The Best Documentaries of 2022

Publish date: 2024-09-14

For decades now, one of the buzziest things you’ll hear at a film festival is, “The best movies here are the documentaries.” It’s often a true statement, though maybe it’s not really about film festivals. For some of us, few things in the movie world can beat the vibrance of nonfiction — the excitement of filmmaking that’s suffused with realty, with life itself. Our list of the year’s best documentaries is a testament to the range of what nonfiction cinema has become. It’s history, it’s activism, it’s portraiture, it’s personal, it’s about science and music and literature and politics and royalty and family… and Pez. We invite you to compare your favorites with ours, and to sample the movies on this list you haven’t seen for the gems they are.

All That Breathes
The sense of a city as a complex, ailing ecosystem is rendered with unusual vividness in Shaunak Sen’s deceptively casual observational documentary. It has no formal interviews, onscreen text or omniscient narrator to provide relevant stats on Delhi, where air pollution is reportedly 12 times worse than in Beijing. Instead, the environmental impact is felt on the microcosmic level of two resident brothers dedicated to the rescue of urban birds (hundreds of which simply drop out of the sky everyday due to pollution). Meanwhile, the two worry about a different kind of threatened extinction: anti-Muslim policies that trigger waves of protest and violence. This snapshot of self-harm both societal and planetary nevertheless manages a gentle impressionistic lyricism. —Dennis Harvey
Watch our interview with “All That Breathes” director Sen here.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
Laura Poitras directs a film about Nan Goldin, the postpunk Diane Arbus, and it’s a deft and satisfying one, though not a conventional biography. Half of it is about Goldin’s life and work — those indelibly transgressive images of herself and her friends, who were often drag queens and addicts, and the assorted people and situations she experienced as part of the hummingly squalid East Village subculture — along with the trauma and liberation that fueled them. The other half is about her campaign against the Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharma, the company that created the opioid crisis. Goldin sought to divide the Sacklers off from the museums they used to enhance their name. The film takes Goldin’s art and her activism and weaves them together in richly suggestive ways. —Owen Gleiberman
Bad Axe
How did you spend your pandemic? David Siev did as any budding filmmaker might, turning his cameras on his own experience — though he’s only a marginal presence, taking a fly-on-the-wall approach to his own family, as his older sister Jaclyn moves back to Bad Axe, Mich., to help her Mexican American mother and Cambodian refugee father save their restaurant. In what feels like binge-watching a full season of a topsy-turvy reality TV show, the documentary captures so much of the uncertainty, fear and bigotry that the nation experienced at large — a singularly engaging time capsule of the Sievs’ COVID year. —Peter Debruge
Beba
How many millennial cine-memoirs does the world need? Yet even as a generation of TikTok and Instagram users seek new ways to overshare, Rebecca Huntt’s film gives one hope. It’s an insightful, engaging and affirmational auto-portrait from a New Yorker with an ear for poetry and an eye for the ineffable. Huntt takes strength from sharing both the good and the bad in herself, pushing herself to be as authentic as possible — some might say “raw,” though her sense of montage is far too refined for that. “Beba” overflows with impossible-to-invent details, interweaving images of a bygone New York with Huntt’s grilling of her Venezuelan mother and Dominican-born Black father and her return to the jungles of Venezuela, where the 16mm footage takes on the quality of a dream. —PD
Descendant
In 1808, the United States banned the importation of slaves, effectively putting an end to the transatlantic slave trade. Or so the history books would have it. But in Margaret Brown’s remarkably complex film, the discovery of a sunken slave ship in Mobile, Ala. becomes a way of distinguishing between what can pass for history — the version of it written by those in power — and the painful reality that eyewitnesses have kept alive for generations. As the wreck of the Clotilda is found, the film records how this bombshell discovery brings closure for some and countless questions for others, a shifting and sometimes contradictory conversation that gives the families of survivors, for the first time, a hand in the public narrative. The past remains present, as Brown weaves a rich tapestry and lets the audience make of it what they will. —PD
