Before the year ends, it’s time to publish my choice for the top 10 documentaries of 2025 – an assignment that, I must admit, I do not relish. It’s agonizing to go over this list, check it twice and many more times before committing to a final 10, knowing the parameters require me to leave out many worthy films.
The upside of the task is to reflect anew on work that moved and enlightened me in the past year and to try to capture something of the filmmaker’s creative achievement. Another reward: the potential for alerting readers to documentaries that may have escaped their attention. In truth, plenty of documentaries escaped my attention; no one can watch all the nonfiction features released each year nor come anywhere close. In other words, this is a top 10 list of the films I was fortunate to experience, not of all documentaries that reached audiences in 2025, whether through festivals, theaters, online distribution, streaming platforms, et al.
Here are my selections in alphabetical order:
‘2000 Meters to Andriivka‘
PBS Distribution/Frontline/AP
The most visceral war film I’ve ever seen. Director Mstyslav Chernov, who documented the earliest weeks of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in the Oscar-winning 20 Days in Mariupol, follows a new stage of the conflict as it descends into a meter-by-meter fight for territory. Risking his life again, the director embeds with a Ukrainian platoon attempting to retake the minuscule town of Andriivka that had been seized by Russian invaders. It’s brutal trench warfare reminiscent of World War I; perhaps for that reason the film evokes, for me, the classic All Quiet on the Western Front.
Many of the Ukrainian soldiers we meet in the film are doomed to die in future skirmishes, as Chernov tells us in solemn narration. Most have volunteered to defend their homeland — in contrast to Russian forces made up mostly of conscripts, freed convicts, mercenaries from North Korea and elsewhere. As President Donald Trump continues to vacillate on Ukraine, at best offering it tepid support, it’s essential to recognize the outrageous scale of the Russian bloodbath that has killed at least 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers and roughly 15,000 civilians. 2000 Meters to Andriivka achieves that end with devastating force.
2000 Meters to Andriivka can be watched for free on YouTube or via the PBS website and PBS app.
Young poet Youbin Gong in ‘Always (从来)’
HandsOn Studio LLC/TimeLight Films
Deming Chen’s debut feature documentary introduces us to young poet Youbin Gong, a boy from a small Chinese village who writes poems as part of his schoolwork. The film is visual poetry – Chen’s camera captures the pastoral setting of Sangzhi County in Hunan Province and Gong’s humble home life. In what by American standards would be considered a hovel, Gong is raised by his aging grandparents, his mother having abandoned him as a small child. The filmmaker boldly eschews traditional narrative structure in favor of sequences built around poems by Gong and some of his classmates. This takes us out of the logical adult world of calendar progression and into the sensory experience of a child like Gong – a comparatively timeless realm of feeling, emotion, observation and isolation.
Always gives us insight into contemporary China where many children grow up without parents – moms and dad who must leave their kids behind in rural areas as they seek employment in cities. In that sense, it reveals as much about Chinese society as the vérité films of Wang Bing’s Youth trilogy.
Always is playing at select film festivals; it does not have theatrical or streaming distribution.
Two other excellent documentaries I saw this year offer a fascinating picture of life in China. The Dating Game, directed by Violet Du Feng, shows us the struggle of young men to find spouses in a country where males outnumber females by a large margin (a result of China’s one-child policy, which saw many female offspring aborted or abandoned in favor of male children). Elizabeth Lo’s Mistress Dispeller, meanwhile, explores a different element of romantic life in China: “mistress dispellers,” relationship specialists that advertise their services to women whose husbands are cheating on them, promising to disrupt the extramarital affair.
Elizabeth Bouvia with her legal team in the 1980s
PBS
Filmmaker Reid Davenport, who was born with cerebral palsy, notes in his film that abled people often casually inquire whether he has ever considered killing himself. The obvious implication of such a question (though it may not be evident to those asking it) is that a disabled person’s life has no value.
Exploring this pervasive attitude towards disability, Davenport takes as his launching point the case of Elizabeth Bouvia, a young woman with cerebral palsy and degenerative arthritis who entered a California hospital essentially asking the facility to assist in her death. This was in the early 1980s before assisted suicide — now known as physician-assisted dying or medical aid in dying — had gained much traction; courts back then rejected Bouvia’s request. Today, California joins a dozen states and the District of Columbia with laws that entitle people to end their lives with the aid of physicians under certain circumstances. Early in 2026, New York’s governor is expected to sign a bill with similar provisions.
