Published Updated

Sort by

Official Top 250 Documentary Films

A companion piece to Dave Vis' list of here. It will be updated on a monthly basis and is an official list progress project on all-time stats pages for Pro and Patron . (See all films that have entered.)

ELIGIBILITY RULES:
• Documentaries must be feature-length (more than 40 minutes), with a theatrical and/or festival release in its entirety.
• TV series, miniseries, and episodes are excluded but docs listed as 'TV movie' on IMDb are eligible. Exceptions made for series and episodes that also had a limited theatrical release.
• No behind-the-scenes featurettes unless theatrically distributed, even if feature-length (featurettes are marked…

There are 192 films in this list available on Amazon US.

  • Stop Making Sense

    1

  • Paris Is Burning

    3

  • Shoah

    4

  • As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty

    6

  • O.J.: Made in America

    7

  • Hoop Dreams

    8

  • The Act of Killing

    9

  • Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii

    10

  • Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks

    11

  • Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father

    12

  • For Sama

    13

  • Streetwise

    14

  • Baraka

    15

  • Twenty Years Later

    16

  • Jenin, Jenin

    18

  • The Look of Silence

    19

  • Harlan County U.S.A.

    20

  • Koyaanisqatsi

    21

  • The Beaches of Agnès

    23

  • When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts

    24

  • Minding the Gap

    25

  • Gaza Fights for Freedom

    26

  • The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On

    27

  • 20 Days in Mariupol

    28

  • The Battle of Chile: Part I

    29

  • Welfare

    30

  • The Battle of Chile: Part II

    31

  • Playing

    32

  • Man with a Movie Camera

    33

  • Black Is… Black Ain’t

    34

  • Master, a Building in Copacabana

    35

  • Life of Crime: 1984-2020

    36

  • David Byrne's American Utopia

    38

  • Senna

    39

  • Tongues Untied

    40

  • 'Til Madness Do Us Part

    41

  • The Gleaners and I

    42

  • Samsara

    45

  • The Salt of the Earth

    46

  • The Last Waltz

    47

  • 5 Broken Cameras

    48

  • Sans Soleil

    49

  • Concert for George

    50

  • A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies

    51

  • All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

    53

  • Louis Theroux: The Settlers

    54

  • Flee

    55

  • Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron

    56

  • Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse

    57

  • F for Fake

    58

  • Kanehsatake, 270 Years of Resistance

    59

  • Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus

    60

  • Human

    61

  • American Movie

    62

  • Tokyo Olympiad

    65

  • Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt

    66

  • Original Cast Album: Company

    67

  • I Am Not Your Negro

    69

  • Won't You Be My Neighbor?

    72

  • Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: One More Time with Feeling

    75

  • Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

    77

  • The Sorrow and the Pity

    79

  • Crumb

    81

  • Belfast, Maine

    82

  • Woodstock

    83

  • Pictures of the Old World

    84

  • LA 92

    85

  • Hearts and Minds

    86

  • No Direction Home: Bob Dylan

    88

  • HyperNormalisation

    90

  • Nazi Concentration Camps

    91

  • Dressed in Blue

    92

  • Heima

    93

  • Blue

    94

  • 9/11

    95

  • Children of Shatila

    96

  • Histoire(s) du cinéma

    97

  • Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

    100

  • Faces Places

    101

  • 63 Up

    102

  • George Harrison: Living in the Material World

    103

  • Dont Look Back

    104

  • Grizzly Man

    105

  • Dead Souls

    106

  • A Grin Without a Cat

    108

  • Lessons of Darkness

    109

  • Jimi Plays Monterey

    110

  • See Know Evil

    111

  • Cameraperson

    112

  • Prince: Sign O' the Times

    113

  • The Murder of Fred Hampton

    114

  • A World Not Ours

    115

  • Searching for Sugar Man

    116

  • White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

    117

  • Fire of Love

    118

  • Mr. Bachmann and His Class

    119

  • They Shall Not Grow Old

    120

  • The Fire Within: Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft

    121

  • Shinjuku Boys

    122

  • Diaries, Notes, and Sketches

    123