The Best Documentaries of 2025

The documentary often gets a bad rap. Maybe you watched a few boring (or prescriptive) ones in school, in which talking heads drone on about what you ought to think or feel. However, despite its reputation as constrained retelling—emphasis on the “telling”—the medium also offers storytellers practically limitless formal flexibility, and the power to show us reality in dazzling new hues. 

This was a year of numerous stunning nonfiction releases, as well as many festival premieres of works yet to be distributed. When viewing them in unison, it’s clear that the medium’s stylistic and thematic ingenuity could not be in better hands. These 25 films from 2025, hailing from all across the globe, represent the very best of what documentary cinema has to offer. 

Afternoons of Solitude

• Streaming on MUBI

From Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra, the brutal, hypnotically textured Afternoons of Solitude skirts traditional documentary conventions by capturing its young bullfighter subject in moments of both performance and privacy, without the use of interviews or voiceover. A radiant, ugly film about death, animal cruelty, and the fragility and beauty of the human form. 

The Alabama Solution

• Streaming on HBO Max

Directed by Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman—and by the numerous Alabama inmates documenting their own abuse on smuggled cellphones—The Alabama Solution is an unflinching look at systems of power, and a full-throated call for reform. Given the risks its subjects take just to be heard, it feels dangerous to watch, as it carefully exposes statewide corruption and the violence it breeds.

All the Empty Rooms

• Streaming on Netflix

In just half an hour, Joshua Seftel’s reflection on American gun violence lends credence to the power of images through its careful composition. All the Empty Rooms follows journalist Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp in their efforts to memorialize schoolchildren lost to mass shootings by capturing their tiny bedrooms—preserved in amber for years by their grieving parents—as a stirring eulogy to the many lives taken far too soon.

Architecton

• Streaming on HBO Max

What can stone and concrete reveal about a people? Gunda director Viktor Kossakovsky attempts to answer this question through meditative and momentous shots of landscapes, ruins and mineral quarries. These are further interspersed with conversations on architecture, cultural values, and the rise and fall of civilizations—abstractions given solid (and rhythmic) form in Architecton.

BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions

• In theaters now

Part impressionistic sci-fi, part pulsing visual essay, Kahlil Joseph’s spellbinding feature debut BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions takes after his two-screen OSCAM installation and chronicles African American liberation and revolutionary thought by filtering them through the sounds of Detroit Techno. Academic citations sit side by side with contemporary internet memes, as Joseph traces cultural transformations and the thorny paradoxes inherent in reimagining the world through Black art and history.

Cover-Up

• In theaters now; streaming on Netflix December 26

From directors Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, the biographical documentary Cover-Up is as reverential as it is confrontational, in its perusal of legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. Set against the largest U.S. government and military scandals of the last half-decade, it captures Hersh’s life and outlook with an unflinching (though by no means uncritical) eye, and in the process, lays bare the cyclical nature of unchecked power.

Emergent City

• Streaming on PBS POV

Transitions, establishing shots, and other connective tissue become the primary canvas in Emergent City, Kelly Anderson and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg’s chronicle of an evolving New York neighborhood. The people, leaders, and liminal spaces of Sunset Park in Brooklyn are extricated from the forgotten cracks of national discourse, in a story of speaking truth to political power, and how complicated it can actually be when a community tries to free itself from capitalistic bonds.

GEN_

• Awaiting U.S. distribution

Dr. Bini, an elderly, zany Italian hormone specialist, is the persuasive centerpiece of Gianluca Matarrese’s GEN_, an unconventionally straightforward documentary about trans issues and gender dysphoria. Through Bini’s quirky bedside manner and his biting frankness with his patients, the film creates a sense of normalcy around bodies often demonized in the political sphere. It’s the rare film whose simplicity verges on rebellious.

Hair, Paper, Water…

• Awaiting U.S. distribution

Returning to the remote Rục tribe in Vietnam, dramatist and documentarian Minh Quý Truong collaborates with Belgian director Nicolas Graux for Hair, Paper, Water…, a melodic 71-minute portrait of a rural grandmother recalling her childhood as she floats downstream with her city-dwelling grandson. Combining natural splendor with meticulous sound design, the 16mm movie heightens the senses amidst its political, linguistic, and anthropological examination of the modern world and the people it leaves behind.

