies and life story, and featuring the major players across the creative industries who came to be part of his world.

Ghosts of the Chelsea Hotel (And Other Rock & Roll Stories)

Release date: TBD

Where to stream: TBD

Ghosts of the Chelsea Hotel is an insightful look into pop culture’s favorite hotel. Directed by filmmaker Danny Garcia, the documentary explores the legacy of the iconic building, which has a rich history of being a place where creative minds from all walks of life came together. Featuring interviews with past and present residents—including artists, musicians, writers and actors like The Sopranos’ Michael Imperioli, author Sherill Tippins, Harley Flanagan, Richard Barone and Cynthia Ross, the buzzy doc is filled with stories of old New York and the vibrant, chaotic scenes that unfolded at the hotel.

Donyale Luna: Supermodel

Release date: September 13, 2023

“Donyale Luna was the first Black woman to be on the cover of Vogue . Why don’t we know more about her?” This is the central question of the HBO Max documentary titled after the ’60s model who, despite her striking beauty, presence and skill as a model was overlooked and thwarted due to her race. The film chronicles Luna’s remarkable life and career; despite discrimination, she was the first Black model to cover not just Vogue (1966) but also Harper’s Bazaar (1965). It also tells the story of the fashion industry during 1960s and ’70s, putting Luna’s career in context of the sociopolitical and cultural mores of the times.

Read W’s review of Donyale Luna: Supermodel here.

Donyale Luna in March 1966.

Ladies First: A Story of Women in Hip-Hop

Release date: August 9, 2023

With 2023 marking the 50th anniversary of the birth of hip-hop, this four-part limited documentary celebrating the pioneering women of the genre is right on time. Hip-hop icons like Queen Latifah and Da Brat appear in the first trailer for Ladies First , as they recall the trials they had to go through to make their mark in a male-dominated industry. According to Netflix, the series "recontextualizes the irrepressible women of hip-hop and their role in the genre’s 50 years by reinserting them into the canon where they belong: at the center, from day one to present day."

Sometimes When We Touch

Release date: January 3, 2023

Where to stream: Paramount+

The oft-maligned subgenre of soft rock, also known in some circles as yacht rock, has its moment in the sun with Paramount+’s three-part docuseries. Artists such as Hall and Oates, Kenny Loggins, Michael McDonald, Lionel Richie, the Carpenters, and Captain & Tennille are all discussed in Sometimes When We Touch: The Reign, Ruin and Resurrection of Soft Rock . A blurb for the series notes that soft rock is “experiencing one of the most unlikely comebacks in music history.”

Break Point

Release date: January 13, 2023

Netflix’s popular Drive to Survive series, which provided a behind-the-scenes look at Formula 1 racing, now takes viewers inside the highly competitive world of tennis. The docuseries, released just ahead of the 2023 Grand Slam season, follows athletes—including Nick Kyrgios, Iga Swiatek, Sloane Stephens, Frances Tiafoe, Casper Ruud, and Stefanos Tsitsipas—as they compete in the Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open.

The 1619 Project

Release date: January 26, 2023

Where to stream: Hulu

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole-Hannah Jones hosts Hulu’s expansion of her “1619 Project,” originally created for The New York Times . The series, executive produced in part by Oprah Winfrey, seeks to reframe the history of the United States by examining the enduring legacy of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans.

Pamela, A Love Story

Release date: January 31, 2023

When Hulu’s Pam & Tommy series premiered last year, it was rumored that Pamela Anderson herself was not thrilled with unauthorized retelling of her infamous 1990s sex-tape scandal with then husband Tommy Lee. Now the actress and activist gets the chance to share her story herself with Pamela, A Love Story , an intimate look at the trajectory of Anderson’s life and career from small-town girl to sex symbol.

Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence

Release date: February 9, 2023

This three-part series investigates the story of Larry Ray, the father of a student who managed to coerce Sarah Lawrence College students into a “sex cult” on campus starting in 2010. The series features interviews from the students themselves, detailing what happened, how they survived, and how the experience continues to effect them.

Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields

Release date: April 23, 2023

Brooke Shields may have become known as “the face of the eighties” with Calvin Klein jean ads and leading roles in The Blue Lagoon and Endless Love , but even before that, the model and actor became the center of controversy at the age of 12 with her provocative performance in Louis Malle’s controversial 1978 film Pretty Baby. The Hulu documentary of the same name, directed by Lana Wilson ( Miss Americana ) and made in partnership with ABC News, takes a galvanizing look at Shields’ life and career from child model to her current day status as an American icon. Pretty Baby follows Shields’ story “as she transforms from a sexualized young girl to a woman discovering her power. Holding a mirror up to a society that objectifies women and girls, her story shows the perils and triumphs of gaining agency in a hostile world.”

Read W’s interview with Shields and Wilson here.

Love to Love You: Donna Summer

Release date: May 20, 2023

Disco icon Donna Summer became famous for wildly popular songs like “She Works Hard For the Money” and the titular “Love to Love You Baby,” even becoming the first Black female artist to debut a music video on MTV. But like any great artist, there’s far more to Summer than the stage persona that the world has come to know and love. Love to Love You: Donna Summer combines Summers’ reflections )and lots of her archival, self-shot footage from over the years), the memories of close family, friends and colleagues and her own songs to take a look at Summers’ life and impact. Direct by Oscar and Emmy-winning filmmaker Roger Ross Williams and Summer’s daughter, Brooklyn Sudano, the film “provides a rich perspective on her complexity, talent, and the adversity she faced while examining the impact that fame can have on love, art and family.”

Release date: Tuesday, May 23, 2023

If you’ve ever watched one of those spooky videos of identical-looking girls stacked up in a pyramid doing unison hand claps and cheers, this one is for you. The relatively insular world of sorority rushing was burst open for the world to see when videos of the high-pressure process went viral on TikTok in August of 2021, specifically at the University of Alabama. According to HBO Max, the streamer behind a new documentary about rushing, more than 2 billion people have watched #BamaRush content to date. HBO’s documentary, directed by filmmaker Rachel Fleit ( Introducing, Selma Blair ) follows four young women during sorority recruitment at U of A in the fall semester of 2022. The film “explores the emotional complexities and stakes of belonging in this crucial window into womanhood.”

Release date: June 21, 2023

Where to stream: Max

In The Stroll , director Kristen Lovell revisits her life as a transgender sex worker in the 1990s in the Meatpacking District of lower Manhattan, in an area known as “The Stroll.” She reunites with the women she knew at the time to talk about how they protected each other from harassment and discrimination, while also providing an intimate look at archival material of New York from the 1970s through early 2000s. The film is about transgender life, but it’s also a stark look at how gentrification changed the city, as NYC Mayor Giuliani enacted “quality of life” initiatives that forever changed its neighborhoods.

Read W’s review of The Stroll here.

Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music

Release date: June 27, 2023

A look at the making of performer Taylor Mac’s acclaimed, 24-hour immersive stage show that took place in 2016 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. The concert provided an alternative take on US history, narrated through the nation’s popular music from its founding to the present, with Mac transforming hourly into elaborate, decade-specific costumes made by Mac’s longtime collaborator, Machine Dazzle. The documentary combines footage of that performance with other shows on Mac’s tour, and examines how the audience’s commitment to the 24-hour experience is in itself an expression of community.

Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed

Release date: June 28, 2023

As one of Hollywood’s most celebrated leading men of the 1950’s and ‘60s, Rock Hudson exemplified the kind of heterosexual American male that, as the documentary trailer puts it, women wanted to be with and men wanted to be. But Hudson, now famously, was actually gay, and his diagnosis and eventual death from AIDS in 1985 shocked the world. It also shifted the way the public perceived the AIDS epidemic, and Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed takes a look at Hudson’s life, career and impact through this lens.