With great intellectual acuity, Davenport examines how in Canada the right to die is being made available not just to those with terminal illnesses but to disabled people with chronic conditions that aren’t life-threatening in the near term. Beneath this expansion of rights, which could expand south to the U.S., the filmmaker detects a desire by the able-bodied to eradicate disability, akin to eugenics. He discovers that in many cases, including Bouvia’s, disabled people who contemplate using medical aid in dying would prefer to live if they could just get proper access to health care, pain management, psychological services and other support.
For Davenport, it’s consistent with a lifelong dilemma that he and others with disabilities encounter: how to find “one’s place in a world that perpetually rejects them.”
Life After is available to stream on the PBS website and the PBS app.
Mr. Nobody Against Putin
Pavel Talankin, co-director and participant in ‘Mr. Nobody Against Putin’
Made in Copenhagen/ZDF/Arte
The endearing Pavel Talankin, a young man devoted to his students at a grade school in the grim Russian town of Karabash, ponders his life and concludes, “I might be a self-destructive person.”
The nature of his “self-destructive behavior” breaks the heart – he dares to advocate for freedom of expression, to criticize Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and to oppose the increasingly systematic indoctrination and militarization of schoolchildren by the state. Over the course of the film, directed by David Borenstein and Talankin, “Pasha,” as he is known, goes from beloved educator to something of a pariah at Karabash Primary School #1. He’s marked as a dissident for responding with defiance to lesson plans mandated by federal authorities after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine that teach youngsters to become Russian nationalists.
In one scene, he peels off the letter Z (a pro-war symbol in Russia) masking-taped to school windows, replacing it with an X, an expression of support for Ukraine. At another moment, over the school’s PA system, he plays America’s national anthem.
Pasha’s brave, perhaps a bit naïve or innocent, and certainly lovable – and in the Russia of 2025 there is no place for such a person. Chillingly, in the film Russian President Vladimir Putin alludes to the importance of controlling the minds of his country’s young people as the war in Ukraine approaches a fourth year, observing in a television appearance, “Commanders don’t win wars. Teachers win wars.”
Mr. Nobody Against Putin is available for streaming in the UK via the BBCi player. It is currently unavailable in the U.S.
Ksenia Mironova in ‘My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air In Moscow.’
Argot Pictures
Putin also casts a long shadow over Julia Loktev’s film. The Russian president is seen in a clip pontificating, “Freedom of press, the right of citizens to receive and distribute information, is a fundamental principle of any democratic government and society.”
Russia’s leaders have long excelled at this kind of gaslighting, dating back to Soviet times. The film documents the last vestiges of independent news media as they’re crushed by the Kremlin – outlets like TV Rain and the newspaper Novaya Gazeta. Those news sources, along with the human rights nonprofit Memorial and even a group that advocates for laws protecting women from domestic violence, have been declared “undesirable organizations” by the Russian government. Individual reporters at TV Rain, Important Stories and other outlets are officially branded as “foreign agents,” stamping them with social stigma and snaring them in a legal and administrative quagmire.
The lengthy film – total running time 5 hours, 24 minutes – unfolds almost like a “lifestyle reality TV” series as we follow the activities of TV Rain journalists including anchor Anna Nemzer and reporter Ksenia Mironova, and Important Stories reporter Irina Dolinina, among others. But unlike the trivialities of lifestyle reality shows on American TV, the stakes here could hardly be higher: the characters in the film, all brave women, face potential harsh prison sentences if they continue to stray outside the Putin party line. Despite the risk, they insist that even if they can’t hope to change Russia, they can document what’s going down for a future generation to learn. In this, they prove themselves worthy successors to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, author of the mighty Gulag Archipelago that chronicled how Stalin and his Bolshevik predecessors committed vast crimes against their people.
The dedication to freedom of expression displayed by the women in My Undesirable Friends should inspire anyone concerned that America, under a Putin-friendly Trump, is sliding towards totalitarianism.
My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow has been playing at film festivals. It is not yet available on VOD platforms or streaming services.
Police shine a light on Susan Lorincz’s house in ‘The Perfect Neighbor‘
Netflix
Geeta Gandbhir’s film grips from its opening frame as police officers respond to a dispatcher’s report of a shooting in a neighborhood of Ocala, FL. The filmmaker restricts herself almost entirely to police body cam and dash cam video to elucidate an awful crime – the killing of a Black woman, 35-year-old mother of four Ajike Owens, who was shot to death by her neighbor, a 58-year-old white woman named Susan Lorincz.
It’s a film of heart-racing tension and almost unbearable tragedy, but essential viewing for anyone who wishes to understand the fatal intersection of race and policing in America. Here, a fairy tale-level ogre in Lorincz gets the benefit of the doubt from police because of her whiteness. For two years leading up to the fatal shooting, as police archive video shows, Lorincz constantly called 911 to make false allegations about her Black neighbors, reserving many of her most strident complaints for children who played near her house (on property they were entitled to enjoy). Police officers, in my view, coddled Lorincz and failed to protect her Black neighbors, Owens among them.