Downfall: The Case Against Boeing
Rory Kennedy’s riveting, often rending tale of two plane crashes and the jet that linked them. On Oct. 29, 2018, an Indonesian carrier plunged into the Java Sea shortly after takeoff. Nineteen weeks later, an Ethiopian Airlines flight also crashed, leaving a deep gouge near the Addis Abba Bole Airport. Both planes were new Boeing 737-Maxes; all told, 346 passengers and crew were killed. Kennedy, drawing on the eloquent testimony of family members, aviation industry experts, former Boeing engineers and a squadron of commercial pilots (including arguably the nation’s most trusted, Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger), builds a case against Boeing that offers an object lesson in the tragic consequences of corporate greed and hubris. —Lisa Kennedy
Fire of Love
At times, nothing is as gratifying to watch as a movie about obsession that lures you into sharing the obsession. Sara Dosa’s film is the story of Maurice and Katia Krafft, who became the world’s most ardent volcanologists. Starting in 1966, when they met, and over the next 25 years, they traveled to as many active volcanos as they could find, from Zaire to Colombia to Iceland to America to Japan, getting as close as possible to the danger and spectacle of these seismic tectonic eruptions. The Kraffts wanted to touch the uncanny, and did; volcanos became their life force. Seeing the footage they shot is a lot of what makes “Fire of Love” a spellbinding experience (the close-ups of spewing lava are like Jackson Pollock paintings in motion; the oozing chunks of black rock are like something out of “The Blob”). Yet the film also tells the enthralling story of two daredevil soulmates addicted to awe. —OG
From Where They Stood
In the seminal 1956 Holocaust documentary “Night and Fog,” the French director Alain Resnais contrasted horrific black-and-white footage shot in the concentration camps with scenes filmed in color, often at the same locations, after the war; he captured the past embedded in the present. The director Christophe Cognet employs a similar strategy in this haunting film — a meditation built around photographs taken inside the camps by Jewish prisoners, some of whom were members of the Sonderkommando. The prisoners, who took great risks to steal and smuggle cameras and to hide the rolls of film after they were shot, did it as a form of resistance: a testament to what went on in the camps, which in some cases amounts to an astonishing undercutting of victimization mythology. The images express something disturbing and elemental, sitting on the fault line between life and annihilation. —OG
Good Night Oppy
The stars of Ryan White’s inspirational and engaging film are the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which were designed to last 90 days on the Red Planet. Instead, they went on exploring the alien terrain for years, sending invaluable data and images back to NASA the whole time. As it turns out, for nearly 15 years there was life on Mars. White convinces us that these two solar-powered, remote-controlled research tools weren’t just machines but sentient characters with personalities, every bit as relatable as Pixar’s lovable trash compactor WALL-E. Anyone who sees “Good Night Oppy” will find themselves actually caring about these gizmos — 5’2″ space pioneers, heroically going where no man has gone before. —PD
Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song
It’s a documentary about the song “Hallelujah,” and if that sounds like a lot of movie to devote to one song — well, “Hallelujah” is a lot of song. You might call it a feel-good hymn for a secular society, because part of the reason people feel so good listening to it (or singing along with it in oversize stadiums) is that the song says to its audience: If you find this beautiful (and who doesn’t?), then you’re a spiritual person. But Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine’s film is also a portrait of Leonard Cohen, the ultimate pop-star-who-wasn’t-really-a-pop-star-except-that-he-so-was. He started off as a poet, but was sexy in a rapt Canadian Pacino-meets-Serge-Gainsbourg way — a clean-cut troubadour, a professor of lyric enchantment. The movie, which is studded with good anecdotes, plumbs the mystery of Cohen’s journey as it lays out the journey of “Hallelujah,” a song that kept changing, becoming, acquiring layers of soul and enchantment. —OG
Hello, Bookstore
