Netflix is one of the most prolific documentary producers around. That means there’s a huge array of choices—but not all of them are good. To help you sift through the glut, we’ve picked out some of our favorite Netflix documentaries, from science to sport, politics to true crime. And if this isn’t enough for you, we also have a list of the best documentaries available on Amazon Prime.
An Indianapolis fertility doctor helped women get pregnant for decades, with one horrific catch: He secretly used his own sperm instead of their chosen donors. Now adults, dozens of his children—who discovered each other through home DNA testing service 23andMe—want answers. Our Father isn’t just about the personal impact this revelation has on the victims. It traces their difficult path seeking justice under a legal system unequipped to deal with an ethical violation of this nature.
Joan Didion is undoubtedly one of the 20th century’s most iconic writers—a journalist with a prose style few others have mastered. This documentary, directed by her nephew, the actor Griffin Dunne, sheds new light on Didion as it follows her unmatchable career in the 1960s and ’70s through to the present, including the publication of 2005’s seminal book The Year of Magical Thinking, written following the sudden death of her husband. Raw and emotive, it’s essential for any fan of her work, or of stellar writing in general. While this documentary might, because Dunne is chronicling his aunt, lack a little bit of objectivity, it makes up for it by having Didion answer questions few people might even know to ask.
Say what you will about Taylor Swift (most people do), but her ascent has been fascinating. Miss Americana follows Swift in the years after her album 1989 rocketed her to pop stardom. Beginning as Swift’s Reputation tour winds down, it delves into her mother’s cancer diagnosis, her feud with Kanye West, and her involvement in politics, including her allyship with the LGTBQ+ community. Perhaps, like Swift’s career itself, the doc is overly varnished, but for anyone who wanted at least a tiny peek behind the curtain of her life, it’s the best there is.
An exploration of the origins of the “conversion therapy” movement—a harmful and medically denounced process though which religious groups try to “cure” homosexuality—may not make for light entertainment, but this searing look at the practice and its roots is darkly compelling. Director Kristine Stolakis speaks with key founders of the movement and survivors of the often brutal treatments that arose over nearly half a century.
Director Sam Feder points a wide lens at the roles and representations of transgender people in film. Disclosure also asks viewers to reconsider some Hollywood favorites and look at how, for decades, they provided only harmful or mocking views of any form of gender diversity. It’s filled with insightful interviews from trans actors and creators—including Orange is the New Black’s Laverne Cox, Pose’s Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, The Matrix's Lilly Wachowski, and Chaz Bono—and with a particular emphasis on Black trans lives, this is an important documentary, now more than ever.
Yes, this is a documentary about black holes. But it’s really a documentary about the scientific process and humanity’s ceaseless pursuit of knowledge. It follows two teams of scientists grappling with different challenges. One team is working to capture the first image of a black hole, while the other is trying to solve the so-called information paradox. It’s both an important historical record of how major scientific breakthroughs are made and a somewhat strange, disjointed love letter to science itself.
In 1986 the space shuttle Challenger suffered total disaster, breaking up 73 seconds after launch and killing all seven crew members on board. The tragedy reshaped the space program. In this four-part documentary, the crew’s surviving family members and former NASA engineers and officials help retell the story of the disaster and dive into the mechanical failures and decision-making processes behind the tragedy.
In October 1985, in Salt Lake City, two people were killed by pipe bombs in incidents that seemed to be related to the lucrative trade in rare Mormon documents. The following day, Mark Hoffman—who had a track record of uncovering documents that were damaging to the Mormon church—was grievously injured after a bomb went off in his car. This three-part true crime documentary explains what happens next and offers a fascinating look at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and a man who wasn’t quite what he seemed.
This documentary tells the story of a group of Facebook sleuths who tried to track down Luka Magnotta, a man who was later convicted of killing and dismembering 33-year-old Chinese undergrad student Jun Lin. It’s a fascinating look at how ordinary people can root out a killer using the same internet tools that are available to everyone.
America has spent billions on its so-called war on drugs—but has it worked? This documentary charts the rise of crack cocaine in the 1980s and ’90s by telling the stories of those whose lives have been ruined by the drug—including the dealers who, at one point, made small fortunes from their work. It covers the drug’s origins, illegal imports into the US, and the ensuing “crack babies” media frenzy.
Walter Mercado was a fixture of Latin American life in the 1980s and ’90s. Every day he would appear, flamboyantly swirling his bejeweled capes and sporting impossibly feathery hair, to read people's horoscopes on TV. Then he vanished. The personal life of the androgynous Puerto Rican astrologer was something of a mystery. Like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, he ended up isolated in his mansion, surrounded by paraphernalia of his glory years and guarded by a protective assistant called Willie. Unlike Desmond, his ending isn’t tragic. When the 80-year old, once described as “bigger than Jesus Christ,” appears on camera for this documentary, he sparkles but seems smaller and more vulnerable . This loving tribute to Mercado is too indulgent at times, but it does something unique: It shows that the man under the cape was just the same as the man on screen—wonderful, weird, and the real deal.
