From a true-crime takedown to the danger of talking truth to power — a look back at our favorite docs of the year
A rejiggering of centuries of real history via fake news reports, and a restaging of a majestic work of theater within a virtual environment. A look back at a defining moment in our country’s history, and a warning about the perils of authoritarianism that seemed to speak eerily to our present moment. A puckish takedown of the True Crime Entertainment Industrial Complex, and several looks at both the necessity and the danger of talking truth to power. There were moments when, looking back at the best docs we saw in theaters, via streamers, and on TV since January, where several of these nonfiction projects seemed to be in conversation with each other — not to mention the world outside our window. Even the portraits of artists that grabbed our attention in 2025 hinged on conflicts that ran the gamut from socio-political persecution to the subject fighting with himself. Here are the 10 best documentaries and docuseries we saw over the past year.
(Shout-outs to Henry Fonda for President, Ladies and Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music, Mistress Dispeller, Pavements, The Perfect Neighbor, Predators, Sly Lives!, Sunday’s Best, 2000 Meters to Andriivka, and WTO/99.)
Photographs used in illustration
Mubi; Magnolia Pictures; Pee-wee Herman Productions, Inc/HBO; Apple TV.
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‘The American Revolution’
Image Credit: Emanuel Leutze; 1851/The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ken Burns’ deep dive through America’s war for independence has everything you’d expect from a Ken Burns doc: narration by Peter Coyote, slow zooms into images (in this case, paintings instead of sepia-colored pictures), a thoroughness that borders on fanatical, a running time only slightly shorter than a college semester. Burns gonna Burns! Yet this meticulous examination of how our country went through the turbulent growing pains of going from a colony of Great Britain to a sovereign power punctures the myth of grand, united-we-stand origin story at every turn, and brings in not just the celebrity-voiced perspectives of the founding fathers but those of displaced Indigenous populations, enslaved people, and loyalists who found themselves persecuted in the name of a patriotic cause. It’s as much a re-education about the birth of our nation as it is an extension of the education handed down to most generations, in regards to those truths we’ve long held to be self-evident. And while Burns has gone out of his way to say this decade-in-the-making project isn’t a critique of the present, his scholarly, multi-episode history comes at a crucial moment regarding the fight for the future of these not-quite-so-united states.
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‘BLCKNWS: Terms and Conditions’
Image Credit: BLKNWS Studio / Cinetic Media
Kahlil Joseph’s feature-length expansion of his BLKNWS video art installation is a kaleidoscope of images filtered through autobiography, Afro-futurism fiction, archival footage and the format of a free-form news show. It’s ability to rewire your ideas on everything from W.E.B Dubois’ lifelong dream of compiling a Black encyclopedia to how the art world engages (or doesn’t) with Black artists as you’re watching the film felt sui generis; Joseph compared it to an album with “tracks,” rather than scenes,” and the comparison feels apt. It’s the sort of work that demands repeat viewings.
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‘Cover-Up’
Image Credit: THE NEW YORK TIMES/The New York/NETFLIX
You can’t talk about the history of investigative reporting in America without talking about Seymour Hersh, the muckraker extraordinaire who helped bring stories ranging from the details behind the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam to the abuses happening at Abu Gharib prison into the broader public conversation. Filmmaker Laura Poitras (Citizenfour, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed) covers the necessary biographical ground and delves into a handful of stories that helped make Hersh’s name, yet she also pays plentiful attention to his process — it’s as much a paean to old-school shoe-leather journalism as it is a piece on one legend’s legacy. And the subtext regarding the need for such a figure in a time when so many media companies are cowering to power is right there, in 21-sized bold font.
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‘Grand Theft Hamlet’
Image Credit: Mubi
When the United Kingdom went into yet another Covid-fueled lockdown in early 2021, actor Sam Crane found himself in the middle of an existential crisis. He also spent a lot of time playing Grand Theft Auto Online, which eventually led to a brilliant idea: Why not stage his own theatrical production within the virtual world of the multiplayer game, casting his fellow GTA fanatics as costars? And what better work to tackle that Shakespeare’s classic drama about the most melancholy of Danes? Shot entirely via in-world gameplay, this funny, ingenious and surprisingly touching documentary about art as a communal salve proves that you’ve never truly experienced the Bard’s genius unless you’ve performed his words while taking arms with a rocket launcher against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them.