When Owens came to Lorincz’s house to discuss the latest incident of harassment against her kids, Lorincz fired a gun from behind her locked door, killing her neighbor. In self-pitying fashion, Lorincz tearily claimed she had feared for her life. Thus, she invoked Florida’s notorious “stand your ground” law, which gives people carte blanche (blanche, it should be noted, being the French word for “white”) to kill under a wide array of circumstances. Lorincz might never have been prosecuted and convicted if the community hadn’t risen in protest.
The Perfect Neighbor is streaming on Netflix.
Leni Riefenstahl with Hitler
Kino Lorber
Leni Riefenstahl, the pioneering German director known to history as Hitler’s favorite filmmaker, is esteemed by many Hollywood luminaries, Quentin Tarantino among them. Their admiration might dim considerably if they saw Andres Veiel’s stunning film about her.
Veiel, conducting a forensic examination of Riefenstahl’s archives and other sources, picks apart the myth the filmmaker propagated after World War II that absolved herself of any complicity in Nazi atrocities. She had merely been an artist taking on assignments from the Führer, she claimed. In fact, Riefenstahl was a true believer. Veiel uncovers evidence of her extolling Nazi ideology as early as 1934 and he shares audio of Riefenstahl, in the post-war years, resuming her warm friendship with Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and War Production under the Nazis. Riefenstahl and Speer speculate on how many generations it will take before Germany once again embraces Nazi thinking (their estimate: two).
When I interviewed Veiel shortly before the film’s world premiere at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, he noted an implicit warning contained in his documentary – beware of anyone in power who spins a distorted narrative to realize a dark purpose.
“We see it with our populist leaders — they just lie,” he told me. “It becomes the truth. And that’s a very, very dangerous and attractive way of turning lies into truth. And she’s a prototype.”
Riefenstahl is available on VOD platforms including Google Play, Amazon Prime Video, the Roku Channel and Apple TV.
Sara Jane Moore in ‘Suburban Fury‘
Argot Pictures
When Sara Jane Moore died in September at the age of 95, obituaries recounted the strange and disturbing incident that thrust her into the national spotlight decades earlier. In September 1975, the former suburban housewife stood outside a San Francisco hotel where President Gerald Ford was speaking and, when he emerged, held up a pistol and squeezed off a shot at him. She got off a second shot, but a bystander grabbed her arm and deflected the bullet.
In Robinson Devor’s fascinating documentary, the filmmaker explores how Moore came close to succeeding in her aim, building his narrative around interviews with the would-be assassin after she was released from prison following 32 years behind bars. It’s a time capsule from the 1970s, a peculiar era of upheaval that saw movements like the Symbionese Liberation Army spring up with sometimes vague revolutionary goals. It was the SLA that kidnapped Patty Hearst and successfully persuaded the young heiress to join their cause; the Hearst case became key in Moore’s evolution to left-wing militancy.
The film isn’t a morally ambiguous “let’s turn the microphone over to an attempted presidential assassin” but something more cogent: a documentation of the unexpected and circuitous radicalization of a once-conservative woman. The story sheds light on an earlier era in America that’s often overlooked – a decade lost between the momentous and well chronicled 1960s and the increasingly corporatized 1980s.
Suburban Fury will be released in theaters in 2026 by Argot Pictures. Kino Lorber will later make the film available on VOD platforms.
Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, president of Paraguay, saluting during a visit to Franco’s Spain on July 1, 1973
Keystone/Getty Images
Among Latin American dictators of an earlier era, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet is probably best known in the U.S. But one shouldn’t forget the reign of Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, who ruled Paraguay from 1954-1989. Filmmaker Juanjo Pereira certainly hasn’t. He probes Stroessner’s regime in his archival documentary that won the FIPRESCI critics prize at the Berlin Film Festival. During the dictator’s time in power, he “disappeared” 20,000 perceived left-wing political opponents, probably outpointing Pinochet in that regard and rivaling Argentina’s dictator Gen. Jorge Videla.
Very little footage from that time exists — such regimes preferring to operate in secrecy. But Pereira went all over the world to track down reels of material and documents that illustrate “how Stroessner dominated all aspects of Paraguayan life, rendering many ordinary people apparently incapable of thinking for themselves,” as I wrote in a piece in March after seeing the film at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in Greece. “He created a strongman’s cult of personality and surrounded himself with an obsequious court (parallels to Trump 2.0 may leap to mind, but that’s outside the scope of this documentary).”
