INDIEWIRE: The 21 Best Documentaries and Documentary Series of 2024
By Ben Travers, Anne Thompson
As Timothee Chalamet likely wheezes at some point in “A Complete Unknown,” the times they are a-changin’. While decidedly not a documentary (even the songs are recorded anew), the Bob Dylan biopic and its oft-leaned-upon lyric do speak to the modern moment as well (and as widely) as they ever have. Here, they reference a doc world in disruption. In Hollywood, the streamers are tightening their once-elastic belts. Theatrical releases are too few and far between. The demand for documentaries remains, but the distribution paths aren’t as robust or reliable as they were even a few years ago.
Unique obstacles surfaced in 2024. Despite the year being dominated by debate over the November election, political documentaries faced a wary marketplace and thus struggled to reach audiences in a timely fashion. Cold feet (or, in some cases, cowardice) proved to be an unfortunate trend. The year’s best-reviewed documentary film, “No Other Land,” has yet to secure distribution, most likely because it focuses on Palestinian communities being wiped out by Israeli forces and buyers are afraid to be seen taking sides. Meanwhile, streamers continue to show a strong appetite for celebrity-driven documentaries — including many where the subject is also a producer — but their stomachs may be too big for their eyes, so to speak: There just aren’t enough famous subjects left to follow.
Despite all this, because of all this, amid all that keeps coming and has come before, filmmakers persevered. Festivals, critics, and audiences rallied around documentaries that were only screened in a handful of venues over a smattering of weeks. Streaming series thrived on passionate word of mouth, thoughtful acclaim, and, of course, the astute insights built-in by their creators. Stories are meant to be shared, and great stories make you want to shout them from the rooftops.
TV highlights included new discoveries, like “Ren Faire” and “Anatomy of Lies,” as well as returning favorites in “Couples Therapy” and “The Jinx.” Some cast well-known subjects under fresh light (Ken Burns’ “Leonardo da Vinci”) and others introduced us to individuals we won’t soon forget (“Pop Star Academy: Katseye”). The best documentary films followed similar, wide-ranging patterns, whether we were once again visiting Martha Stewart’s unbelievable life through a screen or reconnecting with Pharrell via LEGO pieces. Everything may be changing, all the time, sometimes, seemingly, all at once, but this year’s best docs continue to adapt, to push ahead, and to bring us closer to ideas, feelings, and people than ever before.
Christian Blauvelt, Wilson Chapman, Marcus Jones, Ryan Lattanzio, Tony Maglio, Sarah Shachat, Erin Strecker, and Brian Welk also contributed to this list.
‘Anatomy of Lies’
This isn’t the most highbrow pick on this list, but the three-part Peacock documentary based on the Vanity Fair expose about a “Grey’s Anatomy” writer, Elizabeth Finch, who faked a cancer battle, among many, many other lies, is absolutely riveting TV. Getting many of her former co-workers on camera to discuss her years-long deception is full of unexpected, wild reveals. The best part, in this series by Evgenia Peretz and David Schisgall, is the time and care spent with perhaps Finch’s biggest victims, Finch’s ex-wife Jennifer and Jennifer’s children. It’s here viewers see the full, devastating effect of Finch’s choices, and the need to publicize her crimes so she can never get away with it again. One doesn’t need to be a “Grey’s” fan to get sucked into this compelling, disturbing tale. —ES
‘Couples Therapy’ Season 4
Season 4 starts at the beginning. Photographs of Dr. Orna Guralnik’s patients flash across the screen, except they’re not who we’ll meet in the room — not exactly. We’re shown baby photos; photos of the kids who will grow up to become the complicated people trying to save their complicated relationships; photos of the individuals who will take all their memories, all their learned experiences, all their beliefs and try to form families of their own, hoping they’ll do better than their own parents. Except they’re not just hoping. They’re putting in the work. “Couples Therapy” Season 4 focuses on three distraught couples, all desperate to find a path forward with their current partner — or partners.
