Best Documentary Movies, Films, and Streaming Features of 2021
At their best, documentaries have the power to transport us from our chairs throughout the world, placing us in the shoes of fascinating people we’ve never heard of, and undertaking their compelling journeys as if they were our own.
This year, with more viewing methods than ever before, we’ve been lucky enough to experience an overwhelming abundance of high quality documentary movies. 2021 delivered some superb doco’s from exceptional talent, telling tales of unsung musicians, celebrity life stories, harsh truths from the art world, tragic oppression, historic moments, legendary music festivals, and even Sesame Street.
When it comes to documentaries, there was something sensational for every documentary fan this year. Please enjoy our Best Documentaries of 2021.
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1. The Sparks Brothers
The fact that the Mael brothers had long envisaged themselves as creatures of theatre and film rather than just rock music gives Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright a neat through-line that links the cinematic quality of Sparks songs (epic tales told in miniature) to the birth of Annette, a musical collaboration between the brothers and Leos Carax that opened the Cannes film festival.
Wright is a perfect fit for the absurdist antics of art pop’s most elusive duo in this stranger-than-fiction documentary, wrestling with the stranger-than-fiction tale of one of pop music’s most influentially indefinable enigmas.
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2. Fin
For those of us who grew up when Jaws was the talk of the town, sharks will always be a source of fascination and terror. That's probably why Shark Week took off when it did, and it's certainly why Eli Roth was so thrilled when asked to become one of its hosts.
Fin is a wide-ranging film which seems to keep evolving as it goes along. It’s disturbing for a purpose, as it absolutely ought to be. There are also brief, magical scenes where director Eli Roth, underwater, cuddles and pets a wild shark as if it were a dog. Virtually everything told here is also shown, and here film serves another purpose: as a record of what may never be seen by human eyes again.
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3. Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain
Roadrunner is a devastating portrait of Anthony Bourdain’s life and death. Morgan Neville's portrait of the late rock-star chef is as empathetic as it is tragic.
Watching Roadrunner feels like engaging in a kind of collective mourning, a desperate bid to understand a man who meant so much to so many, even if we never met him. For those of us who cared about Tony, whether through the television or a recipe, this is essential viewing.
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4. Woodstock 99: Peace Love And Rage
Setting aside its subjects’ lack of diversity, “Woodstock 99” is a must-watch documentary that reminds us, yet again, about history’s inevitable ability to repeat itself. Clocking in at nearly two hours, it’s amazing how breathless the pace is from the minute the heavily young, white, male crowd starts to arrive.
The documentary plays out in a straightforward manner, detailing the desire and failure from Woodstock creatives Michael Lang and John Schuer to do another multi-day music festival in the vein of what Lang had created in 1969.
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5. A Glitch In The Matrix
The conceit of Rodney Ascher’s computer-haunted documentary is that our perceived reality is not a physical reality where we haul our fleshy conveyances of bone, skin, and muscle around looking for sustenance, pleasure, and maybe a comfy chair. For the men whom Ascher interviews (and yes, they are pretty much all men), everything we see and feel is just the ones and zeroes of a computer simulation.
Ascher’s appropriately discombobulating stew of queasiness, comedy, and terror seems well-cued to the subject matter, even while missing a certain editorial sharpness that might have brought some of its notions into greater clarity.
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6. Schumacher
Through exclusive interviews and archival footage, this documentary traces an intimate portrait of seven-time Formula 1 champion Michael Schumacher. It’s consistently entertaining and informative, allowing non-racing fans to care about the culture, life, and storylines of the 1990s Formula One circuit, something many documentary fans have never given a moment of thought to before.
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7. Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street
Street Gang absorbs what was truly important about the show: that not every lesson is going to be fun, but that doesn't mean everything is terrible. Most importantly, Sesame Street taught small kids their ABCs and 123s, while showing them that a beat-up, diverse neighborhood just like theirs could be the best place on Earth.