It follows the life and fate of a beloved independent bookstore in Lenox, Mass., so you might expect it to be the sort of movie that expands into a larger statement about the cherished and precarious state of independent bookstores in the digital/corporate/chain-store era. Yet it does that only by implication. For 86 reverent minutes, A.B. Zax’s film, without ever leaving the premises, traces the daily existence of one deceptively quiet bookstore — which is called, incidentally, The Bookstore — and its missionary owner, Matthew Tannenbaum, a jaunty boomer who curates the place as if it were a library, a cocktail party and a projection of his literary dreams. Can he raise the funds to save his store? Can the oasis of a community bookstore live on? “Hello, Bookstore” is the documentary as hang-out movie, yet by the end Tannenbaum has come to seem a verité version of George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” —OG
Is That Black Enough for You?!?
Elvis Mitchell’s highly pleasurable and eye-opening movie-love documentary tells the story of Black cinema during a singularly creative and unprecedented time: the decade from 1968 to 1978, when Black actors, Black stories and Black talent behind the camera exploded, in Hollywood and in the adjoining universe of independent film. As Black artists began to take command in a vast array of forms and genres — action movies, historical dramas, film noirs, musicals, close-to-the-bone indie love stories — the Black film revolution became a parallel of the New Hollywood, with new voices overthrowing old strictures. The history is invigorating, but Mitchell, a veteran critic with a unique, at times almost musical ability to nail a movie’s unconscious essence, uses an indelible array of clips to create a film fanatic’s diary that invites the audience to share in the transformational quality these movies invoked in him. —OG
The Janes
Directors Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes tell the story of the female-staffed, Chicago-based underground service that provided over 11,000 illegal abortions to women in need between 1968 and 1973, at which point Roe v. Wade rendered their work triumphantly obsolete. To say that the film’s victorious arc has been undercut by the overturning of Roe v. Wade is another way of saying that the movie looks even more stingingly relevant now than it did when it premiered at Sundance a year ago. “The Janes” engages its audience solely on the testimony of its interviewees — mostly past members of the collective, along with allies and spouses whose stories prove detailed and compelling enough to carry the day. Their words evoke a tight-knit air of sisterhood, defining a formative moment when women didn’t need to explain themselves to get the help they needed. —Guy Lodge
Louis Armstrong's Black & Blues
Louis Armstrong is the rare example of an artist whose fame, image and media mythology can actually obscure his revolutionary grandeur as a creator. Sacha Jenkins’ captivating portrait does justice to the monumental nature of Armstrong’s genius — how as the prime innovator of jazz, he pioneered the concept of improvisation as a system of musical imagination by which a musician would now pour out what was in his mind and heart. This became the foundation not only of jazz but of rock ‘n’ roll. But the film also features revelatory audiotape recordings of Armstrong, speaking in private, where we hear the anger and calculation beneath his public image, which was really a mask of survival. Armstrong never became a Civil Rights activist, but the film captures the jubilant defiance that was lodged in every note he played. —OG
Moonage Daydream
Brett Morgan’s film is two hours and 20 minutes of sound and fury: a kaleidoscopic head-trip meditation on David Bowie, rock’s shape-shifting astronaut of identity. It’s no mere epic music video, though at times it feels like one, as it rides the pulse of Bowie’s music like a psychedelic locomotive. The Bowie estate gave Morgan unprecedented access to its archives, and this amounted to the biggest candy store an adventurous filmmaker could wish for. Morgen uses it to tell Bowie’s story in a hurtling multimedia fashion that dissolves a lot of the usual categories of our thinking about Bowie, so that we register not just the ch-ch-changes but the underlying continuity. There are essential facts you won’t hear, but the film brings you close to the chilly sexy enigma of who David Bowie really was. —OG
The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes
It dives into what we think of as the most tawdry and sensational aspects of the Marilyn Monroe story: her death, on August 4, 1962, from an overdose of barbiturates; the horrific downward spiral of depression and narcotics that led up to it; her clandestine affairs with John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. Yet Emma Cooper’s documentary, drawing on the journalism of Anthony Summers, is the rare tabloid exposé that wants to set the record straight, and does. We hear clips from the taped interviews Summers built his research on, and Cooper “stages” the interviews in a way that allows the audience to judge their veracity. The film’s vision of Monroe’s death is that it was not a murder but that it did involve a conspiracy — to cover up her relationship with the Kennedys. “The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe” fills in the end of Marilyn’s life, and in so doing lends her tragedy the dignity of emotional understanding. —OG
