Best Documentaries of 2025

Andrew Jarecki’s most powerful film since “Capturing the Friedmans” is an exposé of the systemic inhumanity of the American prison system. Filmed over five years, in and around the Easterling Correctional Facility in Southeast Alabama, it’s a scalding portrait of life on the inside that becomes a muckraking murder mystery. Following in the incendiary footsteps of films like “Attica,” “13th,” and “The Farm: Angola, USA,” Jarecki reveals a culture of sanctified lawlessness, much of it chronicled by the prisoners on contraband cell phones. And the way the movie peels off layers of a cover-up becomes as dramatic as the crimes it’s about. —Owen Gleiberman   

Five years after her superb “The Edge of Democracy,” director Petra Costa takes stock of the far-right era of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. But this sobering and impassioned look at the evangelical age of Brazilian politics resonates far beyond Brazil. Costa may be glad to speak of Bolsonaro’s tenure in the past tense, but she is not done analyzing its origins and implications. The film’s key person of interest is the Pentecostal televangelist Silas Malafaia, a self-styled political puppeteer with rigid right-wing beliefs who is presented as the charismatic crux figure of Brazil’s new populist politics — more influential than the individuals he endorses. The film’s startling, climactic depiction of the January 2023 riots by incensed Bolsonaro voters that followed his electoral defeat offers a striking parallel to the Trumpist storming of the Capitol two years before. —Guy Lodge

In the 1990s, Thomas Kinkade, painter of utopian pastoral settings, ornate Christmas country cottages that glow from within, and (peering through it all) pastel magic-hour sunbeams that look an awful lot like the light of God, became the most successful commercial artist of his time; he was like Norman Rockwell, Bob Ross, and Andy Warhol rolled into one. Miranda Yousef’s fascinating documentary is a study of Kinkade’s aesthetic sincerity, his commercial voraciousness, and the dark side he kept under wraps. His art had a cozy splendor that Middle Americans cherished and that the chattering classes dismissed as kitsch. It was more than kitsch, though. Kinkade painted life as an earthly daydream blessed, in a nearly tactile way, by a wholesome higher power. Yet he had to repress part of who he was to do it, and as the film traces his rise and fall, which includes his alcoholic descent and the disturbed private paintings he kept hidden in a vault, it makes his contradictions tantalizing in part because it never fully penetrates them. —OG

Jackie Jesko’s portrait of the legendary, groundbreaking television icon is a lot like its subject. It’s sharp and inquiring in a playful way. It asks friendly questions but knows when to toss in a tough one. It sizes up important people with worldly perception, but it’s also enthralled by the seductions of fame and money and power. The movie delivers Walters’ story in all its tasty fascination and significance (for the first 15 years of her career, she was smashing glass ceilings with every new TV role she took), capturing the fusion of politics and entertainment she was instrumental in forging. —OG

There are many ways to live around an active volcano, and Gianfranco Rosi’s humming, keen-eyed study of those who live in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius is interested in all of them. The Italian filmmaker spent three years filming in and around Naples to create this layered and rewarding study of modern living amid remnants of ancient history. Near Vesuvius, fumaroles release pale breaths of volcanic gas and steam, but there’s man-made smoke, too, of the type that provides steady work for the members of Naples’ put-upon fire department. They’re the most prominently featured of several municipal bodies surveyed here, in a way that lends “Below the Clouds” something of Frederick Wiseman’s inside-out interest in how cities tick. —GL

Susan Lacy and Jessica Levin’s luscious longform movie traces its subject’s life and career with disarming candor, testifying to the contradictions that fueled Billy Joel’s incandescent pop. What takes you by surprise is the film’s emotional gravity. “And So It Goes” is not a once-over-lightly, papering-over-the-valleys portrait of a pop star. It includes plenty of warts, but more than that it shows you how Joel’s complicated and not always happy life was poured into his irresistible and in many ways deceptively buoyant pop. The movie pays tribute to how Joel fused the confessional vibe of the early-’70s singer-songwriter boom with the musical architecture of Tin Pan Alley, and it captures how he arrived as a romantic pop star who remained, to a fault, a pugnacious fighter. —OG  