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8. MLK/FBI
MLK/FBI’s main subject is the ugly history of the FBI’s secret surveillance of King, its discovery of his extramarital affairs and its campaign to discredit him and his leadership. The brilliance of the documentary lies in how effortlessly conversant it manages to be with the injustices of the present, without ever deviating from the injustices of the past.
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9. Ascension
Exploring the pursuit of the "Chinese Dream”, this observational documentary presents a contemporary vision of China that prioritizes productivity and innovation above all. Stylistically, Ascension borrows from the city-symphony genre at times, with long stretches passing without any dialogue as the camera whips past and through recycling depots, cell phone assembly lines, and poultry plants. There are no talking heads in the picture or any camera-facing reflections to guide the audience along a narrative, making it less cinéma vérité and more direct cinema in style. It is an effective approach.
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10. The Lost Leonardo
Andreas Koefoed's documentary hooks you with the mystery of whether the Salvator Mundi is an authentic painting by Leonardo da Vinci. But the film's real subject is how art becomes power. The Lost Leonardo is the first art-world documentary I’ve seen that captures what art becomes once it goes through the looking glass of greed: not just a commodity, but a way of transferring and manipulating power. It’s enough to make the Mona Lisa stop smiling.
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11. Attica
Survivors, observers, and expert government officials recount the 1971 uprising at the Attica Correctional Facility. The violent five-day standoff between mostly Black and Latino inmates and law enforcement gripped America then, and highlights the urgent, ongoing need for reform 50 years later. What unfolds is a bone-chilling account of what is widely regarded as the largest prison rebellion in U.S. history. Director Stanley Nelson relies on chilling first-hand testimony to capture the truth behind the still-shocking prison massacre.
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12. The Velvet Underground
Directed by Todd Haynes, it shows just how the group became a cultural touchstone representing a range of contradictions: the band is both of their time, yet timeless; literary yet realistic; rooted in high art and street culture. The film features in-depth interviews with the key players of that time combined with a treasure trove of never-before-seen performances and a rich collection of recordings, Warhol films, and other experimental art that creates an immersive experience into what founding member John Cale describes as the band's creative ethos: “how to be elegant and how to be brutal.”
Making ingenious use of split-screen, experimental montage and densely layered images and sound over two fabulously entertaining hours, Haynes puts his distinctive stamp on the material while crafting a work that could almost have come from the same artistic explosion it celebrates.
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13. Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters
‘Can You Bring It’ traces the history and legacy of one of the most important works of art to come out of the age of AIDS - Bill T. Jones' tour de force ballet ‘D-Man in the Waters’. In 1989, ‘D-Man in the Waters’ gave physical manifestation to the fear, anger, grief, and hope for salvation that the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company felt as they were embattled by the AIDS pandemic. While Jones (as is his right as an artist) seems determined to recast ‘D-Man’ as an amorphous meditation on grief in many forms, the specificity of the piece is undeniable — and what makes it so enduring. ‘D-Man’ speaks for itself, and it’s poetry in motion.
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14. Sabaya
Sabaya does not shy away from the horrendous circumstances it finds, exhibiting bitterly raw emotion, fear and heartbreak very frankly. Armed with just a mobile phone and a gun, Mahmud, Ziyad and other volunteers from the Yazidi Home Center risk their lives trying to save Yazidi women and girls being held by ISIS members as sabaya (sex slaves) in the most dangerous refugee camp in the Middle East, Al-Hol in Syria.
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15. Marvel's Behind The Mask
The expectations are there for this to be a bit of a puff piece for Marvel (although these are possibly unfounded, given that Marvel 616 is an amazing documentary series also on Disney+). But, ‘Behind the Mask’ is so much more. It's quite wonderful that Marvel has been able to pull from its 80+ years of history to present such diverse intellectual content.