Tell Me Who I Am is a sometimes verbose but also engrossing documentary about brotherhood and trauma—both psychological and physical. The latter and the former collide when Alex Lewis, an 18-year-old from southern England, has a motorcycle accident and forgets almost everything about his life. All Alex can remember is that a young man standing at his bedside is his identical twin, Marcus, and that he can trust him. Back in his family home, Alex asks Marcus to help him reconstruct his past: Does he have a girlfriend? How is his relationship with their parents? For more than 10 years, Alex lives in an idyllic world of Marcus’ making. But after their mother’s death, the amnesiac twin realizes that his brother might have sugar-coated the past.
This harrowing documentary follows journalists from The Indianapolis Star as they uncover an abuse scandal at the heart of American gymnastics. Reporters exposed how elite gymnasts faced abuse from the adults they trusted with their careers and how USA Gymnastics, the sport’s governing body, covered up what was happening. As an Olympic doctor is sent to jail, the documentary tells the story through the survivors who spoke out against the way they were treated.
Before David Beckham and Cristiano Ronaldo, there was Michael Jordan. The 1990s Chicago Bulls were a force of nature—and Jordan in particular helped create the superstar athlete genre with his skill and grace both on and off the basketball court. The Last Dance is, ostensibly, a look at the final season for that great Bulls team. But it’s about more than that. The action jumps back and forth between 1998 and the late ’80s and early ’90s when Jordan was dominating basketball, using a mixture of archive clips and never-before-seen footage. It’s fascinating to see the interactions between some major characters—and it’s an engrossing watch, even if you know nothing about basketball.
This documentary may make you angry, but it comes no closer to unraveling the mystery around the life and death of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. It focuses on the women who accused him of abusing them and trafficking them to other powerful men. Again and again, they tell their stories, describing how they were lured to his house in Palm Beach, or to his private island, and abused. The voices of these women are put center stage as they say that the trail of monsters goes far beyond Epstein and that justice has yet to be done.
When celebrated journalist Gay Talese stumbles upon the story of Gerald Foos—a former motel owner who built special rooms to peep on his guests—he thinks he has the story and character of a lifetime. A book deal and an excerpt in The New Yorker suggest he might be right. But when these two dueling personalities—and their egos—start to unravel, so does the story Talese is trying to tell. What begins as a story about one perverted peeper ends with two oddballs struggling for control of their own narrative.
This true crime fly-on-the-wall documentary centers on the trials and tribulations of an Oklahoma zoo owner called Joe Exotic and his nemesis, an animal rights activist named Carole Baskin. Sure, it’s a show about lions and tigers trapped in cages. But it’s also about some of the most dislikable and downright fascinating people you’re ever likely to come across. This is dirty, grizzly, car crash TV at its very best.
Bikram yoga emerged in the 1970s and has since taken over the world, with a huge number of celebrity endorsements. Exercise aside, Bikram yoga has grown in popularity thanks to its eponymous and enigmatic founder, Bikram Choudhury. This documentary exposes the shaky foundations of Choudhury’s empire and the man himself. In recent years, he has been accused of rape, settled civil suits against him, and fled the United States after refusing to pay $6.8 million in legal damages.
The food we eat often has a hidden backstory—and Rotten seeks to expose it. From the cartels controlling the avocado industry to chicken farming sabotage, each episode of Rotten takes on the strange and often dangerous world of food production.
After An Inconvenient Truth and He Named Me Malala, award-winning director Davis Guggenheim explores the journey of renowned tech visionary and philanthropist Bill Gates. The three-part documentary takes viewers through Gates’ upbringing and marriage and the creation of Microsoft. The real subject, though, is the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a charity that is on a mission to solve some of the world’s most persistent problems—from battling infectious diseases and child mortality in developing countries to educating vulnerable communities in the US.
After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, a group of activists got together to try and change US politics. The result was an influx of new candidates for Congress in the 2018 midterm elections. Knock Down the House follows four of them in the months leading up to the Democratic primaries: a mother from Nevada, a nurse from Missouri, a miner’s daughter from West Virginia, and a 28-year-old bartender from the Bronx named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It’s an uplifting, optimistic glimpse of a different kind of politics.
How well do you really know the Cambridge Analytica scandal? This two-hour documentary digs into the origins of the political and data science consultancy whose dodgy use of data kicked off a congressional hearing in the US and a parliamentary inquiry in the UK and left Facebook with a $5 billion fine and a shattered reputation. Told by the journalist and whistleblower who broke the story and people close to Cambridge Analytica, The Great Hack lifts the lid on the standout scandal of the Big Data era.
Sports can be brutal—particularly if the results don’t go your way. Losers focuses on the individuals and teams that make the headlines for the wrong reasons. Each episode zeroes in on a different story: From the ultrarunner lost in the desert and presumed dead to the Torquay United football team that owes much of its recovery from financial oblivion to a police dog, each 30-minute episode shows how epic defeats often outshine even the greatest victories.
Fyre Festival took place in the summer of 2017, but its reputation has lived on for years, thanks in no small part to social media. Created by Billy McFarland, CEO of Fyre Media Inc, and rapper Ja Rule, the event was billed as the don't-miss festival of the year: influencers, celebrities, and musicians rubbing shoulders in a tropical paradise. The reality? Total chaos—and this documentary captures it in all its glory.
