Documentary is the only form where the filmmaker’s access is part of the argument. A fiction director who can’t get a location rewrites the scene. A documentary director who can’t get access has no film, and what they did get is the whole of what you’re watching. That makes the ranking below more about method than about subject. The entries near the top either invented a technique or obtained something nobody else could, and the entries lower down are films where the director is more present than the material.
Every rating is the one the linked review carries. Ties are broken by year. That’s why a 1929 Soviet experiment sits above thirteen BBC series that share its score.
Documentaries are the films I trust least and value most. A fiction film can lie to me and I’ll enjoy it, but when a documentary cheats, it’s cheating with somebody’s real life, and I take that personally. What I want from one is access nobody else got and a director with enough discipline to stay out of its way. The films at the top of this page have both.
1. Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
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"Every technique the form still uses, invented in one film, in 1929."
Man with a Movie Camera is first because almost everything else on this page uses tools it invented. Vertov’s Soviet silent has no narration, no intertitles, no story and no actors. It’s a day in a city, assembled from footage of people working, traveling, marrying, divorcing and being born. The technical inventory is extraordinary for 1929. Split screens, freeze frames, jump cuts, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, stop motion, slow motion, self-reflexive cutting and a sequence where the film appears to edit itself. Most were either invented here or used seriously here first. The reflexivity is the argument instead of a flourish. The camera operator is in the film, the editor is shown cutting the footage the audience is watching, and Vertov’s position was that cinema should stop pretending to be a window and admit it’s a construction.
I find this film thrilling in a way almost nothing from 1929 manages. Vertov was decades ahead of the argument about whether a documentary is ever just a window, and he won it with the camera. My one complaint is that it demands every minute of your attention, and a viewer who drifts for thirty seconds loses the thread of the cutting.
Vertov refused intertitles, actors, sets and story, and the film is a demonstration of what cinema can do that no other medium can. It contains double exposure, split screens, freeze frames, stop motion, extreme close-ups and a shot of the camera operator inside his own film.
It was dismissed on release as formalist and is now regularly voted the greatest documentary ever made. That took about eighty years.
2. Life on Earth (1979)
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"The series that established what a natural history program could be."
Life on Earth is the point at which the form became what it’s now. Attenborough’s thirteen parts took over three years, visited around thirty countries and covered three and a half billion years, and no previous production had attempted a single narrative structure for the whole of life.
The gorilla sequence in Rwanda is where television presenting changed. Attenborough abandoned his script mid-take and whispered directly to camera while a young gorilla pulled at his boot, and the unforced intimacy of that moment has been the target every presenter has aimed at since.
That gorilla moment is the reason I’d put Life on Earth in front of anybody who thinks nature programs are wallpaper. Attenborough threw away his script because something real was happening, and he had the sense to lower his voice and let it happen. Presenters who talk over every second of footage could learn more from that one take than from any training course.
It established the BBC Natural History Unit’s method: wait, film in situ, and let the behavior supply the drama instead of the edit.
Attenborough spent three years filming across a hundred locations. That was unprecedented for television in 1979 and set the template for everything after.
The gorilla sequence in Rwanda was unplanned, with the animals approaching him, and he abandoned the scripted narration and whispered instead.
It established that a natural history series could carry an argument, in this case evolutionary sequence, across thirteen hours.
3. The Living Planet (1984)
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"The follow-up that swapped evolution for habitat and lost nothing."
The Living Planet reorganized the same ambition around environments and not time. That turns out to be the harder structure. Each episode takes a habitat and examines what surviving there requires, so the organizing principle is a problem instead of a chronology.
It’s the entry in the run that most clearly anticipates the environmental argument the later series would make explicitly, and it makes it here entirely by description. The Antarctic and desert episodes are the strongest, and the series was made at a point when the Unit had the confidence of the first program and not yet the technology that would define the later ones. The follow-up moves from evolution to ecology, organizing by habitat and not by lineage. That’s a harder structure to sustain. The sequence in the Venezuelan tepui and the hot spring footage in Japan are the two everybody remembers. It confirmed that the format could repeat without diminishing. That’s the thing most series fail at.
