The Best Documentaries of 2024

An indispensible lesson in digital history that tracks the creation and rise of 4Chan — the online universe where outrageous satires, the bro anarchy of “Jackass” stunts, and a free-floating impotent political rage fused into an “outlaw” stance of permanent rebellion. But the movie also captures how 4Chan spawned QAnon, and considering the significance of QAnon (i.e., the fact that half the country now thinks batshit psychotic fantasy scenarios are the essence of reality), it’s shocking to see that its creation was essentially a fluke. The conspiracy theory that became Pizzagate was created as a goof; then people started to believe it. “The Antisocial Network” captures how the hackers and programmers of 4Chan wanted eyeballs and would do anything to get them. QAnon brainwashed the nation, but in its way it was the fulfillment of their viral dream. —Owen Gleiberman   

The scariest and most penetrating political documentary of the year, though the media mostly ignored it. It captures how Donald Trump, in the time he has spent setting himself up to be an authoritarian leader, fashioned himself into a president who could mesh perfectly with the goals of Christian nationalism, a movement built around the dream of transforming America into a theocracy. The film’s directors, Stephen Uljaki and Chris Jones, go deep into the roots of this crusade, which believes not only in trashing democracy but in undermining the very concept of free will that’s at the heart of Christian theology. The movement’s goal is a nation ruled by a higher power than the Constitution — ruled by the will of God, as interpreted by His white Christian followers. —OG

An extraordinary exposé of how Benjamin Netanyahu has prolonged the war in Gaza to escape his own corruption scandal. Alexis Bloom’s riveting film is built around leaked tapes of the interrogation of Netanyahu by police. He’s as sly an actor as he is ruthless an autocrat. The movie is about how the accusations Netanyahu has been trying to squirm out from under since 2019, when he was first indicted on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, have changed his identity as a politician. Bloom makes a powerful case that Netanyahu’s alliance with the far-right fringe of Israeli politics, which has culminated in his grotesque compulsion to prolong the massacre in Gaza with no end in sight, has been driven almost entirely by his fear of being toppled and imprisoned, to the point that he’s willing to rip a hole in Israeli society to avoid it. —OG

Shiori Ito’s tightly wound, heart-on-the-sleeve procedural documentary takes place over the course of five years, during which Ito, a Japanese journalist, tracks her arduous struggle to bring to justice the older, more powerful man who sexually assaulted her — the renowned TV reporter Noriyuki Yamaguchi, whose friends in high places included the prime minister. The film switches between modes of formal investigation and first-hand confessional, as archival footage blends into candid conversational iPhone videos and audio recordings. Without undue manipulation or sentimentality, the film pulls our emotions in sharp extremes that mirror the peaks and valleys of this hard-fought case. —Guy Lodge 

It’s a portrait of the legendary rock ‘n’ roll scenester that captures her glamour and artistry. Svetlana Zill and Alexis Bloom’s film is most indelible, though, in laying bare the destructive underbelly of the rock counterculture. The filmmakers celebrate everything that made Anita Pallenberg a feminine force ahead of her time — one of those Olympian women of the ’60s who strode into a room and commanded it. But they also show you that she and Keith Richards had a complex relationship that was a crazy doom spiral. In addition to Pallenberg’s unpublished memoir, the film is built around a towering archive of home-movie footage, so that we feel we’re right there with Anita and Keith. We experience the sweet tranquility of lives being lived, but also the trail of wreckage they left. One of the darkest portraits of the rock world ever made, the movie captures how Pallenberg’s willingness to push everything to the edge and over it was inextricable from her cracked glamour. —OG