Narrated by David Attenborough and produced by the team behind the BBC’s Planet Earth, Our Planet is a nature documentary on an epic scale. The whole series is available in 4K, so if you’ve got a compatible TV and the right Netflix subscription, you’re in for a treat. But as much as it’s a celebration of our planet, this series is also a warning. Its episodes are filled with stories of a planet in crisis, of animals pushed to the brink by humanity’s wanton destruction of the Earth. It’s utterly essential viewing.
Hosted by the delightful Samin Nosrat, Salt Fat Acid Heat is a charming look into how some of the world’s most inventive dishes are made. Each of the four episodes explores one of the four titular elements, and the whole series is beautifully shot and genuinely heartwarming.
Chapman and Maclain Way’s Emmy-award winning documentary about a cult in Oregon has to be seen to be believed. A four-part series, Wild Wild Country tells the story of Bagwan Shree Rajneesh, also known as Osho, a cult leader who moves to Oregon from Pune, India. He imports elements of an idyllic lifestyle to willing followers, but his leadership quickly descends into chaos after conflicts with farmers lead to a bioterror attack on local water supplies.
In 2001, Kathleen Peterson was found dead at the bottom of a staircase in her North Carolina home. Although her novelist husband, Michael Peterson, maintains his innocence, he quickly becomes the lead suspect in a murder investigation that will absorb the next 17 years of his life. This series follows Michael Peterson’s defense team as they prepare to fight a case that digs into every aspect of their client’s life, including an eerily similar case from decades earlier. Along the way, they uncover injustice from investigators, bitter family feuds, and a strange theory involving an owl.
The problems facing the city of Flint are considerable: unemployment, underfunding, violence, and to top it all off a poisoned water supply. Such challenges mean it would be easy, and obvious, to turn this into a dramatic pastiche of a city on the brink. But Flint Town is a slow, considered character drama that tracks key figures in the city’s police force as they struggle to maintain order. As the drama unfolds, the city itself becomes the most compelling character—perpetually frozen, blood-stained, but fighting to survive.
This six-parter explores the murky world of finance, where banks knowingly launder funds on behalf of drug cartels, car manufacturers cheat on emissions tests, and pharmaceutical firms ramp up the price of drugs to boost executive bonuses. Each episode tells a depressingly familiar story of the brutal pursuit of profits. The biggest criminals, it turns out, tend to wear suits.
Yance Ford’s Strong Island tackles the murder of the director’s own brother, who was shot but whose case never saw justice. The story of a Black man being unjustly killed is one the world has sadly become all too familiar with, but Strong Island stands apart as a film about grief, as well as racial injustice.
Exploring the life of Republican political strategist Roger Stone, this documentary is one for fans of House of Cards, or any who watches the real-life twists and turns of American politics. It’s suggested that Stone is heavily responsible for creating the political persona of Donald Trump and encouraging him to run for US president. This story is almost stranger than fiction, and it’s both engrossing and troubling.
Boulder, Colorado was rocked by the mysterious death of six-year-old pageant queen JonBenet Ramsey in 1996. Her death was ruled a homicide by police and received widespread media attention, but the killer was never identified—though suspicions still run wild as to who could have committed such a heinous crime. From the first moments, Casting JonBenet leaves you with a sense of horror, not just at JonBenet’s story, but for the threads of tragedy connecting those who watched it play out from afar.
In Take Your Pills, director Alison Klayman takes on the prescription stimulant craze in the US, exploring how young people use drugs like Adderall and Ritalin in pursuit of performance-enhancing effects. There are college students worried they’ll be at a disadvantage if they don’t pop a pill before an exam, a programmer who wants to live up to the myth of the coder-genius, and a finance worker whose colleague collapsed after two many Adderall-fueled all-nighters. There’s plenty of anger reserved for Big Pharma and over-zealous prescribers, but the film places a large part of the blame on a broader social ill: the pressures of a capitalistic society that drives people to do whatever it takes to be more productive. Do we really want to live in a world where teens take recreational drugs for work, not fun?
Bryan Fogel couldn’t believe how good his rivals were in the prestigious Haute Route, the Tour de France for amateur cyclists, so he set out to prove how easy it is for cyclists to evade doping rules. He hired experts to help, including Grigory Rodchenkov, the head of Russia’s anti-doping agency. Rodchenkov proved very effective, almost too effective, and it soon became apparent why. He let it slip that athletes in Russia were using similar methods to avoid detection, and when this news went public, Fogel found himself making a very different documentary from the one he intended. Rodchenkov feared for his life and fled to the US, and Fogel had the inside line on how the state was directing a massive doping scheme. This revelatory documentary offers fascinating insight into the world of doping and will make you question how many more dopers are evading detection.
This seven-episode series scratches the true crime itch created by Making a Murderer. It starts with the 1969 unsolved murder of nun and school teacher Cathy Cesnik but soon links this event to accusations against priests at the school and spreads to uncover a web of mystery and deceit. The documentary slowly unpacks decades of silence, bureaucratic obfuscation, and criminal collusion. It’s gripping and essential viewing.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