4. The Trials of Life (1990)
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"Behaviour over biology, and the one that got complaints."
The Trials of Life is the least comfortable entry in the run and the most honest. It organizes itself around stages of animal life, from birth through hunting to courtship. That means predation is unavoidable and not incidental. The killer whales taking sea lions off a beach and the chimpanzees hunting colobus monkeys both drew audience complaints on broadcast, and the chimpanzee sequence in particular disturbed viewers who had understood chimpanzees as gentle.
The Unit declined to soften either, which is the clearest evidence the series was refusing to sentimentalize its subject, and it set the standard the later programs worked to.
I respect this series enormously for refusing to protect the audience. People complained about the chimpanzees because the footage didn’t match the picture they’d been sold, and the Unit held its ground. A nature program that cuts away from the kill to keep viewers comfortable is lying to them, and I don’t have patience for that. The organizing principle is behavior and not habitat, covering how animals feed, hunt, court and communicate across their whole lives. Killer whales taking sea lions off a Patagonian beach is the most-repeated sequence in natural history television.
The chimpanzee hunt caused real public objection, which Attenborough defended on the grounds that the series had promised to show behavior and not select for comfort.
5. The Private Life of Plants (1995)
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"Time-lapse turned botany into a thriller."
The Private Life of Plants solved a problem nobody had solved: plants are dramatic on a timescale humans can’t perceive. The answer was time-lapse sustained across months with cameras locked in position. Watching a bramble hunt for a gap in a hedge, or a vine strangle a tree across a season compressed to twenty seconds, reframes plants as competitors and not as scenery. The aggression is real and had simply been running too slowly to see. No series in the run is more technically inventive, and it required rigs that had to hold position undisturbed for the best part of a year. Time-lapse is the entire technical premise, since plants act on a timescale no viewer can perceive without it.
Sequences required cameras locked in position for weeks, and the bramble advancing across ground reads as predation and not growth.
It’s the clearest demonstration that the only obstacle to finding plants dramatic was frame rate.
6. The Life of Birds (1998)
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"Ten episodes on flight, song and display, and it earns all ten."
The Life of Birds took three years and around forty countries to answer a narrow question. That’s what being a bird involves. Flight as mechanics, song as economics, display as negotiation.
The lyrebird sequence is the single most widely shared piece of footage the Unit has ever produced. An Australian bird reproducing camera shutters, car alarms and a chainsaw, having learned them from the forest around it, with Attenborough’s commentary doing nothing but naming what’s being imitated. The restraint in that moment is the lesson. The material is extraordinary and the program adds almost nothing to it.
The lyrebird sequence, reproducing chainsaws and camera shutters, is the single most viewed clip from any Attenborough series. The series films flight from within the flock using microlights and remote rigs. Nobody had attempted that at this quality.
The series is structured around the costs of flight and not around its beauty. That’s the argument underneath it.
7. The Blue Planet (2001)
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"The first serious attempt to film the whole ocean."
The Blue Planet took nearly five years and used submersibles to reach depths television had never recorded, and a heavy amount of what it filmed was new to science as well as to viewers. The deep sea episode is the one that changed what audiences understood. The series filmed creatures that had been known only from damaged specimens in nets alive and moving, and scientists described several from the footage. George Fenton’s score is the best the Unit has commissioned and the Berlin Philharmonic performed it, and the blue whale footage remains the only real material of the largest animal that’s ever lived.
It took nearly five years and around two hundred locations, and much of what it filmed had never been recorded at all. The deep sea sequences used submersibles beyond the depth any previous production had reached, and several species in it were undescribed.
The Berlin Philharmonic performed George Fenton’s score. That set the standard for how these series sound.
8. The Life of Mammals (2002)
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"The one that ends by turning the camera on us."