Yes, Season 4 introduces Dr. Orna to her first poly relationship, and watching the committed, compassionately attentive psychologist navigate a dynamic that’s relatively new to her proves just as stimulating as seeing how the trio will move ahead. But like an inverse of so many more conventional TV shows (that lean on in media res openings to hook viewers with the inciting incident before jumping back in time to work up to that point), “Couples Therapy” starts at the beginning, flashes to the present, and then works its way back through the past. It’s riveting, eye-opening, deeply empathetic entertainment — you’ll want to stick with these couples forever, even if you’re not sure they should stick by each other. —BT
‘Dahomey’
At barely over an hour long, Mati Diop’s “Dahomey” feels more like a hazy dream than a full-fledged documentary. A curious mix of nonfiction and narrative storytelling, the documentary dramatizes the return of 26 historic artifacts hailing from the Kingdom of Dahomey to Benin after hundreds of years in French possession, primarily telling the story through the artifacts themselves. Narration tells of these artifacts’ journey home, giving these inanimate objects a voice in a way that sheds insight into the gnawing sense of displacement and the cultural scars that colonialism lingers on a populace. Still, Diop’s film isn’t just a pure mood piece: an extended depiction of a forum debate over the artifacts’ return, in which students express joy at their return and dissatisfaction at it as an incomplete gesture, is a fascinating moment of nonfiction storytelling that never takes sides or leans into any one direction as it considers the issues in total. —WC
‘Daughters’
“Daughters” is not explicitly a political film. It focuses squarely on the emotional heft of the prisoners’ rehabilitation, the daughters’ struggles as they grow up without a father figure, and the tearjerking gut punch of finally seeing the Daddy-Daughter Dance — and then watching it end. Directors Natalie Rae and Angela Patton linger and, in their verite style, capture the pile of dress shoes collected from the prisoners at the end of the evening, a grim reminder of the situation in which these men are surviving. But it does inject one indicting message about the prison industrial complex: Many prisoners have gone years without being able to even touch their children and are forced to have their families pay a fee to even get the privilege to do a virtual Zoom visit. With that one damning detail, “Daughters” allows us to witness the breadth of the consequences of our American justice system. —BW
‘Eno’
There may be 52 quintillion versions of “Eno” that you can watch, but Gary Hustwit’s brilliant documentary on the ambient music pioneer Brian Eno goes beyond a gimmick because of the way in which Eno’s music itself illustrates, better than anyone else could, the film’s construction. Eno describes taking a loop of music, sculpting it and changing it slightly each time it plays, then sitting back and watching it evolve and allowing the listener to find the connections. Hustwit films a scene where Eno is literally planting seeds in a garden and observing them flower over time, a beautiful metaphor for his music and the film itself. Even without the groundbreaking structure, “Eno” breaks the mold of the typical biographical doc. The kaleidoscopic editing mixed with BTS footage of Eno in the studio with U2 and David Bowie are truly dynamic. And Hustwit evokes a sardonic side to Eno, allowing him to ruminate on existential principles or giggle at old voice notes. “It’s about feelings,” Eno says. “Is that too small a thing to admit to?” —BW
‘God Save Texas’
In 2003, in his hometown of Huntsville, TX, Richard Linklater walked to the state prison, where an inmate on death row was scheduled to be executed. “What I saw as an unfolding tragedy created a kind of panic in me,” Linklater says, narrating the footage 20 years later. “This was all happening just down the hill from where I went to high school.”
Linklater has always been one of the more amiable auteurs out there. He comes across as just one of the guys — the old baseball teammate and high school classmate he was growing up; a seasoned version of the raw young men we see in “Everybody Wants Some” or “Dazed and Confused,” who’s still more comfortable in a T-shirt at a Fourth of July cookout than donning a tux to walk the red carpet. That’s who’s shown standing outside the prison in 2003. Just another face in the crowd, just one more concerned soul who can’t help but confront the moral crisis taking place in his own backyard.