Director Kahlil Joseph radically reimagines the world through a Black lens, while self-reflexively observing the difficulties of doing so. His film is a pulsing, essayistic docu-fiction that defies categorization. It unfolds partially on a futuristic, polygonal transatlantic vessel, but this is merely the anchor for an elliptical collage of personal and political history. Among the film’s touchstones is techno music, a genre whose Black origins are often obscured, but which Joseph deploys to tremendous effect, turning the sounds of Detroit first-wave artists into guiding tempos that take on the ebb and flow of a carefully curated album. From academic talks to viral videos to debates on modern museums, all merged with the audio-visual mischief of late-period Godard, “BLKNWS” combines footage from a vast spectrum of experience and influence, and the effect is at once thought-provoking and soul-stirring. —Siddhant Adlakha

The fabled stoner comedy duo get their own documentary, and it’s good enough to give you a contact high. We learn about their life stories (Chong was an accomplished musician in a group signed by Motown; Cheech was passionate about being a potter), their beyond-random meet-up, the way they invented a vibe of comedy that’s now as mainstream as the cannabis outlet down the block…and, tying the film together in a rather delightful way, we get the two of them today, driving through the desert in a Rolls Royce with a marijuana-leaf hood ornament, still smokin’ and still at war. Getting high was once thought of as a revolutionary activity, a path to freeing your mind from excessive, conventional rationality. Before long, though, it had become just another zoned-out hedonistic middle-class pastime. “Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie” celebrates how Cheech and Chong made comic gold out of the pivot point between those two things. They made us laugh at how we’d all learned to stop worrying and love the bong. —OG

A luminous portrait of two poets navigating an incurable diagnosis. Director Ryan White has made a movie that mirrors how he felt when he first arrived at the home of spoken word artist Andrea Gibson, who had been diagnosed with incurable ovarian cancer, and their spouse, poet Megan Falley. One could chalk up the film’s intimacy to good old-fashioned vérité, but there’s something more lyrical at work. Gibson and Falley don’t pretend that White and his crew aren’t in their home. On the contrary, they treat the filmmakers — and therefore us — with amity. And in the midst of it all, poetry proves essential. Through their words and deeds, Gibson offers gentle tutorials of language, meaning, hurt, redemption. The film invites us to ask: What is poetry? How does it make its meaning? Why does it offer solace like so few other art forms? —Lisa Kennedy   

Laura Poitris’s enthralling portrait of Seymour Hersh is a movie that makes you ask: Where have all the investigative reporters gone? Fifty years later, the stories that Hersh reported — like the My Lai massacre — are now iconic. Yet in charting the evolution of his career, the documentary captures how uncovering corruption is the opposite of automatic; it’s always a mountain to climb. Terse, buttoned-down, owlishly inquiring behind his horn-rims, with a clean-cut Middle American conventionality, Hersh was, and is, a spiky customer, but he wasn’t a pie-in-the-sky purist agitator. He was a regular guy who simply wanted the truth to get out there. The key lesson of “Cover-Up” is that when it comes to crucial stories of corruption, just about every situation is layered, booby-trapped, woven with deception. The true reporters, like Hersh, are those who dare to expose what they’re told not to. —OG

Chris Smith’s film about the jump-suited robo-rock avatars of de-evolution is as much fun as its subject. It’s 90 minutes of dazzlingly edited surrealist audio-visual candy, as it traces Devo’s music and videos, their roots in the embers of the counterculture, their freak success, and their big message, which remains prophetic and often misunderstood. The band’s leaders, Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale, had a major insight: that in the new America, rebellion had become part of The System, so that even “progressive” people were now living in a world of cookie-cutter orthodoxy, of obedience. The band’s real theme wasn’t “de-evolution” — it was fascism. Yet the documentary captures how this once-and-still-subversive message was embodied in songs of extraordinary catchy power, from “Come Back Jonee” to “Beautiful World,” a gripping goose-step anthem that haunts you with its irony. —OG  