The Life of Mammals is structured toward an argument instead of a survey. It works through mammalian strategies from the insect eaters to the primates, and the final episode is about humans as one more mammal species.
That reframes the preceding nine hours as context and not as spectacle. The audience has spent the series watching adaptation and is then told they’ve been watching their own. That’s the most argumentative thing in the whole run.
In the earlier episodes, the blue whale and the sperm whale material is the technical high point, filmed with low-light equipment that hadn’t previously existed.
The structure follows feeding strategy. That lets the series move from insectivores to humans as a single continuous argument.
Of everything in it, the blue whale sequence and the chimpanzee tool use are the two the series is remembered for.
It closes by placing humans inside the taxonomy and not above it. That’s the point the whole series has been building toward.
9. Planet Earth (2006)
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"The first high-definition natural history series and the one that reset the budget."
Planet Earth is the production that made the form expensive. Five years, around two thousand filming days, and the Unit’s first series shot entirely in high definition, with a budget per hour no factual program had previously commanded. The snow leopard hunt in the Himalayas had never been filmed. Neither had the birds of paradise material at that quality, and the aerial gimbal work gave the Unit a visual signature it’s used ever since.
The hunt sequences are the ones people remember and the great white shark taking a seal at forty frames per second is the shot that sold the series. This was the first natural history series shot in high definition and the first with a budget that permitted aerial cineflex across whole continents. The snow leopard footage was the first ever recorded of a hunt, after months of waiting.
The African hunting dogs filmed from the air, coordinating across open ground, is the sequence that showed what the technology had changed.
10. Frozen Planet (2011)
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"Four years at the poles, and the last time they would look like that."
Frozen Planet spent close to four years in the Arctic and Antarctic recording behavior that had defeated previous productions, and it’s now a record of ice that’s since retreated.
Nobody had filmed the killer whales generating waves in formation to wash seals off floes, and it wasn’t widely known to occur. The wolf pursuing a bison across open ground runs for several minutes without a cut away.
The final episode on climate was made optional for international broadcasters. That produced a public argument about whether the Unit was softening its own conclusions. The optional climate episode was a bad call. The series spent years at both poles building an argument out of footage, and then the producers offered its conclusion to broadcasters as something they could leave on the shelf. The photography still deserves its 10, but a film shouldn’t let its own ending be treated as a bonus feature. It was filmed across roughly two thousand days in the field at both poles. That’s a logistics achievement more than a photographic one.
Those killer whales wave-washing a seal off an ice floe had been described and never filmed.
International broadcasters could opt out of the final episode about climate. That became a story in itself.
11. Africa (2013)
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"One continent, four years, and the giraffe fight."
Africa narrows the scope to a single continent and gains depth for it, spending around four years across the Kalahari, the Congo, the Sahara and the Cape. The male giraffes fighting with their necks is the sequence everybody remembers, filmed in slow motion at a weight and impact nobody had appreciated, and it’s shocking in a way natural history rarely manages.
The black rhinoceros gathering filmed at night with infrared is the material that had never been recorded at all, showing social behavior in a species assumed to be solitary.
The shoebill sequence and the fight between two giraffes are the two everybody cites, and the giraffe footage had no precedent.
It uses starlight cameras to film at night at levels no previous series could reach.
Critics faulted the final episode’s material on the drought and the elephant calves for editing chronology, which the production acknowledged.
12. Planet Earth II (2016)
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"The iguana and the snakes, which is the most tense three minutes in the form."
Planet Earth II arrived a decade after the original with stabilized gimbals, drones and remote cameras that let the Unit work at the subject’s level instead of observing from a distance. The racer snakes pursuing a marine iguana hatchling on Fernandina is constructed like a chase sequence in a thriller, cut for suspense with an escape, a recapture and a second escape, and it’s the most purely tense thing the Unit has produced.