Perhaps that’s what makes the center of his documentary, “Hometown Prison” — the first episode of HBO‘s three-part series “God Save Texas” — so powerful. Despite being aware enough to walk to the correctional facility that day, despite being engaged enough to bring his camera and record what happened outside those towering walls, Linklater admits he didn’t often think of the prison when he was living in Huntsville; he didn’t dwell on the people locked inside those walls, or the people whose job it was to make sure they stayed there. Linklater’s 87-minute doc wrestles with just how common it’s become not to acknowledge the government-sanctioned pain and suffering going on all around us. Whether it’s a necessary coping mechanism, an encouraged societal mentality, or a combination of both, normalizing tragedy has become a pervasive part of American culture, whether it’s at home or abroad, and Linklater’s tender, personal inquisition of how that can happen is moving and memorable. Don’t miss it. —BT
‘Hollywoodgate’
This is what access journalism should be — and what access it is. In late 2021, the Taliban invited journalist Ibrahim Nash’at to follow and film a top commander, Mawlawi Mansour, the recently appointed chief of the new government’s air force, as well as a lower-level fighter named Mukhtar. Nash’at would not be allowed to follow anyone else, nor could he turn his lens to the suffering of the Afghan people writ large.
Instead, the filmmaker turned the constraints the Taliban imposed on him into an asset: The limits they demanded reveal just how limited, compartmentalized, and detached the fundamentalists themselves are from the people they rule. Filmed over a year, “Hollywoodgate” — named for the gate at the CIA’s largest former base in Kabul — is a documentary that reveals the Taliban like never before… and pretty much confirms Westerners’ fears about them, without Nash’at necessarily having his thumb on the scale. Some sequences are positively chilling, such as when emissaries from Russia and China attend a military parade celebrating the Taliban’s one-year takeover. The parade even includes a “suicide squad” brigade, and Nash’at told IndieWire that the only reason the Russian and Chinese delegations allowed him to film them was because they thought he too was a Talib.
Nash’at says that his film exists in the gap between what he saw and what the Taliban wanted him to see. That alone is a shocking eye-opener. —CB
‘The Jinx’ Season 2
“The Jinx” (2015) was one of the docuseries of the decade, complete with a culture-dominating ending. So fans would be forgiven for thinking we didn’t need a sequel to the Andrew Jarecki project about murderer Robert Durst. But they’d be wrong. This long-in-the-works sequel, also by Jarecki, covers everything post-2015 and is full of even more wild characters and reveals. The six-episode project takes on Durst’s prison calls, intimidated witnesses, and more. No, there isn’t a moment that tops Part 1’s finale, but it’s still a riveting continuation about a truly WTF case with a cast of “characters” straight out of central casting. For anyone left wondering how Durst was able to get away with so many crimes for so long, this follow up more than answers the question. —ES
‘Leonardo da Vinci’
Five-hundred years after his death, Leonardo Da Vinci is both extremely famous and yet also fairly unknown — beyond being “the guy who painted the Mona Lisa.” That’s something the PBS documentary “Leonardo Da Vinci” aims to fix, and the two-part series by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon definitely pulls out all the cinematic stops to deepen our understanding of Da Vinci’s particular genius in the canon of not just Western painting, but humanist thought. The biography blends re-created footage, split screens of paintings against live-action film, plus all sorts of archive and B-roll material to get us to understand more than simply the facts and accomplishments of Da Vinci’s life. The documentary tries to get us to understand how he thought, which is how we think, too. —SS
No Other Land’
At the IDA Awards this month the four directors of “No Other Land” — Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor, and Yuval Abraham — accepted the Courage Under Fire Award. The searing portrait of Israel’s systematic destruction of Palestinian homes on the West Bank, which is currently without distribution, continued its recent awards sweep including the Gothams and New York Film Critics Circle, winning the IDA’s top prize, Best Documentary Feature, as well as Best Director. What is shown in “No Other Land,” as Israeli soldiers supervise the razing of homes that have been lived in for many years, driving residents into underground caves, is undeniable and disturbing. It’s also a must-see. —AT
‘Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini’
Hulu’s “Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini” is not a perfect docuseries, but it’s a really good one with a really crazy story to tell.
If you’ve only heard Sherri Papini’s name from Eminem’s “Houdini,” well you still kind of get the gist of it: “Caught sleepin’ and see the kidnappin’ never did happen/Like Sherri Papini.” Yes, we (and Slim Shady) just gave away the ending to the 2024 limited series, but so did all of the national news coverage in 2016.