It’s what Pereira does with the archive that makes this documentary so remarkable. He doesn’t present it as some sort of objective record but interrogates the footage. He achieves that through sound design that reduces ambient noise to telling details; at other moments, he reverses the archive video so that, for example, soldiers march backward instead of forwards. This technique encourages us as viewers to deconstruct, along with Pereira, the narrative architecture of an authoritarian system – to see how it uses symbols to impose and maintain power. At a time when right-wing movements are gaining around the world, this film shows us what to look for as such regimes try to dominate their countries and eliminate dissent.
Under the Flags, the Sun has played at many film festivals. We will update with any distribution details.
Juanjo Pereira’s film dovetails with another of my favorite documentaries of the year, Norita, directed by Jayson McNamara and Andrea Carbonatto Tortonese. It tells the story of Nora “Norita” Cortiñas, an Argentinian woman who led a quiet life disengaged from politics until her eldest son, Gustavo, a left-wing activist, was swept up and disappeared by the right-wing military junta of Videla in April 1977. Norita co-founded the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo – the extraordinary group of women who confronted the regime over the disappearance of their children. Some of the Mothers were in turn seized by agents of the government and disappeared themselves, including one woman who had fled Stroessner’s Paraguay.
My Pick No. 10
For my 10th and final selection, I jointly recognize several films as Defenders of Democracy — at a time when government by and for the people faces extreme threats in the U.S. and around the world.
- Apocalypse in the Tropics, Petra Costa’s compelling analysis of the rise of Christian nationalism in Brazil. The director shows how a subset of evangelicals has weaponized the Book of Revelations, embracing an image of an armed and vengeful Jesus who commands them to take over the government and all sectors of civic and religious life. The film contains urgent lessons for anyone unaware of the parallel rise of Christian nationalism in the U.S.
- Orwell: 2+2=5, Raoul Peck’s documentary about the late British author of 1984 examines not just the Herculean effort it took for George Orwell to finish that novel as he suffered the end stages of tuberculosis, but how his work speaks to today. We are in a time of Newspeak when a Vladimir Putin describes his attack on Ukraine as a “special military operation” and a Donald Trump tries to rewrite January 6 by calling it a “day of love.”
- Cover-Up, the film directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus that documents the career of reporter Seymour Hersh. The investigative journalist has broken some of the most important stories of the past 50+ years, including the My Lai Massacre and the Abu Ghraib scandal. His work and that of others of a similar stripe holds government officials accountable for criminal and sometimes barbaric acts even as they try to cover them up (hence the film’s title). The documentary serves as a reminder that a free press is synonymous with democracy and explains why dictators across the globe make squashing independent news media a top priority.
- In Democracy Noir, director Connie Field shows how Hungary’s strongman, Viktor Orbán, used democratic means to get himself elected prime minister, then expanded his power to destroy democratic institutions and a free press. In office, he has leveraged his position to enrich his family and close associates. In that sense, his arc perfectly matches Trump, who has used Orbán as a template for gaining power and dismantling democracy once installed. Modeling Orbán, Trump has also used the presidency to balloon his family’s wealth by $1.8 billion since he won reelection in 2024 (according to the Center for American Progress).
- James Jones’ film Antidote documents investigative journalist Christo Grosev, the man who identified those behind the Kremlin’s sinister scheme in 2020 to poison Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Russian authorities, not looking kindly on Grosev’s forensic investigation, slapped him on a “wanted” list. In short order, a group of Bulgarian spies started tracking Grosev around the world, intent on kidnapping and/or killing him (they’re now in prison in the UK). Grosev has paid a steep personal price for upholding ideals of freedom of expression and the rule of law.
Antidote is available on YouTube; Cover-Up and Apocalypse in the Tropics are streaming on Netflix; Orwell: 2+2=5 is available on VOD platforms including Amazon Prime Video; Democracy Noir played at numerous international film festivals but currently isn’t available on VOD or streaming platforms.
Other films I loved this year that could easily have made my top 10 list: Holding Liat, directed by Brandon Kramer; Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, directed by Sepideh Farsi; Coexistence, My Ass!, directed by Amber Fares; Cutting Through Rocks, directed by Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni; Yanuni, directed by Richard Ladkani; Child of Dust, directed by Weronika Mliczewska; Art for Everybody, directed by Miranda Yousef; Below the Clouds, directed by Gianfranco Rosi; The Alabama Solution, directed by Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman; Come See Me in the Good Light, directed by Ryan White; The Librarians, directed by Kim A. Snyder; Natchez, directed by Suzannah Herbert; Seeds, directed by Brittany Shyne; The Tale of Silyan, directed by Tamara Kotevska; and WTO/99, directed by Ian Bell.