The urban episode is the other significant departure, treating cities as a habitat and filming leopards in Mumbai and macaques in Jaipur with the same seriousness as a wilderness. The iguana and racer snakes sequence is the most heart-rate-raising footage in any natural history series and was cut like an action scene. This series uses drones, remote rigs and stabilized long lenses that didn’t exist for the first series ten years earlier.
Its final episode on cities is the argument the whole series was building toward and the one the format had never attempted.
13. Blue Planet II (2017)
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"The series that changed legislation."
Blue Planet II is the most consequential thing on this page. Four years at sea produced behavior never previously recorded, including the tuskfish using coral as an anvil to open shellfish. That’s tool use in a species nobody expected it from.
Then the final episode on plastic pollution produced a measurable policy response in several countries, contributed to the UK microbead ban and single-use plastic charges, and the effect was named after the program.
It’s also the point at which the run stopped describing and started arguing, which the Unit had been building toward since The Living Planet in 1984.
Blue Planet II is the entry that moves me most, because it proves a camera can change what people do. The tuskfish alone would’ve justified four years at sea. What the final episode achieved went past anything I expect from television, and it got there by showing the process and letting viewers draw the line themselves. The tool-using tusk fish, carrying a clam to a rock to break it, is behavior that had never been recorded.
Within a year, the final episode on plastic changed public policy in several countries, which almost no documentary achieves.
Hans Zimmer scored it and the collaboration with Radiohead on the closing piece is the only time the format has done anything like that.
14. Hemo the Magnificent (1957)
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"Frank Capra made a science film about blood and it is better than that sounds."
Hemo the Magnificent is here because it solves the explanatory film’s problem. Capra directed a series for Bell Laboratories in the 1950s and this one explains the circulatory system by combining live action with character animation. The animation carries the diagram instead of replacing it. Capra treats the audience as capable of following a real mechanism, uses the cartoon to illustrate what a chart can’t, and never substitutes wonder for information. American schools showed it for decades and it’s the reason a generation understood circulation. That’s a larger claim than most films on this page can make. Frank Capra made it for Bell Laboratories as part of a series of educational science films shown in American schools for decades.
It combines live action with animation to explain the circulatory system, with the animated character arguing with the scientist. Every science communication program since takes it as the model, and almost nobody knows Capra made it.
15. The Thin Blue Line (1988)
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"A documentary that got a man off death row, and the form has never recovered from its method."
The Thin Blue Line is the most consequential single documentary ever made in the most direct sense: it got Randall Dale Adams released. Morris set out to make a film about a psychiatrist and found a wrongful conviction instead. The reconstructions are both the controversy and the achievement. Morris stages the shooting repeatedly and differently, according to each incompatible witness account, so the audience watches the contradictions instead of being told about them. Because the reconstructions were held to make it not a documentary, it was disqualified from Academy Award consideration. That’s a judgment that’s aged badly. Philip Glass scored it.
This is the film on the page I’d defend hardest. A man was in prison for something he didn’t do, and a filmmaker who’d come for a different story noticed and wouldn’t let it go. The Academy disqualifying it over the reconstructions was an outrage, since the reconstructions were exactly how Morris showed the witnesses couldn’t all be telling the truth. My only reservation is that the staged scenes can feel cold on first contact.
The film’s re-enactments were controversial because documentary orthodoxy held that reconstruction was dishonest, and Morris used them to show conflicting accounts. It led directly to the release of Randall Dale Adams from a life sentence. That’s the clearest practical consequence any documentary has had.
The Academy refused to nominate it, reportedly because the re-enactments disqualified it as documentary, which the rules were later changed to address.
16. Hoop Dreams (1994)
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"Five years with two families, and the basketball turns out to be the least of it."
Hoop Dreams began as a thirty-minute short about playground basketball and became five years of footage following William Gates and Arthur Agee from recruitment at a suburban Catholic school through the collapse of both their prospects. The subject is tuition, transport, electricity being cut off, and a scholarship structure that extracts labor from teenagers and discards them when they’re injured. None of that is asserted; it emerges because the crew stayed long enough to film it happening.