Peter Yost and Michael Rohatyn’s riveting look at how New York City nearly went bankrupt in 1975: a cataclysm that echoes into the current moment. The film’s archival footage, dominated by politicians and bankers and city officials, is a saga of bad ties, bad shirts, bad haircuts, and bad lighting — the real-life New York caught by the Sidney Lumet of “Serpico” and “Dog Day Afternoon.” And that’s not to mention the bad money. There was a level of fiscal irresponsibility that had gone for far too long (records stuffed into a thousand different drawers, no bookkeeping). Yet the underlying problem was that New York was still a place that believed in however much government it took to help its citizens succeed. It was going to help its workers and residents, even if it couldn’t afford to do so. “Drop Dead City” unfolds like a thriller, but it’s also a wonkish and fascinating glimpse into how the city’s legendary crisis revealed a crack in the liberal dream. —OG

Amy Berg’s film reverently captures the late rocker who sang like Nina Simone crossed with Robert Plant crossed with the voice of an angel. He had a singular gift (it’s as if he’d been given a different instrument from everyone else in pop). Yet Jeff Buckley, for all his cult mystique, was as much a rock ‘n’ roller as he was a hipster chanteuse, and watching the movie, it’s clear that had he lived he could have been a staggeringly huge star. Skinny and raw-boned, with dark eyes and a razory grin, he was a real James Dean: the kind of glamorously tousled rock star they don’t make anymore. And Berg colors in the underpinnings of his life that lent it a nearly mythological aura. Buckley’s father was Tim Buckley, the late-’60s folk rocker who ditched Jeff before he was even born. Jeff’s death, in 1997, was a tragic accident, but what he did in the end was to mirror his father’s abandonment — of the world, and of Jeff. —OG

H.E.R., the 27-year-old R&B pop star, directed this irresistible celebration of the ’70s funk-soul legend, and it’s not like other music docs. It’s structured as a series of conversations between H.E.R. and a handful of the musicians who bear the influence of Mayfield’s bravura (Dr. Dre, Maxwell, Mary J. Blige, John Legend); they take you from the incandescent “Move On Up” through his soundtrack to “Super Fly” (like the music for “Saturday Night Fever,” practically a movie unto itself) through his incalculable influence on the social-protest soul music of the ’70s. The film includes plenty of archival footage of Mayfield: concert clips, performances on “Soul Train” and “Hullabaloo,” interviews. And what comes across is the fascinating way that his persona simply didn’t fit the image of the revolutionary music star he was. He was short, with a rabbity grin and small rectangular-wire-framed glasses, and his look didn’t match the voice that came out of it. Yet that voice soared to the heavens. And no artist of the time ever plugged you more beautifully into what’s going on. —OG 

A powerful and poignant film that chronicles the disturbing militarization of Russian schools in the wake of the war in Ukraine. Working from Pavel “Pasha” Talankin’s first-hand footage, director David Borenstein exposes the extreme tactics employed by the Russian government to indoctrinate students. With the snappy casualness of a day-in-the-life vlog, Pasha, a charismatic Russian teacher who serves as planner and videographer for all his school’s events, introduces his peculiar small town: Karabash, known as one of most toxic places on Earth due to a copper smelting plant, but a place where Pasha has built a safe haven within his classroom. Yet when Putin passes a law that will sentence anyone deemed a “traitor to the motherland” to life in prison, the stakes of his ongoing vérité diary gain alarming significance. —Carlos Aguilar

Rebecca Miller’s five-part portrait of Martin Scorsese is one of the most electrifying movies about a movie director ever made. It burns the Scorsese mythology down to essential moments — of invention and audacity, of addiction and career death (which happened to him twice), of survival and triumph fueled by genius. And it teems with extraordinary stories that make you feel like you’re seeing all of this for the first time. Miller hunts down and interviews the gangster who was the model for Robert De Niro’s Johnny Boy in “Mean Streets.” She captures, with unprecedented candor, how Scorsese’s descent into cocaine fever in the mid-to-late ’70s nearly killed him; how De Niro convinced him to make “Raging Bull” to save him (the film was about Jake LaMotta’s lack of faith, the very quality that had fueled Scorsese’s addiction); how Scorsese carried around so much rage that during his marriage to Isabella Rossellini, he would trash entire rooms; how he shot “The Last Temptation of Christ” on no budget doing 25 set-ups a day; and on and on in a roller-coaster of sin and despair and creativity and redemption. What’s special about the documentary is that Scorsese’s relationship to his own film protagonists has always been so personal (every one of them…is him) that “Mr. Scorsese” achieves the intensity of a Scorsese film, only with Marty himself as the hungry, tormented, high-flying hero. —OG  

