My list of the year’s best documentaries looks different from other critics’ lists, mainly because I put a premium on things like entertainment value and formal innovations. (You may have gleaned this from my previous editions of this listicle.) I do this because I’m concerned with people thinking that watching documentaries is the movie equivalent of eating your Brussels sprouts, but it’s possible I’ve overcorrected. I try not to lose the value of more conventional fare. In any event, here’s my list of the best nonfiction movies I saw this past year. If it’s not as heavyweight as other critics’, I dare say you’ll find it more fun.
1. Grand Theft Hamlet grabbed this spot last January, and in the ensuing 12 months, I didn’t see anything good enough to knock it off. Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen’s film, shot entirely on location in Grand Theft Auto, documents their borderline obsessive quest to stage a production of Hamlet inside the popular game. Their film wound up stretching what we knew was possible with both Shakespeare productions and video games. What I wouldn’t give to see someone do The Tempest inside Minecraft.
2. In the early 2000s, the city of Providence and its fantastically corrupt mayor, Buddy Cianci, announced the development of the Providence Place Mall, for which a number of artists’ spaces and venues were cleared out. In response, a group of artists in the city moved into the shopping mall, finding unused space below the movie theater and turning it into a functioning apartment. Jeremy Workman tells their story in Secret Mall Apartment, a documentary about a prank that touches on subjects like social protest, usage of urban space, and the role of public art. It’s profound, but it goes down easy.
3. If you are a serious birder, Listers: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching is your movie. If you think birders are weirdos who need to get a less strenuous and less expensive hobby, this is also your movie. Two brothers from Tucson, Owen and Quentin Reiser, decided to do what birders call a Big Year, spending 12 months criss-crossing the contiguous United States spotting as many bird species as possible. In between that, they also interviewed fellow birdwatchers and found them to be specimens as strange as the birds, and the fiercely mulleted Quentin is an equally quirky guide to them. Featuring some top-quality bird photography, the movie is available for free on YouTube, so I’m embedding it here.
4. Look, if a man makes an appointment online for sex with someone he believes to be a child, he probably deserves whatever happens as a result. However, we probably shouldn’t turn catching him into a spectator sport, which is what NBC’s To Catch a Predator did in the mid-2000s. Predators catches up with Chris Hansen and the YouTube gotcha specialists who are now doing his job on social media, and it also reminds us that a Collin County prosecutor’s suicide is what took the NBC show off the air. This movie would have ranked higher if director David Osit had grilled Hansen harder, even though the TV host would likely have been too slippery for him.
5. Like some other entries on this year’s list, The Voice of Hind Rajab comes dangerously close to being exploitative. Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania (whose Four Daughters won a place in this feature two years ago) dramatizes the real-life 2024 killing of a 5-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza by the Israeli military, juxtaposing real-life audio footage of the murdered girl’s distress call against filmed re-enactments, with actors portraying the emergency service workers in Ramallah who stayed on the line with her for hours while trying fruitlessly to get her help. Some of the dramatizations are really cheesy, but Ben Hania makes it clear that Israel’s military is behaving with impunity in Gaza.
6. Netflix’s best doc of ’25 was the penultimate one it released in December, Cover-Up. Laura Poitras (who won an Oscar for Citizenfour) teamed with Mark Obenhaus to profile Seymour Hersh, the investigative journalist who has been a thorn in the side of many a presidential administration by uncovering stuff about the My Lai massacre, Watergate, and Abu Ghraib. Hersh is an engaging interview subject, with his memory and mental processes enviably sharp at the age of 88. I’d say we won’t see his like again, but he wouldn’t want that. He’d want a million just like him unveiling truths that the world’s governments and corporations are trying to hide. He’s an inspiration to us all.
7. I previously reviewed In Whose Name?, and if spending two hours with the artist formerly known as Kanye West is this exhausting, what must it have been like filming him for six years? That’s what Nico Ballesteros did, and he gives us a compelling, sometimes horrible, sometimes horribly funny look at a madman who discards his family and everyone else who refuses to sign off on his delusions. How can mere reality compete with the vision he has of himself as a savior of the world, when it’s just too damn beautiful to look away from?
8. I also reviewed the year’s best concert film last month with Merrily We Roll Along. Broadway junkie that I am, It’s always a privilege to write about Stephen Sondheim, and that article was as enjoyable as my reviews of Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods. Then again, I’m not just placing this on my list because it was fun to write about. Maria Friedman and her concert film made a case for this relatively overlooked show as a masterwork. Richard Linklater and his crew will have to do some fancy stepping to top this.
9. Any attempts to rehabilitate Leni Riefenstahl’s image should end with Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl. The filmmaker stuck to the same line for much of her 101 years of life: She was kept away from the worst aspects of the Nazi regime that she worked for and never knew about the concentration camps until after World War II. The film uses her own archive to contradict that lovely story, as well as plentiful interview footage where she waxes nostalgic about the praise and parties that Hitler and Goebbels offered her without mentioning the suffering and death they caused. (My own 5-cent analysis: She wanted to be adored and celebrated as a great artist, which is why she never took a scrap of responsibility for her actions, unlike her close colleague Albert Speer.) She is a monster, and as the center of this documentary, she’s fascinating.
10. Trust Alex Ross Perry to do something different with the music documentary. The director of fiction films such as Queen of Earth and Her Smell goes super-meta with Pavements, which mixes footage of the seminal 1990s alt-rock band Pavement with stuff from their Broadway musical, a parody music biopic starring Joe Keery as Stephen Malkmus, and behind-the-scenes footage with Perry clashing with Malkmus and Keery going so Method that he spends 24-7 speaking like Malkmus. Where fiction films dropped the ball with music biopics, this documentary busted the formula wide open. It’s the sort of tribute that the Stockton, Calif., outfit merits and clearly appreciates.
Honorable mention: David L. Bushell’s Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie … Courtney Stephens and Callie Hernandez’ Invention … Viktor Kossakovsky’s Architecton … Eddie Huang’s Vice Is Broke … Contessa Gayle’s Songs From the Hole … Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor … Ryan White’s Come See Me in the Good Light … Emily Mkrtichian’s There Was, There Was Not … Peter Miller’s Marcella … Heidi Ewing’s Folktales … Pippa Ehrlich’s Pangolin: Kulu’s Journey.