Navalny
Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, is now shackled in a remote prison, all for the crime of calling out Vladimir Putin as a corrupt emperor with no clothes. Navalny’s story is singular in its relevance, but it is also, in Daniel Roher’s momentous documentary, a saga of forceful and staggering twists and turns. The film invites us to hang out with Navalny in Germany after he got poisoned by the Putin regime, an assassination attempt that plays like a hit ordered by a Bond villain and carried out by the Keystone Kops. Navalny himself, with a vast following on social media, emerges as a new kind of freedom fighter: part martyr, part entertainer, as well as a walking profile in courage. —OG
Nothing Compares
Sinéad O’Connor was far from the first pop star to scream, but in Kathryn Ferguson’s incisive and poignant documentary portrait, we see how she framed her very identity as a rock singer around a cry of anger from the depths. She had a wail of fury she was going to let out, and (this was her artistry) she was going to make it beautiful. O’Connor is interviewed in the film off camera, and she talks about a childhood of staggering abuse that was mental, physical, spiritual. Yet her vision of it is large. From the outset, she linked the pain she suffered to the stern punitive force with which the Catholic Church held Ireland in its grip, the oppression that she says shaped her mother, her mother’s mother, and so on. Watching “Nothing Compares,” you feel the catharsis — the way that, in addition to possessing a voice of sinuous power that could make a note feel both caressed and pummeled, O’Connor had the rock alchemist’s gift for turning rage into excitement. —OG
The Pez Outlaw
Back in the ’90s, Steve Glew made and lost a fortune selling rare and counterfeit Pez dispensers from Eastern Europe. Whether by design or just dumb luck, he’d tapped into a craze whereby obsessives would pay exorbitant amounts for those collectible plastic candy holders, where you tilt back the bobble-head and out spits a tiny fruit-flavored treat. With mischievous eyes and a white, flowing ZZ Top beard, Glew looks more like an old-timey moonshine runner than an international smuggling mastermind. No matter. Bryan and Amy Bandlien Storkel’s wild, true-crime doc takes this kooky character at his word, finding creative ways to illustrate his story while casting the slippery con artist as himself for a series of incredible reenactments. —PD
The Princess
Perfectly timed and addictively watchable. It’s a documentary about Princess Diana culled entirely from television news footage and other archival public records, and coming on the heels of “Spencer” and Seasons 4 and 5 of “The Crown,” that may sound like one Diana chronicle too many. Yet it’s galvanizing to see the real story laid out exactly as it happened — or, more precisely, as it happened and as it was presented to the public, those being, quite often, two very different things. Once Diana emerged from the morass of the monarchy, she was revealed to be not just the charismatic rock star of royalty we always knew her to be but an icon of empathy, one who used her platform to conjure a glow of hope to the citizens of the world. Yet what did it mean that the woman who did all this was a princess? “The Princess” asks: Can someone really be Mother Teresa and the first Kardashian at the same time? —OG
Sr.
Just how polished does a career-spanning documentary about the anarchic underground filmmaker of “Putney Swope” and “Greaser’s Palace” need to be? This incredibly unconventional documentary was directed by Chris Smith (“Fyre”), but it gets hijacked along the way by its subject, Robert Downey Sr., who can’t resist the impulse to make his own version of the movie we’re watching. Downey is perhaps best known for siring Robert Downey Jr., and the documentary sneaks up on you, emotionally speaking, when it begins to double as a kind of farewell exercise between the two generations in the months before Downey Sr. succumbed to Parkinson’s disease. The film channels as much of the energy of dad’s renegade film career as possible; it’s also frank about how his drug use got out of control, to the point that his son picked up the habit. As insanely specific as this family history may be, “Sr.” packs a wallop in the end, when it comes time for father and son to say goodbye. —PD
Tantura