Hoop Dreams breaks my heart, and it deserves every bit of that. A system that treated two teenagers as inventory promised them a way out, and the crew stayed long enough to watch the promise fall apart. If you want to know what it costs to be good at something other people profit from, this is the film. It’s long, and I wouldn’t cut a minute.
It runs a hundred and seventy minutes, wasn’t nominated for Best Documentary, and the omission caused enough of a scandal that the Academy changed its voting procedure.
Shot across five years, it was assembled from around two hundred and fifty hours of footage.
The film was planned as a thirty-minute short and became a three-hour feature because the subjects’ lives didn’t resolve.
Its exclusion from the documentary shortlist caused enough objection that the Academy changed its nomination process.
17. Senna (2010)
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"No talking heads, no narrator, and a better film for the refusal."
Senna is built entirely from contemporaneous archive: race footage, in-car cameras, press conferences and home video, with no retrospective interviews filmed for it at all.
That constraint is why it works. Nobody in the present tells the audience how to feel about Senna or about Imola in 1994, because there’s nobody in the present at all, and the outcome stays uncertain for a viewer who already knows it.
Kapadia and editor Chris King reviewed thousands of hours, and the drivers’ briefing footage, in which Senna argues about safety with officials, is material the sport had never released.
This one uses no talking-head interviews at all, assembling the entire film from archive footage and audio recorded at the time.
The onboard camera footage and the drivers’ briefing recordings are the material that makes the rivalry legible and not asserted. Asif Kapadia refined the method here and reused it for Amy and Diego Maradona.
18. The Act of Killing (2012)
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"Former death squad leaders restage their own killings as genre cinema, and agree to it happily."
The Act of Killing is the most extraordinary access any documentary has obtained. Participants in the 1965 Indonesian killings reenact what they did, in the styles of the American films they admire, with costumes, sets and musical numbers they choose themselves. They agree eagerly because they were never prosecuted and are locally celebrated, so a film about their achievements is an opportunity instead of a risk. The method means Oppenheimer never has to accuse anybody; the choices indict them. That final sequence, in which Anwar Congo physically can’t continue on the roof where he killed people, is the closest any camera has come to filming a conscience arriving. Much of the crew is credited as Anonymous.
This was the hardest film on the page for me to sit through, and I think everybody should.
What chills me is the enthusiasm, men proud enough of what they did to dress it up as a musical. Oppenheimer never raises his voice, and he doesn’t have to. The rooftop scene is as close as I’ve seen a camera come to catching a conscience showing up late.
Oppenheimer invited perpetrators of the Indonesian killings to restage their own crimes in the style of the films they liked.
The men agree enthusiastically, which is the source of the horror, and the film’s subject becomes what performing it does to them. Much of the crew is credited as Anonymous. It’s a fact about the country the film is describing.
19. Citizenfour (2014)
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"A camera in the hotel room while it is happening."
Citizenfour is unrepeatable because of when Poitras filmed it. Poitras recorded Snowden’s June 2013 meetings with her and Greenwald in a Hong Kong hotel before any of the disclosures had been published and before anybody knew what would follow.
It’s not a reconstruction and not an interview. The film records a man deciding to end his own life as he’s known it, in real time, while the people in the room work out what to do with what he’s given them.
The fire alarm testing in the corridor, the hair dye, the blanket over the laptop, and the moment the story breaks on the television in the room are all captured because Poitras was there before the outcome existed.
Poitras was filming in the Hong Kong hotel room as the Snowden story broke. That makes the footage contemporaneous and not reconstructed. The tension is entirely procedural, with people managing encryption, phone batteries and a fire alarm they can’t account for. She had been on a watchlist for years and edited the film in Berlin because she didn’t consider American editing facilities safe.
20. O.J.: Made in America (2016)
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"Seven and a half hours, and it needs every one of them."
O.J.: Made in America uses the case as a route into decades of Los Angeles policing, race and celebrity, and the trial doesn’t begin until well into the running time.