Stephen Curry: Underrated

Release date: July 21, 2023

Where to stream: Apple TV+

Stephen Curry: Underrated is the coming-of-age story of one of basketball’s most influential and unexpected players. The A24 and Ryan Coogler-produced doc blends archival footage, cinéma vérité and on camera interviews to tell the story of Curry’s rise from “an undersized college player at a small town Division I college to a four-time NBA champion, building one of the most dominant sports dynasties in the world.”

Invisible Beauty

Release date: September 15, 2023

Where to stream: TBD—will first have a theatrical release

From Frédéric Tcheng, the director of 2019’s Halston comes another fashion documentary about model-turned-industry titan (and co-director of the film), Bethann Hardison. Invisible Beauty charts Hardison’s legendary life and career, especially her endless advocacy for diversity on and off the runway. The film, which premiered at Sundance and will also play at Tribeca, is filled with archival footage and interviews with fellow fashion heavy-hitters like Naomi Campbell, Iman and Zendaya, serving as both an nuanced look at Hardison’s impact and the fashion industry as a whole.

Release date: June 16, 2023

Where to stream: Disney+

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has become a driving force in pop culture—and now, Disney+ has announced a documentary about the endlessly creative mind behind it all. On December 28, 2022, which would’ve been Lee’s 100th birthday, the streamer announced a new project detailing the life and legacy of the creator of such legendary characters as Spider-Man, Black Panther, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four. From his comics to his many on-screen cameos in Marvel movies, Lee has had an indelible impact on pop culture.

This article was originally published on Jan. 10, 2023

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One of 2023’s biggest cinema trends was the way accomplished filmmakers like Martin Scorsese , Greta Gerwig , Wes Anderson , Christopher Nolan , and many more delivered some of the most creatively and commercially successful work of their careers. There was just something in the air this year, as one major artist after another took big swings that connected.

The same was true in the world of nonfiction film. Half of the movies on this list were directed by filmmakers already responsible for some of the best documentaries of this era: reliable old hands like Frederick Wiseman, Errol Morris, Matthew Heineman, Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss… and again, Martin Scorsese. Perhaps there’s a greater sense of urgency as the planet veers from crisis to crisis. Our best cinematic artists don’t have time to make anything too frivolous.

Some venerable documentarians just missed the cut for this list, like Hoop Dreams director Steve James, whose film A Compassionate Spy ( streaming on Hulu , about the long aftermath of the Manhattan Project) would make a fine companion piece both to Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Morris’ The Pigeon Tunnel . See also: Wham! ( streaming on Netflix ), the excellent doc about ’80s pop heroes George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley from Chris Smith, the great director behind American Movie , Fyre , and Tiger King .

As is the case most years, many of 2023’s best documentaries were about visual artists and musicians. But even the movies here not specifically about art are still about how humans try to order and understand their world — and themselves.

10. The Pigeon Tunnel

Where to watch: Apple TV Plus

Writer David Cornwell, known to the public by his pen name, John le Carré, died in 2020. But in the last years of his life, he consented to be interviewed at length by Errol Morris, the renowned documentarian famous for his ability to keep his subjects talking until they revealed hidden truths. Given that Cornwell worked for the British intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6 — and wrote bestselling spy novels — Morris had his work cut out for him. But as The Pigeon Tunnel goes through the details of Cornwell’s life, the film poignantly captures an old man’s regrets at the broken international order his generation helped create.

9. American Symphony

Where to watch: Netflix

Director Matthew Heineman is known for hard-hitting political documentaries like Cartel Land and Retrograde , but he shifts easily into a more sentimental mode with American Symphony , a touching, inspiring film about a year in the life of musician Jon Batiste. Heineman and his crew were around as Batiste experienced both the career highs of winning an armful of Grammys (including Album of the Year) and the personal lows of watching his wife, author and journalist Suleika Jaouad , endure leukemia. This is a story about creative people turning all the stuff of life — their pasts, their joys, their heartbreaks — into art that breathes and bleeds.