At nearly five-and-a-half hours (divided into five chapters), Julia Loktev’s film is less typical docu-journalism and more akin to “War and Peace.” What starts off as a look at Loktev’s friends and colleagues being branded “foreign agents” by the Russian state evolves in real time, as Russia invades Ukraine and Loktev winds up shooting much of the movie on her outdated iPhone X, yielding stark realistic hues and an intimacy seldom seen in political documentaries. The journalists’ camaraderie takes center stage in the film’s second half, which builds to stunning climactic moments of the “I can’t quite believe this was captured on camera” variety. Loktev’s immersion in the action provides a pulse-pounding quality when things come crumbling down, resulting in an intimate, enormous, and urgent political portrait of speaking truth to power, and speaking it together. —SA

A nimble and infectious portrait of the quintessential magazine. In just 96 minutes, Marshall Curry’s film brings off a trick more challenging than it looks (in that way, it’s a lot like the magazine). It lays out the fabled history of The New Yorker and colors in its larger cultural significance. It gives us a close-up, between-the-lines portrait of how The New Yorker gets put together each week and folds all this into the enticing story of the magazine’s vibe and aesthetic: the way its commitment to truth and beauty are flip sides of the same coin, and how its manner of looking at the world, while up-to-the-minute and fully alive, is slyly rooted in the analog sanity of an earlier time. And it shows us David Remnick, the magazine’s editor since 1998, doing his daily two-step of menschy straightforwardness and Machiavellian demand. It also spotlights those moments (John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood”) when the magazine shifted the culture and altered the essence of journalism. The film shows us that we might need The New Yorker now more than ever, even as the magazine undergoes the ultimate stress test: Is there a place in our fractious civilization for a publication this civilized? —OG  

A revelatory inside look at John Lennon, in concert and in the world. It deals with the period just before the Lost Weekend, starting in August 1971, when John and Yoko moved from their country estate outside London to New York City, where they spent 18 months living in a small apartment in the West Village (where they spent most of their time watching television). The film takes its title from a pair of 1972 benefit concerts Lennon gave at Madison Square Garden with the Plastic Ono Elephant’s Memory Band, and what’s staggering, seeing it now, is what a powerful kick the music delivers; it gives the film shape and propulsion. But so does the way that director Kevin Macdonald, keying off Lennon’s TV habit, presents images of the period as a heady channel-surfing montage. He also allows us to listen in on Lennon’s private phone calls, giving us a sense of the former Beatle in all his contradictions: a radical who was also a TV couch potato; a powerful rock star who devoted himself to pleasing his avant-garde wife, even as he held onto his libertine edge; a dyed-in-the-wool Brit who became the ultimate New Yorker. —OG

Not as great as many have said, but still good, Raoul Peck’s meditation on George Orwell and “Nineteen Eighty-Four” makes a central point of how timely Orwell’s message is now. That might seem a vital and inevitable thing to say in 2025, as the spirit of totalitarianism rises around the globe, most dramatically in the United States. Yet even as the film highlights the relevance of Orwell’s vision of oppression, it gives short shrift to what was most brilliant and indelible about “Nineteen Eighty-Four” — its deconstruction of totalitarianism’s mental strategy, its way of breaking people down through the acrobatics of mass insanity. (The book is a head trip about fascist head-tripping.) That said, “Orwell: 2+2 = 5,” while it doesn’t attain the rich depths of Peck’s “I Am Not Your Negro,” offers a soulful portrait of Orwell’s tumultuous life, and an instructive look at how his sinister fantasia of existence in a prison society emerged from it. —OG