The length is the method instead of an indulgence. By the time the verdict arrives the audience has been given Watts, Eula Love, the 1979 shooting policies and Rodney King, so the reaction in the courtroom is comprehensible and not merely shocking. A two-hour version could only have asserted what this shows, and it won Best Documentary despite a dispute about whether a five-part series qualified as a film. It runs nearly eight hours and spends the first two on Los Angeles policing before the trial is reached. The argument is that the verdict is unintelligible without three decades of context, which the length is required to establish.
It won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature. That prompted a rule change about what counts as a film.
21. Free Solo (2018)
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"The crew have to decide whether filming makes it more likely he dies."
Free Solo is on this list because it examines its own presence. Vasarhelyi and Chin recorded Alex Honnold’s free solo ascent of El Capitan in June 2017, and the film is at least as much about the crew as about the climber. Chin and his team, all climbers themselves, discuss on camera whether the production is adding pressure that could kill the subject, whether they should be there at all, and where to place cameras so Honnold can’t see them. They film his first aborted attempt instead of cutting it.
One cameraman can’t watch through the lens during the boulder problem and turns away. That’s in the film. The crew had to decide how to film somebody who might die in front of them, and the film includes their discussion of that.
Researchers scanned Honnold’s brain response to fear during production, and the film uses the finding without making it the thesis. The camera positions on El Capitan required climbers operating at the same exposure as the subject.
22. Apollo 11 (2019)
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"Seventy millimeter footage nobody had seen, and no narration at all."
Apollo 11 is a restoration achievement first. Miller found large-format footage in the National Archives that had been shot for a documentary never completed and never transferred, and had it scanned at a resolution the original film stock could support.
The clarity removes archival distance entirely. The crowd at the launch, the faces in mission control, the technicians smoking, all at a sharpness that makes 1969 look like last week and not like history.
There’s no narration, no interviews and no present-day material. Eleven thousand hours of mission audio were synchronized to the footage, so everything heard was said at the time.
I really enjoy this one. Somebody went into the National Archives and found footage good enough to make 1969 look like last week, and the film had the sense to add nothing to it. If it has a weakness, it’s that anybody hoping to learn how the mission worked will come away with the feeling and very little of the engineering.
It’s assembled entirely from 65mm footage discovered in the National Archives that hadn’t been seen since it was shot.
There’s no narration and no interviews, only material recorded at the time, including mission audio synchronized to the film. The launch sequence in large format is the closest any audience will come to standing at the pad.
23. Roger & Me (1989)
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"The film that invented the presenter-as-protagonist documentary, for better and considerably worse."
Roger & Me established a form that’s dominated advocacy documentary ever since. That’s the director as on-screen antagonist pursuing an interview he won’t get.
The Flint material is strong. General Motors closed plants in a company town, the consequences are filmed directly, and the sequence intercutting an eviction with a Christmas message is effective. The chronology has been criticized for compressing events to suit the argument, including presenting closures and their effects in an order that didn’t occur. Moore’s defense is that the film is an essay and not reportage. That’s a position the form has been arguing about ever since.
I enjoy Roger & Me and I don’t fully trust it. The Flint footage works because the people losing their homes are real, and the rearranged chronology sells them short. When your subjects are people who were hurt, you don’t get to reshuffle their story for a better punchline.
Moore built a form here, with the director as an on-screen presence pursuing an executive who won’t meet him.
He rearranged the chronology. That drew criticism at the time and became the standard objection to everything he’s made since.
The Flint material about the plant closures is the strongest part and the least stylized.
24. Grizzly Man (2005)
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"Herzog disagrees with his own subject and says so out loud."
Grizzly Man is assembled from Timothy Treadwell’s own hundred hours of footage across thirteen summers among Alaskan grizzlies. That ended with Treadwell and his partner being killed and eaten.
Herzog refuses the sentimental reading and states his disagreement directly in narration, saying he sees only indifference and the overwhelming half-bored interest in food in the bears’ faces. The narrator is in open conflict with the man whose images the film is made of.