Mati Diop’s exquisitely strange film is a meditation on the return of looted artifacts to Benin. Diop, the director of “Atlantics,” has made a dreamlike, discursive, fantasy-inflected foray into the wildly contested issues surrounding the restitution of treasures stolen by colonial powers. The film starts in the basement level of the Parisian Musée du Quai Branly, where several of the artifacts, including a wooden statue of King Gezo, who ruled the kingdom of Dahomey in the mid-1800s, and whose pose looks irresistibly like he’s giving a Black Power salute, are being packed up ready for transportation. Then, suddenly, we’re hearing the thoughts of statue-Gezo himself, as he contemplates his long years of captivity. His words flavor the film with a mysterious unease, as every celebratory impulse about the artifacts’ return is complicated by a far greater ambivalence about whether actual redress can ever be made. —Jessica Kiang   

Natalie Rae and Angela Patton’s moving film follows four girls — Aubrey Smith, 5, Santana Stewart, 10, Ja’Ana Crudup, 11, and Raziah Lewis, 15 — as they head toward an encounter with their imprisoned fathers. Patton is the founder of Girls for Change, the organization that launched its Date with Dad program 12 years earlier. As the day nears when the men will attend a dance and luncheon in the repurposed prison gymnasium, reunited with the daughters they’ve been separated from, the film creates visually lyrical moments that connect viewers with the young ones’ sorrows, fears, insights, and hopes. And when the dance arrives, it does not disappoint. The filmmakers suture wounds, but they also make the familial and cultural scars apparent. The movie adds depth and dimension to stories of incarceration, even as it remains both the daughters’ story and their keepsake. —Lisa Kennedy

There’s now a whole genre of celebrity documentary built around the playing of old analog tape recordings. Nanette Burstein’s luscious and enveloping portrait is based on interviews that Elizabeth Taylor did with the journalist Richard Meryman, starting in 1964, for a book he was researching, and Taylor’s voice is singular in its expressiveness — she is insolent, mournful, sexy, outraged, dripping with debauched delight, and always casually candid. Her words invest even the most familiar events with a revealing intimacy. The movie shows us how Taylor’s life became a mythology, especially when her romance with Richard Burton got elevated into a global love story, as the two became the first celebrities to see their private lives played out in the new international mass media (the idea of “paparazzi” literally came into being around them). The film is filled with astonishing clips of the private and public Liz, which cue you to see how expressive her beauty was, and what an array of moods she possessed. —OG

Ennio Morricone, the maestro of the movie soundtrack, gets the entrancing documentary he deserves. It’s a 156-minite portrait of Morricone built around an extensive interview, conducted when he was in his late 80s (it also includes comments from a murderers’ row of filmmakers and artists). The film captures how he scaled his own wild peak, inventing his own kind of beauty, his own transcendent cacophony. Yet you would never have guessed it to look at him. He had the aura of a young professor, or maybe a tax accountant. And the more we hear his music, in all its fabulous and voluptuous eclecticism (the swooning pop songs; the spaghetti Western scores that sounded like ghostly Mexican rock ‘n’ roll frontier acid trips; the political-drama soundtracks for films like “The Battle of Algiers” that were as charged-up as the revolutions they were about; the transcendent romanticism that infused his beloved later work), the more we have the same thought: Where did it come from? The movie devotes itself to Morricone’s music, but it’s also a study of his mischievously self-serious personality. He was channeling something, maybe nothing less than the mystery of cinema. —OG

Gary Hustwit’s groundbreaking film uses generative software to reorder itself with each viewing. Hustwit fills in the legend of Brian Eno, the ambient-music-innovator-turned-producer, by echoing the spirit of his art in the film’s very form. Eno started out, in Roxy Music, as a delicate sci-fi gamine, a glam geek in thrift-shop drag. As he began to create his solo albums, he held onto his image as pop’s harlequin eccentric, a mystique that carried over to his fabled work as a producer with Davie Bowie, Talking Heads, Devo, U2, and Coldplay. As a documentary, “Eno” is sleek, seamless, and compelling, though one of the reasons it feels that way is that Hustwit, drawing on 500 hours of film and video from Eno’s personal archives, has made a movie that’s all Brian Eno. As a talking head, he turns out to be a brainy but also funny and grounded middle-class British chap with great stories to tell. The film uses his observations to fuse his present and past in a way that accentuates their musical and spiritual continuity. —OG      