The late Paul Reubens opens up — when he doesn’t close up — in an expansive portrait. Matt Wolf’s two-part documentary gives the man behind Pee-wee Herman a platform to come out of the closet, but it doesn’t mask the tension between a filmmaker and a subject who has understandable trust issues. At 200 minutes carved from over 40 hours of interviews, “Pee-wee as Himself” is the last word on a life and career that retained secrets and mysteries even after attaining an invasive degree of celebrity. The film does justice to its subject’s sui generis artistry — a blend of experimental performance, broad comedy and high queer camp that caught imaginations of all ages — while giving scrutiny to the offscreen legal troubles that unfairly threw his career off-course. Reubens is a generous, engaging raconteur on all such matters, while allowing himself to be drawn halfway out on a personal life he kept close to his chest up until his death. But it’s the brittle, unsettled dynamic of the interview footage that makes the film unusual and engrossing, as Wolf and Reubens grapple for control of a story that each wants to tell very differently. —GL 

Reconstructing an escalating dispute from video recordings made by 911 responders, director Geeta Gandbhir reveals how white citizens attempt to leverage the police against people of color. Her film focuses on the shocking case of a local Florida grouch, Susan Lorincz, who went all Clint Eastwood on a trespasser. That’s an admittedly flip way to describe a real-life tragedy that resulted in the death of an African American single mom like “AJ” Owens. Then again, movies like “Gran Torino” have a way of encouraging violent solutions. Both formally innovative and philosophically necessary, “The Perfect Neighbor” is a true-crime documentary that tensely recreates this dispute — from the first 911 call to the final courtroom verdict — almost entirely from official footage, most of it taken from police bodycams. The police come off here looking like the good guys, doing their best to defuse the situation. If only Owens had been the one to call them, things might have turned out differently. —PD

David Osit’s quietly trenchant film examines the ghoulish NBC hit “To Catch a Predator” and its cultural legacy over two decades, querying the show’s ethics, its insight, and its effectiveness as an instrument of justice. The premise was so simple — naive, even — that it’s surprising “To Catch a Predator” worked for as long as it did. The producers would identify men seeking sex with minors in online chatrooms, using decoy actors to lure them to a secretly camera-rigged house where they would be ambushed by host Chris Hansen and, later, local law enforcement. Psychological probing was never on the agenda. The slick, righteous pull of the episodes stands in stark contrast to remarkable, untelevised raw footage that Osit has uncovered of police rather more temperately interrogating the show’s targets. Dehumanization was the easier, grabbier approach — at least, until the infamous incident where a botched sting culminated in the suicide of the perpetrator. “Predators” is slow to condemn but precise and insistent in its moral inquiry of what the show has wrought — and its lingering impact on participants, viewers, and abuse survivors. —GL

A valuable and arresting portrait of Leni Riefenstahl that looks closer at the question: Was the infamous, virtuosic Nazi filmmaker complicit in Nazi crimes? Riefenstahl made her films for Hitler, who she was personally chummy with, so there’s no doubt that on some level she made a deal with the devil. But what was the deal? What, exactly, did she know? Andres Veiel, the director of “Riefenstahl,” was given access to the archives of the Riefenstahl estate, and this allows him to showcase a great deal of material that has never been seen in public before: photographs, diaries, tape recordings of Riefenstahl’s phone conversations. Here are images of Reifenstahl in the company of Hitler, the two smiling and clasping hands. Here’s a record of her relationship with Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda who wooed her and tried, in his apartment, to sexually assault her. “Riefenstahl” presents more evidence than we’ve seen up until now that Riefenstahl was embedded in the regime. Yet the evidence remains circumstantial. And what is perhaps most telling about the film is that in its indictment of Riefenstahl, it insists, as Susan Sontag did, in using her work as a transcendent expression of her guilt. —OG