Sherri Papini famously faked her own kidnapping and went through great pains to cover it up. We mean that literally: Papini beat herself badly and implored her co-conspirator to inflict even more physical damage on her battered body to sell it as a real crime. Well, it wasn’t a real crime — or at least, not a kidnapping — but “Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini” is a stand out in the true-crime genre. —TM
‘Piece by Piece’
Pharrell Williams has spoken a lot about how he never wanted to follow the crowd by contributing to this recent explosion of music bio-docs, but taking up the offer to try and execute it however he wanted was too good to pass up. Ultimately, while the narrative is pretty standard, it’s still very fun to be reminded of just how much his production dominated a certain era of popular music, and the real achievement of the Focus Features release directed by Oscar winner Morgan Neville is the expansion of what a film shot in Lego animation can be. Add in the fact that the film has full-on musical numbers, and one gets exactly what Williams was looking to accomplish: a music bio-doc that genuinely stands out from the crowd. —MJ
‘Pop Star Academy: Katseye’
One way to describe this docuseries — about the years-long international collaboration between record labels Hybe and Geffen Records to create a global girl group using the KPop training system — is that it’s as if “The Bachelor” and “UnReal” got squished together into the same show. Even knowing what final six girls made the group Katseye, it is fascinating to see the journey they and their peers went on, through intense dance practices — as well as the reveal that they unknowingly entered a reality-competition show where all of a sudden, they had even less control of their fates, no matter how high ranked within the training program. The record company employees cop to their failures, but the process also fascinatingly illustrates what exactly is that innate X factor that makes someone a star. —MJ
‘The Remarkable Life of Ibelin’
“The Remarkable Life of Ibelin” is remarkable itself not just in story, but in device. The Netflix documentary posthumously — and beautifully — captures the all-too-short life of Norweigen gamer Mats Steen, who died at 25. Steen’s parents initially mourned not just the loss of their son, who suffered from a degenerative muscular disease, but also their misconception that Mats lived a friendless, isolated life. Mats spent his days glued to a computer screen, but they were not days wasted. Rather, as “Ibelin,” Mats deeply entrenched himself in a community via the online RPG “World of Warcraft.”
Steen’s Ibelin’s many meaningful virtual relationships are recreated for the film through ambitious animation, narrated entries from Mats’ blog, and interviews with those who knew him as his charismatic “WoW” character. It’s a very real life story lived out and told through digital means, but like Mats/Ibelin himself, the humanity clearly comes through the screen. —TM
‘Ren Faire’
While there is definitely some novelty to the trappings of “Ren Faire,”what with the jousting and all, Lance Oppenheim’s three-part docuseries is one of the most fascinating dives into the organization of an empire and the toll it exacts on everyone who upholds it. “Ren Faire” is worth the ticket alone for the, shall we say, vivid character of George Coulam, the octogenarian in charge of the Texas Renaissance Festival who is finally looking to let go of his crown so that he can, among other things, die while having intercourse (just to give you a flavor). The structure of scheming courtiers looking to step into the succession will be familiar to anyone who’s seen a trailer for any season of “Game of Thrones,” but Oppenheim’s approach to the disconnect between fantasy, period, and our modern day draws you deeper into the intrigue than dragons ever could. —SS
‘Separated’
In maybe the most enraging documentary of Errol Morris’ often blood-pressure-raising filmography, he brings to life NBC News journalist Jacob Soboroff’s book of the same name about the shocking family-separation policy the first Trump administration used as a deterrence against undocumented migrants. Morris recognizes an essential truth from the start: Much of the American public, and certainly the U.S. government, seem to have “moved on” from this injustice, turning their attention to the parade of crises that have occurred since. It’s necessary then for a total refresher.