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16. The Rescue
‘The Rescue’ chronicles the enthralling, against-all-odds story that transfixed the world in 2018: the daring rescue of twelve boys and their football coach from deep inside a flooded cave in Northern Thailand. It isn’t just a movie about cave divers, or a recap of a well-reported humanitarian operation. It’s ultimately a film about the triumph of altruism, ingenuity and perseverance in the face of almost impossible odds, by the very people you might initially have dismissed as not up to the task.
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17. The First Wave
Now, more than a year and a half into the novel coronavirus pandemic, Matthew Heineman’s intensely intimate documentary arrives as a graphic and emotional reminder of the early days of the crisis, in all its confusion and horror. It’s also a breathtaking testament to the fight to live, the calling to heal, and the power of human connection.
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18. Listening to Kenny G
Since Kenneth Gorelick isn’t actually interested in being separated from Kenny G, Director Penny Lane’s real task becomes imbuing the aggregate with some stakes. And she crushes it: ‘Listening to Kenny G’ gives you all your need-to-knows so that you can take or leave the titular musician as you see fit.
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19. The Truffle Hunters
Deep in the forests of Piedmont, Italy, a handful of men, seventy or eighty years young, hunt for the rare and expensive white Alba truffle—which to date has resisted all of modern science's efforts at cultivation. As a result of climate change, deforestation, and the lack of young people taking up the mantle, the truffle hunters' secrets are more coveted than ever.
However, as it soon becomes clear, these ageing men may just hold something much more valuable than even this prized delicacy: the secret to a rich and meaningful life. This endearing, thoroughly entertaining movie might be what we all needed in 2021: An invitation to stop and smell the roses — or, if you’re lucky, their far less showy fungal cousins.
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20. Sisters with Transistors
Narrated by legendary multimedia artist Laurie Anderson, ‘Sisters with Transistors’ showcases the music of and rare interviews with female electronic pioneers Clara Rockmore, Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, Éliane Radigue, Maryanne Amacher, and Wendy Carlos.
Director Lisa Rovner’s superb documentary pays a deeply deserved, seldom-expressed tribute to the female composers, musicians and inventors from the brief history of electronic music.
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21. State Funeral
In the days following the death of Joseph Stalin, countless citizens flooded the Red Square to mourn their leader’s loss and witness his burial. Though the procession was captured in detail by hundreds of cameramen, their footage has remained largely unseen until now. Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s clinical and fascinating 135-minute assembly of this priceless archive is a categorically weird, thrillingly immersive distillation of four days of official, cultish pomp and mourning for one of the 20th century’s biggest monsters.
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22. Little Girl
Sébastien Lifshitz’s lovely, clear-eyed documentary thoughtfully articulates the disorientation of gender dysphoria not from the inside out — Sasha is never less than calmly convinced of who she is — but from the outside in, as her transitioning identity sparks confusion and resistance in an uninformed community, causing her anxiety in turn.
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23. Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
In 1969, more than 300,000 people attended the summer concert series known as the Harlem Cultural Festival. It was filmed, but after that summer, the footage sat in a basement for 50 years. It has never been seen. Director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s feature debut intertwines music and politics in one of the best concert movies of all time.
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24. Procession
‘Procession’ is a harrowing document of a group of survivors of sexual abuse by Catholic priests and their battle for justice. In letting them retell their stories their way, and asking us to watch, ‘Procession’ dares its audience to not look away. It calls us, in other words, to join the healing community, not just with vague aspirations but with our actual eyes. To play our roles as audience members and then take what we learn and bring it to others.
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25. Wojnarowicz
Prolific, lyrical, and possessed of that entrepreneurial optimism which afflicts some who have seen the worst of what the world has to offer, David Wojnarowicz was a multivalent artist who survived a tormented childhood and decanted that bone-deep fury into his work. Director Chris Kim’s skittering collage of a documentary Wojnarowicz doesn’t explore his career from the outside but rather works ground up through his art to present an experiential plunge into the raw tumult of the New York art scene just before and following the onset of AIDS.
Read more here.
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