50 Documentaries to See Before You Die

It's the stuff of cliche, that the truth is often stranger than fiction, but that doesn't make it wrong. When documentaries are bad, they feel like formulaic PSAs, or dry-as-dust college essays with a single point to drive into your brain one dull interview at a time. But when they're good they ask you to consider the world from perspectives—plural—that you haven't had access to before. A good documentary can be just as rich in character as the best narrative feature, can be just as complex and persuasive as the most necessary criticism. Like all great art, it changes you.

The documentaries here are intended to cover the history of the form, as well as discuss as many subjects as possible. Think of it as a primer before you pursue the other work of the directors mentioned, or other films dealing in the same subject. These are the 50 Documentaries to See Before You Die.

Director: Tony Silver, Henry Chalfant

Style Wars manages to communicate the essence of hip-hop music without focusing on the music itself. Instead, the film sets its sights on graffiti and break-dancing, centering on how the evolution of these expressions became vital to the vibrant roots of hip-hop culture spreading across the streets of New York in the late '70s and early '80s. Style Wars,which originally aired on PBS in 1983, follows several street artists, notably one-armed graffiti writer Kase 2, who is famous for his signature form of wild style called "computer rock" as much as for his boundless devotion to expressing his art.

If he was writing in his room, this wouldn't be the film it was; instead, we have an educational-sounding voice-over (this is PBS, remember?) describing the great risks he took to write on subway cars, and gorgeous visuals of graffiti-enveloped trains weaving throughout NYC. Kase 2's art is not just about aesthetics any more than Rock Steady's devotion to breaking is just about physical movement. It's about capturing a certain spirit, expressing something otherwise inexpressible, and ultimately making something your own. And that's all hip-hop really is, at it's heart, isn't it?

A film like this is not without accolades: Style Wars was awarded the Grand Jury Prize in documentary category at the Sundance Film Festival, and is widely viewed as a indelible declaration of hip-hop's commitment to originality at a fundamental time of its development. —Shanté Cosme

Director: Seth Gordon

It's the ultimate contest of good against evil—the noble hero taking on the unlikable, cold-hearted villain. And yes, it just so happens to revolve around middle-aged men playing video games.

Immensely entertaining, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters turns Donkey Kong into a sport that's as intense as anything seen on ESPN's SportsCenter. The goal: to achieve the highest Kong score ever, a claim that humorless mullet-head Billy Mitchell's been able to make for over 20 years. That is, until nice-guy familyman Steve Wiebe gets really damn good at the game while constantly playing it in his suburban garage. Before long, Mitchell catches wind of Wiebe's skills, and the the vibe becomes Larry Bird versus Magic Johnson, but much less cordial.

Arrogant and clouded by delusions of grandeur and entitlement, Billy Mitchell is a classic movie antagonist—he's King Koopa with a terrible hairdo. Which, indeed, makes Wiebe the film's Mario. earning points, not coins, and fighting the honor of well-intentioned nerds everywhere, not the Princess. —MB

Director: Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin

In 1969, the Rolling Stones mounted a massive tour of the United States. It culminated in what should have been a gift to American fans, a free concert at the Altamont Speedway in California. The show did not go as planned.

Beyond capturing performances from the best band in rock and roll during one of its hottest streaks, Gimme Shelter shows how the show at Altamont devolved into chaos and violence. Members of the Hells Angels were hired as security for the massive outdoor show. By the Stones' third song, "Sympathy for the Devil," the Angels were having it out with fans. Meredith Hunter, an 18-year-old black fan, died at the hands of the bikers.

The Altamont show is now thought of as the day the '60s died, and the cameras of the Maysles captured it all. —RS

Director: Jennie Livingston

Livingston's stunning documentary captures ball culture in the '80s, with gay New Yorkers doing some of the finest stunting the city has ever seen. Before TV shows like RuPaul's Drag Race brought walking into the prime time, there was Paris Is Burning, an incredible time capsule of old New York. Your slang and swagger will grow one-thousand fold. And you'll marvel at how much contemporary rap has in common with the incredible houses that populate the film.

R.I.P. Pepper LaBeija. —RS

Director: Ross McElwee

All Ross McElwee wanted to do was make a documentary General William Tecumseh Sherman's brutal March to the Sea during the American Civil War. Everything was going fine until his romantic relationship ended, turning the film into something else entirely. McElwee's movie paradoxically became more personal, focusing on his hang-ups about love and women, but in doing so became universal, a meditation on the religion, the Cold War, and destruction.