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‘My Undesirable Friends — Part 1: Last Air in Moscow’
Image Credit: Ksenia Mironova
A look at what happens when the concept of a free press turns into a contradiction in terms, Julia Lotkev‘s marathon-length doc follows a handful of female reporters who are trying to counteract the propaganda machine of Putin’s Russia — and it will look extremely familiar to many folks who currently feel like they’re in a state of war while life goes on all around them. You get to know each of these women, experience the bond they have, bask in their personalities, and share their troubles. Taken out of context, My Undesirable Friends could be mistake for a typical docuseries following around a disparate group of urbanites as they fight the good fight and figure themselves out over several months. Except the menace behind all of the exchanges involving a slow death by a thousand executive-order cuts, or how surveillance and harassment is a daily occurrence, or the manner of doublespeak used to tarnish them as both journalists and citizens, is ever-present. So is the ticking clock of history.
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‘Mr. Scorsese’
Image Credit: Melinda Sue Gordon/AppleTV
You want a five-part docuseries on Martin Scorsese, complete with best-in-show clip reels, interviews with both his famous collaborators and his Little Italy buddies from way back in the day, and a lot of commentary about everything from Mean Streets to Goodfellas and back again? Filmmaker Rebecca Miller (The Ballad of Jack and Rose, Personal Velocity) is happy to oblige. But her labor of love never loses sight of the man behind the movie camera, paying close attention to the good, the bad, and the ugly of Scorsese’s life while giving him plenty of space to reflect on all of it. And that, more than anything else, is what makes this look at Mr. Scorsese as exhilarating, urgent, invaluable, and perpetually rewatchable as Mr. Scorsese’s own work. It is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the definitive look at our greatest living filmmaker.
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‘One to One: John and Yoko’
Image Credit: Magnolia Pictures
Just when you thought John Lennon’s life and career had been picked clean in terms of documentary fodder, along comes Kevin Macdonald’s insightful, penetrating look at Lennon and Yoko Ono’s first few years as New Yorkers. Though it uses the 1972 “One to One” benefit at Madison Square Garden (the only complete solo concert Lennon would do prior to his death) as a sun around which to orbit, this extraordinary collection of home movies, interviews, and news footage paints a picture of two ex-pats who found political radicalization, a sense of personal reclamation and place to finally call home. The One Day in September filmmaker’s access to the archives clearly unearths a lot of treasures — the phone calls involving Ono attempting to procure flies for an exhibit is worth the price of admission on its own — yet what makes this look back stand out is the way it presents both of them in the process of individual and mutual evolutions. How do you navigate life as the most famous (and infamous) couple in the world? You test all of your assumptions, fuck up once or twice, and never stop growing as human beings.
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‘Orwell: 2+2=5’
Image Credit: NEON
Documentarian Raoul Peck returns with a look at George Orwell’s transformation from a cog in Britain’s colonialist machinery (he served on the police force in Burma in the 1920s) to political critic, essayist, and world-renowned author of Animal Farm and 1984. Had the filmmaker merely delivered a documentary on the writer’s radicalization and warnings about power, corruption, and lies this would still make for essential viewing. But he goes several giant steps further, borrowing the expansive design of his magnum opus Exterminate All the Brutes (2021) and connecting the dots between those two dystopian novels, the 20th century’s totalitarian regimes, and the ways in which history tends to repeat itself — like, say, in contemporary America. It’s a virtual firehose of doubleplusbad information on how fascism insidiously takes hold, collapsing the gap between then and now in a way that’s damn near overwhelming. You would not call the outlook “good.” This dour primer is absolutely vital at this particular moment in time.
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‘Pee-Wee as Himself’
Image Credit: Dennis Keeley/HBO
Centered around a 40-hour interview that Paul Reubens conducted with director Matt Wolf (Spaceship Earth) shortly before his death in 2023, this two-part, three-and-a-half-hour doc on the man behind pop culture’s favorite manchild is nothing if not a portrait of the artist as a control freak. It’s designed to let Reubens speak, in his own words, about everything from his children to the creation of Pee-wee to success, scandal and everything in between. What the doc really ends up being about, however, is conflict — between the subject and his chronicler, as Reubens wrestles with the documentarian for control of both his own narrative and the project, and also the subject and his alter ego. Judges would have also accepted Pee-Wee vs. Himself as an alternate title.
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‘Zodiac Killer Project’
Image Credit: Music Box Films
Once upon a time, British multimedia artist and documentarian Charlie Shackleton secured the rights to adapt Lyndon E. Lafferty’s book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up — in which the retired California Highway Patrol officer claimed that he knew the real identity of the serial killer who plagued the Bay Area in the 1970s — into a docuseries. Then, for reasons that remain murky, the author’s estate pulled out of the deal. So rather than presenting a deep dive into one man’s quest to solve that case, Shackleton describes what he would have done if had he gone through with the project. And quicker than you can say “give me the next Making a Murderer,” this meta-documentary skewers the clichés so beloved by the modern True-Crime Entertainment Complex while showing you exactly how this brand of nonfiction sausage gets made. It’s a full-frontal assault on a way-too-popular genre, done with a trickster’s deft touch.