Heightened Scrutiny

• Awaiting U.S. distribution

Following a transgender attorney challenging the U.S. Supreme Court, Sam Feder’s Heightened Scrutiny is as much a plea for social equality as it is an inquiry into corporate news media, and its rarely-examined toxic runoffs. Through seemingly traditional means—primarily, sit-down interviews—it traces the building blocks of prejudice, and the way it can slither its way from uncritical editorializing into the very foundations of the law, all while smuggling a vibrant portrait of community in order to highlight what (or rather, who) is at stake.

Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958–1989

• Available to buy or rent on Apple TV

Over three and a half hours, Göran Hugo Olsson’s archival odyssey Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958–1989 scrutinizes decades of Swedish public broadcasting. In the process, Olsson not only weaves one of the most comprehensive filmic tapestries of the modern West Bank and Gaza conflicts, but traces the shifting biases that determine how these stories are told, and how they’re cemented in the public consciousness.

Letters from Wolf Street

• Awaiting U.S. distribution

In the wake of festering far-right sentiment, Letters from Wolf Street sees immigrant filmmaker Arjun Talwar train his lens on his sleepy Warsaw enclave. Through wry observations—and the director’s Indian-accented Polish voiceover—the film explores the evolving fabric of modern Poland through its mundanities, and through the struggles of fellow outsiders to embed themselves within the country’s rich artistic history.

My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow

• Awaiting U.S. distribution

A five-and-a-half-hour documentary that zips by at light speed, Julia Loktev’s riveting My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow begins in unassuming territory by capturing the everyday lives of dissident reporters challenging the Putin government. However, its premise implodes with Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, transforming the film into an intimate and defining real-time portrait of modern journalism under fire from an authoritarian regime.

Orwell 2+2=5

• Available to buy or rent on Amazon and Apple TV

Combining contemporary newsreels with the personal and fictional writings of George Orwell—primarily, Nineteen Eighty-Four—Raoul Peck’s Orwell 2+2=5 lays out the English author’s prescient warnings in chilling ways (courtesy of narration by Damian Lewis). While its juxtapositions may seem obvious on the surface, Peck refashions this archival exercise into not just an examination of Orwell himself (and the wartime experiences that molded him), but a mournful retrospective on how such accessible cautionary tales have gone unheeded in 2025.

The Perfect Neighbor

• Streaming on Netflix

Using the state as its primary lens, Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor traces a years-long dispute between neighbors using extensive police body camera footage to recount a story that ends in deadly tragedy. With Florida’s “stand your ground” gun laws at its center, the movie’s wrenching human toll is imbued with lucid political dimensions, thanks to its transformative filmmaking. 

Predators

• Streaming on Paramount+

A documentary about the Chris Hansen-hosted reality sensation To Catch a Predator, David Osit’s Predators—told through both archival footage and contemporary interviews—is part media retrospective and part ethnographic study, exposing the raw impulses and the murky legality of vigilante justice as entertainment. However, what makes it particularly powerful is the way it unfurls as a painful personal story about Osit himself, as he gradually turns his camera 180 degrees in service of discomforting questions.

Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk

• Available to buy or rent on Amazon and Apple TV

Sepideh Farsi’s Gaza chronicle, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, would be a powerful film about resilience even if its enterprising subject—25-year-old photojournalist Fatma Hassona—hadn’t been killed in an Israeli airstrike after its completion. This wrenching reality brings the movie’s form into even clearer focus: using one cellphone to film another, Farsi captures her numerous, glitchy video calls with Hassona in a manner that not only emphasizes the tragic distance between them but makes the viewer want to reach out through the many layers of technology to comfort the radiant artist as bombs fall all around her.