8. Personality Crisis: One Night Only

Where to watch: Paramount Plus with Showtime

Killers of the Flower Moon understandably drew a lot of Martin Scorsese fans’ attention this year, but for those pining for the director’s “New York stories” side, Personality Crisis should fill that need. Co-directed with and edited by David Tedeschi — Scorsese’s creative partner on most of his recent documentaries — the film uses a David Johansen cabaret performance as the anchor for a loose, discursive look at the wild adventures of the legendary New York Dolls frontman. In interviews, on the stage, and in archival footage, Johansen describes in funny, colorful, and at times surprisingly emotional terms how the flowering of underground art in the 1960s led to proto-punk in the ’70s and to modern queer culture.

7. Smoke Sauna Sisterhood

Where to watch: Currently in select theaters

Deep in a wintry Estonian forest, a group of women gather in and around a homemade sweat lodge, where they alternate long sessions in sweltering steam with vigorous exercises in the frosty outdoors, all while completely nude. Director Anna Hints moves the camera in tight on these ladies as they soak and scrub in the twinkling, misty sunlight, and as they talk about getting older, dealing with changing family dynamics, and navigating a culture that often reduces them to their bodies alone. Smoke Sauna Sisterhood is a lovely, delicate exercise in intimacy, getting close to people who are so physically and emotionally bare that they are awake to every sensation. (YouTube won’t embed the trailer here because it’s age-restricted, but it’s viewable at the site .)

6. Aurora’s Sunrise

Where to watch: Streaming free through PBS.org through Jan. 21, 2024

A remarkable new entry in the small subgenre of animated documentaries, Aurora’s Sunrise tells the story of Aurora Mardiganian , who became a minor celebrity in the early 20th century by serving as a living witness to the atrocities visited on Armenians by the Ottoman Empire. Director Inna Sahakyan has some interview footage of Mardiganian from late in her life, and some clips from the mostly lost 1919 film Auction of Souls , starring Mardiganian and based on her memoir. But mostly, Sahakyan relies on painterly animated sequences (guided by illustrator Gediminas Skyrius ) that recreate a world which no longer exists, while also illustrating the ongoing nightmare of a woman who spent her life repeatedly describing its demise.

5. The Disappearance of Shere Hite

The title of Nicole Newnham’s The Disappearance of Shere Hite has the ring of true crime, but there’s no grim mystery here. The documentary’s subject, the late American sex researcher and bestselling author Shere Hite, merely faded from public view after moving to Germany in the ’90s. Still, the wealth of footage of Hite in this movie — sharing her controversial findings about female and male sexuality on TV talk shows in the 1970s and ’80s — becomes cumulatively haunting. Hite was a prominent public figure who forced people to rethink their preconceptions about sex. This stirring film shows how the outraged reaction to her books drove her — but not her ideas — into exile.

4. Judy Blume Forever

Where to watch: Prime Video

When directors Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok started making this moving documentary about beloved YA author Judy Blume, they likely had no idea that all the old stories about outraged parents banning Blume’s novels would become more relevant in 2023 than ever . Judy Blume Forever isn’t an overtly political film; it’s more of a gentle, sweet biography of a low-key American hero. But watching it may remind older people of how bracing it was a kid to read books like Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and Blubber , and to feel that finally an adult was telling the truth about growing up. As this movie makes clear, that’s an experience no child should be denied.

3. The Mission

Where to watch: Hulu/NatGeo

One distinguishing characteristic in the documentaries of Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss (who previously collaborated on Boys State ) is their empathy for decent people whose good intentions sometimes lead them to embrace questionable ideologies and make terrible mistakes. In The Mission , McBaine and Moss tell the story of the Christian missionary John Allen Chau, who in 2018 became a cautionary tale (and the butt of more than a few cruel internet memes) after being killed by the residents of a remote island. The film puts Chau’s willingness to violate international law in the context of missionaries throughout history, examining how religious fervor can be both personally satisfying and socially disastrous.