Alon Schwarz’s investigatory film digs into what has been, in Israel (and, for the most part, in the mainstream American media), forbidden territory. The movie is a record of what went on the during the 1948 War of Independence — a much uglier and more brutal story than Israel has ever wanted to acknowledge. “Tantura” includes graphic testimony that comes from the most authoritative sources possible: those who fought the war and lived it — the Palestinians, but also the Israeli soldiers themselves. What we hear on tapes and from some of the soldiers interviewed today is a description of war crimes and ethnic cleansing. Yet the real subject of the film is how the knowledge of Israel’s conduct during the war was suppressed, denied, and covered up in Israel by a counter-mythology. As the film makes clear, these lies are ghosts that have kept coming back to haunt Israel. —OG
The Territory
Dual forces of climate change and cultural genocide overlap to devastating effect in Alex Pritz’s film. Riveting and despairing in equal measure, it immerses us over the course of three years in the lives, livelihoods and dwindling homeland of the Indigenous Ure-eu-wau-wau people, whose supposedly protected patch of Amazon rainforest is under attack from all sides by farmers, miners and settlers who think nothing of deforesting swaths of jungle that don’t belong to them. The film makes an impact with both its bleak, blunt messaging and its muscular formal construction, as the turf war in question takes on the heated urgency of a thriller. Not content merely to be sympathetic victims under the gaze of the camera, the Ure-eu-wau-wau often wield it themselves, and the film benefits from their righteously inflamed point-of-view. —GL
Watch our interview with “The Territory” director here.
Turn Every Page — The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb
Lizzie Gottlieb’s documentary is about Robert Caro, towering author of “The Power Broker” and his still-to-be-completed multi-volume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, and Robert Gottlieb, the legendary editor who has shepherded all of Caro’s books. But if it were just a piece of good-ol’-days literary nostalgia, the film wouldn’t tell the deep and rapturous tale it does. “Turn Every Page” captures how the writing of books like Caro’s was (and still is) a religion, and that it’s all about the place where a magically crafted sentence can capture the truth. The two Roberts emerge as intoxicating giants, their egos locked in a sometimes combative dance, but what unites them is their devotion to the civilizing glory of The Word. —OG
Under the Influence
David Dobrik, the 26-year-old YouTube superstar, looks like the comic-strip character Dondi crossed with Mark Wahlberg in 1995 crossed with the world’s smarmiest frat-house douche. “Under the Influence” is a very absorbing, very disquieting, very meaningful-for-our-time documentary, directed by Casey Neistat (a YouTube personality himself), that charts Dobrik’s rise into becoming the buzziest and more infamous influencer of his generation. It captures how he made himself into the new king of Most Insane Home Videos Nation, how a dark cloud came to hover over him and his fellow Vlog Squad dudes after they enticed a group of young-woman followers to come over to their apartment and be filmed as part of a ”fivesome,” and how his sponsors cut him loose — for a while. But the film’s telling finale reveals how capitalism, in the age of aspirational fame, will always follow the money. —OG
Wildcat
Set deep in the Peruvian rainforest, Trevor Frost and Melissa Lesh’s movie packs a deep appeal for animal lovers, who will bond almost instantly with the orphaned ocelot that gives this regenerative documentary its name. Those feelings (and the title too) extend to the young man who dedicates 18 months of his life, and then some, to baby Keanu, preparing the adorable endangered feline for its return to the wild. After serving in Afghanistan, ex-soldier Harry Turner travels as far as he can from the front lines, finding purpose in the project, which also gives him the tools to cope with depression and PTSD. —PD

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The Best Documentaries of 2022

All That Breathes

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Bad Axe

Beba

Descendant

Downfall: The Case Against Boeing

Fire of Love

From Where They Stood

Good Night Oppy

Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song

Hello, Bookstore

Is That Black Enough for You?!?

The Janes

Louis Armstrong's Black & Blues

Moonage Daydream

The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes

Navalny

Nothing Compares

The Pez Outlaw

The Princess

Sr.

Tantura

The Territory

Turn Every Page — The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb

Under the Influence

Wildcat

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