“Should I fight or should I film?” When the war in Ukraine began, Artem Ryzhykov made a decision: He would fight and he would film. He became a Ukrainian filmmaker soldier, steeped in the trenches but relentlessly holding his camera, carving out the existential historical record of what went on. The images in “A Simple Soldier” are open-eyed, harrowing, indelible. We’re right there in the middle of the chaos and the national breakdown. The film colors in much of what we’ve heard and read and seen about the war in Ukraine, only this one captures a slice of war that’s almost vividly ordinary. The film’s most haunting comment comes from a woman who says, “I don’t know why we were torn out of ordinary life. None of us have a spare life.” And that’s the film’s wrenching upshot. We’re watching a citizen record a life that has been subsumed in the totality of war. Near the end, when Artem lets out a scream, it’s like hearing the inner anguish of Ukraine, a nation that has been torn out of the very life it’s fighting for. —OG

Amir “Questlove” Thompson’s dazzling documentary levels up from “Summer of Soul,” exploring the life and legacy of Sly Stone in a kaleidoscopic and profound way. You can feel Questlove working furiously to get it all in — the story of how Sly became the rock star of his moment, smashing through boundaries of sound and image, scaling the peak of a new kind of Black fame, to the point that he had nowhere to go but down. As sexual as Mick Jagger, he took the bottom-heavy, on-the-beat DNA invented by James Brown and gave it wings, elevating funk by fusing it with pop and rock ‘n’ roll, until it was more thrilling than the sum of its parts. For all the grit of his aesthetic, he had a joy he elevated into an ideology. But then he destroyed his success with drugs; after a while, he seemed to vanish. And it’s one of the headier themes of the movie that Sly, having changed an art form by inventing the template for so much of the music of the ’70s, was made vulnerable by his success in a way that (the film suggests) a white pop star would not have been. Without making any excuses for him, the movie explores the war in his soul. —OG

Ben Stiller directs an unexpectedly moving documentary about his famous comedian parents. It’s a portrait of Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, the husband-and-wife comedy team who first came to prominence on “The Ed Sullivan Show” (they made their debut appearance there in 1963) and then became a popular nightclub and TV-variety-show staple in the ’60s and ’70s. There was an edge of conviction to their act, because they drew it from their own lives, and their love and (at times) acrimony would spill right onto the stage. The movie, after a while, begins to morph from a likable entertainment-world profile into something more resonant — a nearly novelistic portrait of Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara’s life-and-art marriage. —OG

Conspiracies are a dime a dozen in dramatic features, but when a documentary unravels a conspiracy, it can take on the kind of hushed suspense that those films used to have and rarely do anymore. Bao Nguyen’s riveting film is framed as a mystery: an inquiry into the true authorship of the famous Vietnam War photograph, taken on June 8, 1972, in the town of Trảng Bàng, that showed the aftermath of a napalm attack — a 9-year-old girl named Phan Thį Kim Phúc running, naked, toward the camera, her arms outstretched like broken wings, her mouth open in a scream of agony. Who took the historic photo known as “Napalm Girl”? Was it Nick Út, who the photo was credited to and who won the Pulitzer Prize for it? Or was it Nguyen Thanh Nghe, a freelance photographer who was there that day as well? “The Stringer” is rapt, urgent, and absorbing, a potent human story of daunting cultural resonance. And at the climax, when the filmmakers hand over their evidence to a group of forensic experts in Paris, who do a meticulous computer-based analysis of which figures stood precisely where and when during those crucial few minutes in Trảng Bàng, it really is like combing through the Zapruder film, looking for that crucial visual detail that will bring the hidden reality into focus. —OG

A shattering expedition to the frontline of the war in Ukraine. The Oscar-winning Mstyslav Chernov follows up 2023’s “20 Days in Mariupol” with another full-tilt, you-are-there plunge into the living hell of war, this time from the perspective of Ukrainian soldiers. Like its predecessor, this is an angry, viscerally illustrative film — but it’s a weary one too. Some of the soldiers Chernov follows into battle remain gung-ho about defeating the enemy; others, like the filmmaker himself, voice fears that there’s no end in sight. Amid the turmoil, Chernov’s camera captures small, poignant character sketches of the Ukrainian men putting their lives on the line to potentially win back one patch of land. “Andriivka” is less tersely journalistic and more pensively devastating than “Mariupol” — a film of its moment, and an agonizingly extended moment at that. —GL