The Secret of Me

• Awaiting U.S. distribution

Three Identical Strangers producer Grace Hughes-Hallett follows in the footsteps of the aforementioned masterwork in her directorial debut, the equally mysterious childhood chronicle The Secret of Me. Winding and enraging, it follows an intersex adult subject, Jim, through recollections of rigid social mores and shocking medical malpractice, as he narrates the harrowing childhood experiences that ripped apart his sense of self.

The Settlers

• Streaming on BBC Select, Amazon Prime, Apple TV and the Roku Channel

One of Louis Theroux’s latest and most prolific specials for BBC Two, journalistic documentary The Settlers is a stark and detailed chronicle of modern colonial thought. Across the one-hour exposé, armed Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Zionist thought leaders alike hoist themselves with their own petards, even when only mildly challenged by the seasoned reporter, blurring the line between confession and braggadocio in unbelievable ways.

Shuffle

• Releasing theatrically January 16, 2026

A film about systems of recovery turned against their subjects, Benjamin Flaherty’s Shuffle is part essayistic inquiry and part dramatic self-portrait. With his infuriating tale of predatory rehab facilities—told in extraordinary visual detail, using screens and social media to shine a light on chilling evils—Flaherty doesn’t just seek to expose fraudulent claims, but uses his camera to re-humanize numerous addict subjects so often abused and denied grace.

Sirens Call

• Awaiting U.S. distribution

A sci-fi fantasy that dovetails into a challenging portrait of Americana, Miri Ian Gossing and Lina Sieckmann’s Sirens Call is a shimmering, phantasmagorical chronicle of Merpeople cosplayers—a community centered around the acceptance of politicized bodies. Thematically queer and aesthetically folkloric, the film’s kaleidoscopic approach is practically transhumanistic—even though its focus is on flesh-and-blood characters. The result is cinematic sleight of hand that disguises (and eventually reveals) radical thought from beneath a seemingly ridiculous surface. It shines like a diamond.

The Tale of Silyan

• In theaters now

Directed by Tamara Kotevska, The Tale of Silyan uses white storks as a window into the lives of Macedonian farmers, their struggling economy and their local fairy tales. As the political tides of Europe continue to shift, this tale of struggling humans and endangered birds cross paths when an injured stork, Silyan, is adopted and nursed back to health by a lonely farmer, Nikola. However, what sets it apart from run-of-the-mill conservationist movies is the multifaceted way it uses the sounds and images of its avian subjects, turning them into ghostly observers and, in a sense, musical composers guiding the story. The world from a bird’s eye view.

Thoughts & Prayers: Or How to Survive an Active Shooter in America

• Streaming on HBO Max

Through its title—and then, through a multitudinous array of student interviews and product demonstrations—Zackary Canepari and Jessica Dimmock’s Thoughts & Prayers: Or How to Survive an Active Shooter in America contrasts the paralyzing helplessness in the face of America’s gun epidemic with the financial opportunism in its wake, i.e., the training-and-safety industrial complex that makes its bread off mass tragedies. These are, on one hand, a necessity in a world of recurrent school shootings and political stalemates, but Canepari and Dimmock present them with the requisite absurdity, resulting in a chilling snapshot of a society eating itself.

Underland

• Awaiting U.S. distribution

In less than 80 minutes, Robert Petit’s Underland traces both humanity’s deep past and its possible futures through subterranean landscapes. From nuclear facilities, to unexplored caverns, to forgotten people inhabiting urban sewers, Petit excavates submerged spaces, turning them into haunting theses on societal fabrics, while inviting the audience to witness (and imagine, and reflect upon) what roots us to the Earth, and why we look to the stars for answers.

Yanuni

• Awaiting U.S. distribution

Richard Ladkani’s thrilling ecological doc Yanuni both embodies the splendor of the Amazon landscape and captures—in the vein of a polished political action thriller—the tale of Juma Xiapaia, a young indigenous woman fighting to preserve it. With up-close-and-personal portraits of eruptive violence, alongside meditations on love and adrenaline-fueled portraits of righteous militancy, the film combines poetic reflections with whiz-bang urgency, resulting in one of the most complete and affecting activist documentaries in years. A true testament to the form.