Morris stages dramatic sequences showing a composite journey to the U.S. from Central America for an “everywoman” migrant and her son. And he shows the cold calculus of bureaucratic tyranny by representing the development of the policy through animated sequences showing the real-time writing of emails. These are stylistic choices that add to the emotional power of this strongly journalistic doc and put the actual reporting front-and-center. NBC News, which produced this doc and has already aired it on MSNBC, premiered it at the Venice Film Festival. Putting an actual awards campaign behind it would show that they are still willing to speak truth to power. —CB
‘Soundtrack To a Coup D’etat’
Belgian multimedia artist turned filmmaker Johan Grimonprez crafts a dazzlingly alive and vividly constructed odyssey into a time and place in the Cold War seldom illuminated by history: when jazz singer Abbey Lincoln and drummer Max Roach crashed the UN Security Council to protest the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. In this long-lost episode of the Cold War, Grimonprez welds the languages of jazz music and the semiotics of decolonization to tell a propulsively forward-driving story that’s also a feat of editing by Rik Chaubet. Told mainly through archival footage and quotations from primary sources and academic texts, “Soundtrack to a Coup D’etat” is anything but inaccessible despite its lofty ambitions, wending from the Soviet Union to the Republic of the Congo and to the CIA in the United States to examine America’s own place in the events, as the Eisenhower administration chased one of the biggest global supplies of Uranium in the Congo. Meanwhile, back home, segregation for musicians like Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, and Dizzy Gillespie (in ebullient, entertaining clips as you’ve never seen him before) still rules the day. —RL
‘Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in 2 Pieces’
“Steve!” is a documentary for fans of the comedian, for anyone interested in what it takes to make it professionally in the arts, and for enthusiasts of documentary structure, too. Hence the full title: “Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in 2 Pieces.” While the first part detailing Martin’s rise is pretty conventional, with talking heads from comedy giants and a silky voiceover from Steve Martin himself, part two is much more conversational, such that it feels like director Morgan Neville organizes a primer so we can appreciate all the nuances of Steve hanging out with the people he loves. It’s a testament to Martin, not a fault of Neville’s, that even with both parts of “Steve!” being feature-length, it still feels like there’s a lot more to know about the comedian. But it is a great joy to get a picture of where Martin is now, and an appreciation of all the miracles that have brought him here. —SS
‘Union’
The best part of “Union” is its ending. The first hour-and-a-half of the film is devoted to exploring the Amazon Labor Union’s efforts to unionize their Staten Island warehouse, culminating in a soaring moment of triumph as the National Labor Relations Board formally announces its recognition of the labor force. Then, directors Brett Story and Stephen Maing continue the story in the months and years afterward, as Amazon appeals to block the union, more attempts to organize in other warehouses fail, and the leadership of the ALU experiences tension and divisions over strategy and egos. The doc, which is clearly and passionately supportive of the ALU, is never particularly romantic about the grueling work they do, the bureaucratic obstacles they face, or the ideological divides that sometimes set them against each other instead of those on the top. But it’s that ending, which reminds the audience that progress isn’t linear and that the work and struggle is far from over, that transcends the film from a look at one labor team and into an indelible portrait of the modern American labor struggle. —WC
‘Will & Harper’
Director Josh Greenbaum’s cross-country road trip with Will Ferrell sees the superstar comic revisit some of his chum and writing partner Harper Steele’s old haunts, while checking the country’s cultural temperature at each stop. Ferrell, as a straight man, took the trip as an opportunity to ask a lot of questions about what Steele, a trans woman, went through during her transition. The results are surprising and funny but also revealing and moving. —AT
‘Zurawski v Texas’
It is still hard to tell if the general public has fully comprehended the ramifications of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, but this film directed by Maisie Crow and Abbie Perrault gives a snapshot of the literal lives lost due to restrictions on abortion. Just in the four women it profiles, all fighting for the Texas justice system to define what exactly are the medical exceptions for terminating a pregnancy that were promised by state legislation, viewers get an idea of how politicians like Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton are meeting these cases of endangered lives — because of doctors’ inability to provide proper care under the law — with fatal indifference, just to make a political point. Although it has only become increasingly harrowing to watch, given everything that has happened in American politics since its premiere at Telluride in September, characters like Center for Reproductive Rights Senior Staff Attorney Molly Duane do exemplify the drive one should have to keep fighting for justice. —MJ