A wild, beautiful mess, Sherman's March has to be seen to be understood. —RS

Director: Jonathan Demme

Called the greatest rock concert movie ever put to celluloid, Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense follows Talking Heads over a three-night performance at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood. Demme breaks from the conventions of concert shots in favor of more deliberate, sparse techniques that aesthetically separates and elevates his movie above other music movie of its time. David Bryne's onstage dance performances are a main attraction. His big white suit is timeless. —Frantz Rocher

Director: Richard Press

New York is as self-absorbed a city as they come. Just when you think you can't listen to one more New Yorker talk about what makes the place so fucking special, a film like Bill Cunningham New York comes out, forcing you acknowledge that something is different here. But it's different here because of the people-Bill Cunningham, a fashion photographer for the New York Times, being one of them.

Cunningham, in his trademark blue workman's coat, photographs people on the streets of Manhattan. He's a monk for fashion, and Richard Press' doc explores his ascetic lifestyle. He cares little for food, for his own dress, for his living space. He has few close relationships. It's at once awe-inspiring and deeply saddening, his devotion to beauty. You'll never think about integrity the same way again. You'll also never love New York as much. —RS

Director: Errol Morris

Errol Morris is justly famous for his explicitly political documentaries like The Fog of War and Standard Operating Procedure, works of non-fiction that capture the frailty of the human condition in the face of armed conflict. But his low-key best work just might be a small film about pet cemeteries that does big work. Gates of Heaven, about the men and women who love their pets so much they hold lavish burials in their honor, takes what could be a ludicrous occasion for mean-spirited jokes about unusual people and turns it into a profound look at death. No, really. Gates of Heaven, about departed cats and dogs, is one of the most bracing and compassionate conversations about the end of life ever made. —RS

Director: Michael Wadleigh

The most notorious music festival of all time, the 1969 Woodstock Music & Art festival in Bethel, N.Y. brought over 400,00 people together for fun, love and drugs. Woodstock offers a behind-the-scenes look at preparation for the festival, the concerts, and its messy conclusion. Drug use and sex abound before the National Guard shows up with food and medical assistance. Images of naked fans sliding in the mud and loving one another will make you nostalgic for a time you never knew. —Debbie Encalada

Director: Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese loves rock and roll and uses it so well in his movies that he's thought of as an American master when it comes to incorporating pop music into the cinema. So, what happens when Scorsese makes a movie about rock and roll? Magic, duh.

The Last Waltz documents The Band's farewell performance on November 25, 1976, at Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. For this Thanksgiving Day show, the Canadian-American rock outfit best known for working with Bob Dylan was joined onstage by Neil Young, Emmylou Harris, Ringo Starr, Dr. John, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Muddy Waters, and many, many more. Best concert movie ever? It's hard to argue with those names. —RS

Director: Peter Davis

The Vietnam War is so often the subject of superficial pop culture joking, it's all to easy to reduce it to a lousy war that turned a bunch of American servicemen loopy. (Think of The Big Lebowski.) Which is why Peter Davis's Hearts and Minds, a documentary with no narration, that works just through the tension created between conflicting images and scenes, is all the more important today, when America is again embroiled in a lousy conflict.

Winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1974, Davis's film is full of empathy for the Vietnamese and American GIs, but unafraid to criticize both for the disasterous effects of war. —RS

Director: Amy J. Berg

Prepare to have your hearts and guts beaten to pulps. An astoundingly researched and exhaustive look at social injustice, director Amy Berg's magnificent West of Memphis was last year's epitome of powerful, awe-inspiring documentary filmmaking. And, it's worth pointing out, 2012 was a phenomenal year for documentaries (see, in addition to those previously included in this list: The Queen of Versailles, The Invisible War, How to Survive a Plague, The House I Live In, and Searching for Sugar Man).

At a sprawling yet justified 146 minutes, West of Memphis leaves no figurative stone unturned, probing deeply-through multiple interviews with those who lived through the events-into the controversial case of the West Memphis Three. They're Damian Echols (who co-produced the film), Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley, Jr., three guys who, as teenagers back in 1993, were targeted for their antisocial ways and interests in occultism as the savage murderers of three little boys.

Berg's harrowing film unflinchingly shows every aspect of the actual killings, the investigation, the subsequent trials, and the eventual evidence of wrongful imprisonments. West of Memphis is intimate, shocking, maddening, and revelatory. —MB

Director: Banksy

If a documentary sends you into the light of the lobby wondering about the truthfulness of what you just saw, usually that's a failure on the doc's part. In the case of Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop, it's the point. Much like Orson Welles' F for Fake, Exit Through the Gift Shop is a cheeky study of value and perspective.

Great insider stories about street art eventually give way to a narrative about the artist known as Mr. Brainwash, who may or may not be a phony. Who's the sucker? Is it you? —RS

Director: Bart Layton

File this under both the "stranger than fiction" and "disturbing reality" categories. Directed by Bart Layton with the tightness, mystery, and subtle creepiness of a David Fincher narrative thriller, The Imposter is a documentary so profoundly unsettling that it's arguably the summer's scariest movie. Of course, it's devoid of any jump scares, instead focusing on the inherent paranoia at the center of master con artist Frédéric Bourdin's truly bizarre case.