2. Close to Vermeer

Where to watch: Amazon , Vudu , and other digital retailers

It may not seem like there’s much to this documentary, which in 78 brisk minutes covers the efforts to mount the most comprehensive Vermeer exhibition to date, at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. But director Suzanne Raes finds a lot of fascinating wrinkles here, watching as the curators deal with the challenges of borrowing artwork, and as they face the possibility that some paintings credited to Vermeer may actually be by someone else. As the title suggests, long stretches of Close to Vermeer consist of art experts peering at canvases, discussing technique, and contemplating the concept of authorship. What starts as a kind of curatorial procedural develops into a thoughtful meditation on what makes art art.

1. Menus-Plaisirs: Les Troisgros

At 93, Frederick Wiseman delivers a late-career masterpiece with this four-hour film about a restaurant in France that’s rated among the best in the world. Working in his usual quietly observational style, Wiseman immerses the audience in long scenes with no contextual narration or on-screen titles, urging us to watch patiently and raptly as a family of great chefs and their staff shop for ingredients, debate recipes, prep elements, arrange plates, and guide their guests through a one-of-a-kind dining experience. Viewers can draw their own conclusions about the meaning of all this, though one chef’s offhand comment about the ongoing refinement of dishes offers one interpretation. Even an old master like Wiseman has to keep tinkering, finding a sense of purpose in the hundred tiny details that go into an act of creation.

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The Best Travel Documentaries to Watch on Hulu

1. 'Dark Tourist'

2. 'street food', 3. 'anthony bourdain: parts unknown', 4. 'amanda knox'.

CinemaBlend

11 Great Adventure Documentaries To Watch

Posted: May 28, 2023 | Last updated: August 3, 2023

Ready for some adventure?

Over the years, adventure documentaries have taken us on journeys few of us have been lucky enough to experience in our real lives. To the peaks of the highest mountains and depths of the deepest and darkest caves, and everywhere in between, these spellbinding documentary films put us in the passenger’s seat of some of the world’s grandest adventures. 

This is true with gems like the many mesmerizing Werner Herzog movies like Encounters at the End of the World, and 14 Peaks: Nothing is Impossible . Here is our list of the best adventure documentaries to watch.

By Philip Sledge

14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible

Most people who are brave, experienced, and crazy enough to attempt to reach the summits of all 14 of Earth’s 8,000-meter mountains do so over the course of years and decades, but the subject of the 2021 Netflix documentary, 14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible, isn’t one to hold back. In this daring and inspiring adventure documentary film, Nepali mountaineer Nirmal “Nims” Purja sets out to reach all 14 summits in seven months instead of spreading the climbs out over the course of numerous years.

With a goal like that, it’s easy to imagine that 14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible is a thrilling ride of a documentary, but like all good adventure stories, Nims Purja’s heart and devotion will leave you in awe.

180° South: Conquerors Of The Useless

The 2010 documentary, 180° South: Conquerors of the Useless, follows adventurer Jeff Johnston as he sets out to recreate the epic 1968 trip made by Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins to Patagonia, in hopes of climbing Cerro Corcovado, a 7,500-foot volcano in the Andes Mountains. The real beauty of this breathtaking and transfixing documentary is the journey itself, which Johnston completes not by flying to his destination but by sea, which presents additional obstacles and dangers.

What sets 180° South: Conquerors of the Useless apart from a lot of other documentaries like it is the heartfelt tone and relaxed pacing of the film, especially when the expedition gets delayed and the crew spend several weeks exploring Easter Island before resuming their journey.

Encounters At The End Of The World

You can’t make a list of the best documentaries without including Werner Herzog, and so we have to talk about Encounters at the End of the World . In this 2007 documentary, Herzog and cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger travel to Antarctica to spend time with the researchers, construction workers, and various support staff who live and work at the South Pole. 

Even though Encounters at the End of the World is far from the most adventurous documentary on this list, it is hard to not be inspired and carried away by Werner Herzog’s excitement and quest for adventure, as shown in multiple scenes where he grows tired and upset of being stuck in what is essentially a small town.