Raoul Peck’s haunting film rediscovers the fearless South African photographer who showed the world what apartheid looked like — what it was — in his 1967 book “House of Bondage.” But after moving to New York City, he became a ghost. Cole’s photographs take up the entire film, and they’re a revelation to revel in. His street scenes are vérité dioramas, psychological portraits of life inside a caste system. He caught the underlying violence of apartheid, and that made him a celebrated figure. But wandering through New York with his camera, chronicling a freedom unlike anything he’d ever known, it wasn’t a freedom he felt he could totally join. The movie chronicles his descent, but it also turns into a detective thriller, as it follows the process of discovery when negatives of 60,000 of his photographs that had never been seen were found in three safety-deposit boxes in a bank vault in Stockholm. (No one knows how they go there.) Watching “Lost and Found,” you’re moved by a life that veered into tragedy, but by the end you feel the ghost is speaking to you. —OG       

A documentary for anyone who loves “We Are the World,” or even for those of us who look at that legendary charity single with some serious questions but are fascinated by the phenomenon of it. The movie puts us backstage at the into-the-night session that took place at A&M Recording Studios in Los Angeles immediately after the American Music Awards on January 28, 1985. In a sense, “We Are the World” always was a documentary — the famous music video that captured the song as it was being recorded, and was also a kind of pop-stars-reveal-themselves psychodrama in miniature. And Bao Nguyen’s film allows us to revel in that vibe and extend it. With Lionel Richie as its chief nostalgist and tour guide, the film is certainly “celebratory,” but it’s also honestly assembled and intensely pleasurable. It pulls back the curtain on the perpetual smoke screen of music-god fame. —OG  

Norman Mailer is the kind of writer people now tend to look at and appraise by saying, “He could never get away with that today.” He was feeding the fire of controversy and provocation 50 and 60 years ago, yet it was all part of his mission to make a difference in his time, to wake us all up. Jeff Zimbalist’s film captures the majesty of the Mailer experience, and its dark side too. It channels Mailer the writer, the celebrity, the failure, the boozing-and-drugging underworld-of-the-’50s searcher, the culture warrior, the literary comingler of fiction and reality, the filmmaker, the serial husband and paterfamilias, the talk-show firebrand, the self-dramatizing hoodlum who stabbed his wife…and the obsessive artist who wrote sentences so lyrical in their perception that they could change your imagination. The film looks at Mailer with a supreme fusion of understanding and critical wisdom. —OG  

Director Lana Wilson meets a diverse group of New York City psychics and clairvoyants, perceiving them closely enough that believing them is beside the point. The result is a funny, compassionate portrait that’s most interested in how these allegedly second-sighted folk function on an everyday basis, and what drives ordinary people of different persuasions to seek out their services. The seven psychics Wilson has assembled to interview and observe are a diverse group — four of them women, three men; four people of color, three white — with an equally varied range of approaches to their calling, from New Age-y solemnity to fairground-style showmanship and sparkle. The film walks a deft line between the ironic and the honestly receptive: Hardline skeptics will be entertained, others peculiarly affected. Yet you needn’t have a firm stance on the afterlife and its accessibility to be tickled by a pet medium bragging that she could diagnose a cat’s urinary tract infection through sheer telepathy. Wilson’s film suggests that communing with the dead may just be a roundabout way of reaching the living. —GL

R.J. Cutler’s terrific film taps into everything we love, and don’t, about Martha Stewart. It takes us through her rise and fall and rise, a transfixing saga enhanced by Cutler’s ongoing meditation on The Meaning of Martha. The film captures how Stewart’s penetration into American culture seems, in hindsight, as inevitable as it was unlikely. It traces how she started off as a model, then became a New York stockbroker, then moved with her publishing-magnate husband to Westport, Conn., where they bought a fixer-upper, Turkey Hill Farm, whose fixing up, by Martha (she hand-painted the entire house while listening to the Watergate hearings), became the prototype for her brand of obsessively tasteful “perfection.” The movie shows us that Stewart had a vision, which turned her into the first self-made woman billionaire in America. Yet what she created and marketed was the idea of a high-powered homemaker for women who no longer wanted to be homemakers. She showed you all the good things you could aspire to, but she helped establish the aspirational culture of the 21st century as a certain unattainable proxy dream thing. In a way, she put a turkey in a puff pastry so you didn’t have to. —OG        