The audio of the deaths exists and Herzog listens to it on camera, tells the woman holding the tape to destroy it, and doesn’t play it. That’s the most restrained decision in the film.
Herzog’s refusal to play that tape is the most decent thing any director on this page does.
I also find the film uneasy to watch, because Treadwell can’t answer back and Herzog gets the last word on him every time. I think Herzog’s right about the bears. I’m less sure he needed to win the argument quite so thoroughly against a dead man.
Herzog assembles it from around a hundred hours Treadwell shot himself over five summers.
He listens to the audio of the deaths on camera and tells the owner of the tape to destroy it. That’s the film’s central decision.
Herzog’s disagreement with his subject is stated openly in narration. That’s unusual and is what stops the film becoming a memorial.
25. Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)
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"Thirty-two thousand year old paintings, filmed under severe restriction, and the restriction improves it."
Cave of Forgotten Dreams was made under conditions that would normally cripple a production. Herzog was given four crew, cold lights that wouldn’t damage the pigment, a narrow metal walkway he couldn’t step off, and four hours a day for six days.
The constraints produce the film’s best quality. The camera can’t move freely so it lingers, and the paintings are held on screen long enough for the audience to see the use the artists made of the rock contour.
The 3D is the one legitimate use that format has found, because the artists painted the images on an uneven surface and used that unevenness deliberately, which a flat image can’t convey.
Access to Chauvet was granted for a handful of hours across a few days, with the crew restricted to a narrow walkway. Herzog shot it in 3D because the paintings use the contours of the rock. That can’t be conveyed flat.
The postscript about albino crocodiles is entirely Herzog and has nothing to do with anything. That’s why people remember it.
26. Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (2018)
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"A film about sincerity that manages not to be sentimental about it."
Won’t You Be My Neighbor treats Fred Rogers as somebody with a theory and not as a warm memory. That’s what keeps it from becoming the thing it’s about.
The strongest material is evidence that Rogers was making arguments against his own industry. The 1969 Senate testimony that saved public broadcasting funding, the decision to address assassination and divorce and death directly to children, and the episode where he shares a paddling pool with a Black officer in 1969.
Neville also includes the material that complicates it, including Rogers’s difficulty with his own sons and his late doubt about whether any of it had worked.
The film’s argument is that Rogers’s approach was a deliberate methodology instead of a temperament, built on child development research. The 1969 Senate testimony, six minutes that secured public broadcasting funding, is the sequence the film builds toward.
Neville avoids sentiment by staying with the work instead of the man. That’s harder with this subject than with most.
27. The Last Dance (2020)
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"Ten hours of extraordinary footage, controlled by its own subject."
The Last Dance is built around footage nobody else has. A crew followed the Chicago Bulls through the 1997-98 season with unusual access, and the material was held for two decades because Jordan controlled its release.
That’s also the limitation. Jordan’s production company was a partner, he’s shown responding to other participants’ accounts on an iPad and having the last word on each, and Horace Grant and others have disputed the version presented. The footage is unrepeatable and the framing is negotiated, and both of those are true at once.
I had a great time with The Last Dance and I don’t take its version of events at face value. Footage like that doesn’t exist anywhere else, and it’s thrilling to see. The iPad scenes are where it gives itself away, with the man who controls the footage getting to rebut everyone who spoke before him. That’s a fine arrangement for a greatest-hits reel and a poor one for history.
Jordan had held the 1998 footage for over twenty years and controlled whether it was ever released.
That control is the film’s structural problem, since he’s a producer and the narrative is his account.
It’s absorbing television and should be watched with the knowledge that the subject approved every frame of it.
I think nerve separates the top of this list from the bottom. The best of these films got somewhere nobody else could and then trusted what they found enough to leave it alone. The weaker ones couldn’t resist putting a thumb on the scale, whether that’s Moore reordering Flint or Jordan approving his own story, and every time a documentary does that it spends trust that belongs to the people in it.