Free Solo , which took home an Academy Award for Best Documentary and a staggering seven Primetime Emmy Awards in 2019, follows the death-defying Alex Honnold as he attempts to climb El Capitan in Yosemite National Park without ropes, harnesses, or other safety equipment. This multi-faceted documentary doesn’t just include Honnold’s various attempts at the impossible, as it also focuses on what brought him to that point and everything he has sacrificed for that dream.

Another great aspect of Free Solo is how it focuses on co-director Jimmy Chin’s preparation to shoot the monumental feat, and how he and his crew developed techniques that made the whole thing possible.

Valley Uprising

After you check out Free Solo , you should really give Valley Uprising a watch, a 2014 documentary that sheds light on the rebellious climbers who honed their skills and gave birth to a counterculture in Yosemite National Park throughout the mid to late 20th Century. With interviews with some of the biggest figures of the movement and those they inspired, the film explores the impact of the group of young, talented, and wild climbers who were willing to risk it all and go up against just about anyone (including the National Park Service) to make their dreams come true.

Touching The Void

The 2004 documentary Touching the Void recounts the terrifying and near-fatal descent carried out by mountaineers Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, after they successfully reached the summit of the West Face of Siula Grande in Peru. But, unlike most documentaries on this list, this film combines interviews with the two men, and dramatizations of the incident with actors filling in for them. Regardless, this white-knuckle thrill ride is something that needs to be experienced by anyone who’s a fan of the genre.

Sunshine Superman

There are few activities on the face of the Earth that are more exhilarating and deadly as BASE jumping, which was brought to the forefront by Carl Boenish. The 2015 documentary, Sunshine Superman, explores the life and legacy of the man many consider the father of BASE jumping, someone who devoted everything to the sport and wanted nothing more in life than to share his love with those around him. 

With stomach-dropping footage of some of Boenish’s biggest and most dangerous jumps and interviews with those closest to him, the documentary paints a loving portrait of the legendary thrill-seeker.

The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young

In 1977, James Earl Ray, the man who assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. nearly 10 years earlier, escaped from the Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Tennessee, but only covered eight miles in the span of 55 hours. Years later, Gary Cantrell claimed he could run at least 100 miles during that same stretch of time and created the Barkley Marathon, a 60-hour ultramarathon where only 40 runners are allowed to participate, after submitting an essay, random articles of clothing, and having paid the $1.60 entry fee.

Over the course of the 2015 documentary, The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young , a group of dedicated (and crazy) runners attempt to complete a race that has only seen a couple of finishers since it was first held decades ago.

Desert Runners

The 2013 documentary, Desert Runners, follows a group of non-professional athletes who set out to achieve one seemingly impossible and dangerous goal: complete 4 Deserts, a series of ultramarathons in Chile, Mongolia, Namibia, and Antarctica. Over the course of the 90-minute documentary, the participants test themselves physically, mentally, and spiritually, as they stay true to their goals and themselves, unwilling to throw in the towel. 

Expedition Happiness

Driving from one end of America to another makes for quite an adventure, but traversing the length of the entire continent of North America is something entirely else. In the 2017 documentary, Expedition Happiness , Felix Starck and Selima Taibi (and their dog), convert an old school bus into a home on wheels and drive from Alaska to Mexico in hopes of finding peace, meaning, and happiness on the open road. This proves to be no easy task as the travel companions battle the elements, open road, and dangers that await around every turn.

Losing Sight Of Shore

The 2017 documentary, Losing Sight of Shore, follows a group of four women known as the Coxless Crew as they set out to achieve the impossible: row 8,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean from San Francisco, California, to Australia, with nothing but a modest-sized boat, their strength, and each other. This empowering and challenging documentary shows just how far a group of people can push themselves to make their dreams come true. With only a few stops for supplies along the way, the fearless and tireless group spends nine months crossing the ocean, doing something no one has done before.

These are just some of the great adventure documentaries that are worth checking out, as there are hundreds of amazing and inspiring true stories of thrill-seekers, adventurers, and those unwilling to back down from anything even when their lives are on the line.

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