A hypnotic documentary about moths, one that unfolds to reveal vital climate-change concerns. In northeastern India, scientist Mangi Mungee and her indigenous assistant partake in the nightly ritual of suspending a cloth sheet and illuminating it with the bright lights in the middle of a forest. Slowly but surely, hundreds of moths flock to this makeshift station, so that Mansi can observe, photograph, and eventually measure them. Fluttering wings and the echoes of trilling insects make up much of the serene soundscape, as the movie observes the moths from a distance but also creates aesthetic connections between their lives and ours, in ways we need to lean forward to observe and understand. —Siddhant Adlakha    

A frank, devastating protest against Israel’s West Bank occupation. The young Palestinian lawyer and activist Basel Adra is a resident of Masafer Yatta, a network of Palestinian villages in the Southern Hebron Hills, recently subject to an aggressive campaign of demolition and forced transfer by the Israeli army. As his community is literally bulldozed before his eyes, Adra has little scope to do anything but keep his camera on. “I have nothing else, only my phone,” he despairs. That, thankfully, is not nothing. In this shattering documentary, Adra’s witnessing becomes ours. The film presents horrifying footage with candid sangfroid, contributing little commentary where the images speak for themselves. “No Other Land” might be called timely, though through its years-spanning depiction of both the mortal danger and mental strain of living under occupation, it underlines a situation that has been at crisis point for a long time. The filmmaking is tight and considered, with nimble editing (by Adra and his co-directors, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor) that captures the sense of time at once passing and looping back on itself. —GL

An essential examination of how plastic is literally invading us all. We’ve long known that it’s bad for the environment, but Ben Addelman and Ziya Tong’s movie documents what it’s doing to our bodies. The film focuses in on the issue of how microplastics — plastic particles that are less than 5mm in length, though the key ones may be microscopic — have invaded our food, our water, our air, and ourselves, toxifying us from within. (It presents powerful evidence that plastic is a major contributor to rising infertility levels.) It also offers a fascinating history of how plastic evolved in the 20th century and gradually took over, with Big Oil and Big Plastic now joined at the hip. In its way, “Plastic People” is a cautionary horror movie. It could have been called “Attack of the Killer Polymers.” —OG

Jeff Zimbalist’s extraordinary film about rooftoppers, who scale the tallest skyscrapers in the world and then climb onto the splindly curved spires that shoot out the tops of those buildings, is a vertigo-inducing spellbinder. But it’s also a profound story of love and trust and dread and transcendence in an age when romantic entanglement has become a daredevil sport. The film provides the kind of high on getting high that “Free Solo” and “The Dawn Wall” did, though this one conjures even more of a “Whoa” factor, as it follows two rooftoppers from Moscow, Vanya Beerkus and Angela Nikolau, who are drawn together by their impulse to elevate risk into a kind of controlled madness. By the time they’re scaling the Merdeka 188 in Kualua Lumpur, Malaysia (if they’re caught they’ll go to prison), all to stage a feat in which Vanya will stand atop a girder and hold Angela up to the sky, the film has elevated “Don’t try this at home” to a new level of awesome. —OG    

Telling the story of the Congolese leader Patrick Lumumba, who was assassinated in 1961, and juxtaposing that political scandal — it has long been alleged that the CIA was involved — with a musical tour by Louis Armstrong and the expansion of the UN after many African countries declared independence in the 1960s, might seem to be a tall order. But the writer-director Johan Grimonprez brings it all off with astonishing success. This is politics as grand spectacle and ironic comedy: an entertaining and instructive documentary that masterfully explains a complicated historical moment. The film shows us how a popular African leader was killed in a coup d’etat, so that colonial powers could keep profiting from his country’s mineral wealth. But it all plays out against the rhythms of American jazz, a counterpoint that reflects how the musicians were used by the State Department to deflect from Lumumba’s murder, but one that also allows the movie to ebb and flow in complicated ways, finding a rhythm all its own. —Murtada Elfadl

It’s likely that many non-Indigenous people knew nothing about the abuse and disappearances of Native American children that occurred over decades in residential Indian schools throughout North America — at least, until those outages inspired a wrenching subplot on the Taylor Sheridan TV series “1923.” But the truth behind that fact-based fiction is even more shocking. “Sugarcane” is an enlightening, infuriating look at the horrors that were endemic at the now-shuttered St. Joseph’s Mission in British Columbia. The school was one of many state-supported institutions that dealt with “the Indian problem” by brainwashing children into forgoing their Native languages and customs and becoming acceptably assimilated. The movie details how students died while trying to escape, or by committing suicide, and we hear daunting tales of priests sexually abusing students. The survivors of St. Joseph’s dredge up memories they’ve obviously long sought to suppress, and “Sugarcane” is the product of humane and insightful filmmakers who are determined to never let anyone forget. —Joe Leydon

Christopher Reeve gave the greatest performance as a comic-book superhero in movie history. And it’s partly because Reeve was so indelible as Superman that what happened to him on May 27, 1995, felt so singular in its devastation. As everyone knows, Reeve was thrown from a horse during an equestrian competition and landed on his neck, which resulted in his being paralyzed from the shoulders down. “Super/Man” is a moving, wrenching, compellingly well-made documentary that inevitably ends up centering on Reeve’s accident and its aftermath. (He died in 2004.) It was Reeve’s fate to spend the rest of his life using a wheelchair and a respirator, and there’s an extraordinary drama to how he recovered from the cataclysm, learning to breathe and talk and, more than that, rehabilitating his life force. We see, with aching honesty, how challenging his existence became (just getting Reeve to the 1996 Oscars was a logistical feat). Yet we also see how the love of his wife Dana, his children, and his friends, like Robin Williams, gave him the strength to transcend. What happened to Reeve was a tragedy, but it’s one that became a parable. As “Super/Man” tells it, it begins with the thought “There but for the grace of God go I” and ends with “It’s a wonderful life.” —OG

Amei Wallach’s highly enjoyable and revealing documentary is about a legendary uproar in the art world. The film chronicles what happened at the 1964 Venice Biennale, when the U.S. mounted a campaign of “cultural diplomacy” in the hopes that one of its own artists — Robert Rauschenberg — would win the grand prize. The U.S. wanted to use art as a proxy to assert its global dominance, and to fight the Cold War. Yet the event also marked a paradigm shift: the overthrow of Paris as the center of the art world, and the movement toward a new age in which New York and its freewheeling American stars (Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol) would now hold sway. (The Harvey Weinstein Oscar machine of the ’90s would have approved.) “Taking Venice” captures the moment when the art world, in thrall to the electricity of the new Americans, changed its spots. You could say that the U.S., at the Biennale, engaged in art-world propaganda. But another way to look at it is: Has there ever been a more righteous U.S. propaganda campaign? We were backing the right horse, and for the right reason. It was the one with the most beauty. —OG

An enticing portrait of James Hamilton that makes you wonder: Is he the greatest New York photographer ever? D.W. Young’s documentary gets you hooked on the work of the legendary Village Voice and Harper’s Bazaar shutterbug, whose images are a miracle of spontaneous classicism. Hamilton’s black-and-white photographs — in the documentary, we see hundreds of them — have a burnished tactility, and a psychology so effortless that every one of them tells a story. He should have been far more famous — a household name, like Weegee or Diane Arbus or Annie Liebovitz. Yet part of the fascination of “Uncropped” is that it shows you that Hamilton didn’t run his career that way. He was and is that rare thing, a lifelong bohemian. In the documentary, we see him wandering through Washington Square Park, tall, with a shock of white hair, always with his camera. “Uncropped” takes us back to the world before publicists, when a photographer like Hamilton could hang out for hours in a hotel room with Duane Allman, capturing his dissolute hedonism, or with Alfred Hitchcock, who produced a grin for him unlike that seen in any other Hitchcock photograph. —OG

Structured as an on-camera road trip between two longtime friends, fueled by laughs and tears and the occasional “Borat”-style stunt, “Will & Harper” gives us a chance to meet former “Saturday Night Live” writer Harper Steele, who befriended Will Ferrell when he first joined the show, believing in the crazy cut-up when others were still skeptical of his talent. Technically, Ferrell is meeting her for the first time too, since Steele spend the first six decades of her life as a man. After receiving a long, vulnerable coming-out email from Steele describing her decision to transition at 61, Ferrell suggested that they travel the country together — just Will and Harper and a decent-sized crew (which manages to stay off-camera the whole way). Stretching from New York City to the Santa Monica Pier, with stops at redneck bars and diners and dirt track races, the physical journey gives the old friends a chance to catch up and talk through all aspects of Steele’s emotional journey. Struggling to recognize her own beauty in a society that often seems determined to deny her identity altogether, Steele brings the trans experience down to earth. And by accepting his fledgling gal pal on her own terms, Ferrell sets the best kind of example. We should all be so lucky as to have friends like these. —Peter Debruge

Overflowing with insight; stuffed with revelatory interviews and anecdotes and archival footage; as bursting with flavor as a baked ziti; and as immersive, in its way, as the series itself, Alex Gibney’s two-hour-and-40-minute film is a sensationally artful and engrossing look at the greatest show in the history of television. It’s framed as a profile of the show’s visionary creator and showrunner, David Chase, who is interviewed by Gibney on a mock-up of the set of Dr. Melfi’s psychiatrist office, a joke/stunt that recedes into the background yet never loses its playful resonance, since it pings off the way that “The Sopranos,” for Chase, was a kind of therapy. For him, even talking about the show, analyzing its secret sauce, is offered up with a certain gnomic reticence. (Within that, the disarmingly sincere and at times ruthlessly blunt Chase is actually something of an open book.) The movie shows us how Chase got his shot language from ’70s movies, and how James Gandolfini’s audition left the other actors in the dust the way Brando left the entire studio system in the dust. There was a child alive inside Tony Soprano that was central to what we responded to in him, and maybe that child was alive in Gandolfini as well. One of the documentary’s most haunting insights is how the entire series evolved in tandem with Gandolfini sinking into the life force of Tony’s darkness. “Wise Guy” is a thrilling testament to how “The Sopranos” changed television forever and, in doing so, changed us. —OG

An unflinching, cumulatively disquieting look at the fight over Texas’s newly restrictive abortion laws. It charts the legal battle that’s being waged against the state, which almost completely banned abortions on the heels of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, albeit with some exemptions for life-threatening conditions. But as the film’s directors, Maisie Crowe and Abbie Perrault, spell out, the exemption law is so ambiguous that doctors are left in the dark about whether they can legally provide abortions to their patients. At the center of the film is Molly Duane, the tireless Center for Reproductive Rights attorney whose multi-pronged lawsuit extends from local courtrooms to the Texas Supreme Court. We witness the traumas of patients who become Duane’s clients, notably lead plaintiff Amanda Zurawski, who nearly died when her water broke just 18 weeks into her pregnancy. (Her doctors didn’t perform the medically vital abortion she should have gotten, forcing her to wait until she became septic.) With its insistence on prioritizing individual stories over cold talking points, the film, which counts Hillary and Chelsea Clinton and Jennifer Lawrence among its executive producers, powerfully argues that abortion access shouldn’t be a left or right issue but a bipartisan matter. —Tomris Laffly