Without giving away too much of The Imposter's deep impact, Layton's real-life white-knuckler focuses on Bourdin's elaborate, unbelievably successful stint posing as Texas kid Nicholas Barclay, who disappeared as a 13-year-old in 1994. Despite the fact that Bourdin, a Frenchman, looked nothing like Barclay, the missing boy's family allowed themselves to fall victim to the criminal's rouse, and that's just the beginning of The Imposter's fascinating and unpredictable tale.

Mixing in-depth interviews with all involved (chiefly a manipulatively charming Bourdin), taut reenactments, and a macabre score, The Imposter is a first-rate horror show disguised as a probing investigative piece, one that has the power to make viewers question their own perceptions. Layton knew that the immediate reaction from audiences would be, "How could these people fall for such a trick?" The ways in which The Imposter casually puts viewers in the same unknowingly vulnerable positions as Barclay's own family members is only one of its key strengths. —MB

Director: Les Blank

German director Werner Herzog is just as crazy and determined as the characters who populate his movies. For instance, one of Herzog's best films, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, follows a crazed conquistador looking for El Dorado in the 16th century. Herzog shot the the film on location in the Amazon, and the cast looks suitably terrified.

Burden of Dreams documents Herzog's herculean struggle to make 1982's Fitzcarraldo, about a man moving a steamship over a Peruvian mountain. During the shoot for Fitzcarraldo, Herzog actually moved the steamship over a mountain, and this became Les Blanks's doc. Levels. —RS

Director: Ellen Hovde, Albert Maysles, David Maysles

Once you meet "Big Edie" Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and "Little Edie" Edith Bouvier Beale, it's hard to forget them. Both relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the eccentric mother and daughter at the center of this landmark doc live in the 28-bedroom, racoon-infested Grey Gardens mansion.

Though undeniably impoverished since Big Edie's husband left the family decades ago, they have a taste for fur coats and high fashion. This is a documentary, but their penchant for imaginative storytelling makes for many moments that may defy reality. Watching how these singular personalities co-exist amid consistent strife, however, is the true wonder of this memorable movie about the remnants of a once prestigious family. —Frantz Rocher

Director: Dziga Vertov

Russian visionary Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera is an undeniable testament to film's unique abilities. Literature and theater provide distinctive views of our world, but Vertov knew that a camera offers something much more open to singular interpretation. Using a tactic known as double exposure (objects can change size or appear beneath other objects), he distorted reality, filming everyday occurrences (birds flying, cars driving) from daring angles. He's like the patron saint to women who prefer watching porno over reading romance novels. —MB

Director: Michael Stephenson

Time really does heal all wounds. If you've never seen Troll 2 (1990), do yourself a favor: rent it, pick up a 12-pack and invite some friends over, because the sequel nobody ever wanted is all that bad and then some.

Thanks to Best Worst Movie, it's now also an endearing trainwreck. This documentary is a celebration of crap, and how true crap can transcend the pits of creative Hell and unite lovers of garbage. George Hardy, one of Troll 2's stars and this doc's central figure, best exemplifies this spirit: he's a dentist so proud of what Troll 2 has become that he struts around midnight screenings like an A-lister.

After watching Best Worst Movie, you'll wish that Hardy could experience a career rebirth. Maybe score a role in a Marvel movie. He won't, of course, since he never had an official career to begin with, but he sure is a good sport. —MB

Director: D.A. Pennebaker

In Don't Look Back, director D.A. Pennebaker follows Bob Dylan through his tour of the United Kingdom in 1965, letting the viewer glimpse some of the '60s most significant singers and performers like Joan Baez, Alan Price, and Marianne Faithfull in the process. Dylan's iconic cue-card presentation of his song "Subterranean Homesick Blues" remains a highlight, an essential scene for fans of the American singer/songwriter. —Frantz Rocher

Director: Chris Smith

With just one viewing of American Movie, Wisconsin will no longer be the land of cheese and Brett Favre for the viewer—it'll become the land of broken dreams. Perhaps that's a harsh judgement of the subjects in Chris Smith's documentary about a guy who just wants to make a movie. But really, things are pretty dire in Menomonee Falls, where Mark Borchardt is trying to turn his love of cinema into something that can turn a profit.

He has difficulty holding down a job, maintaining relationships, and moving out of his parents' house, but he is going to make this horror movie—even if it kills him. And really, the horror movie (entitled Coven) is only a means to secure funding for the serious, autobiographical film Borchardt wants to make. His path is beset by struggle. Sorry, Wisconsin. —RS

Director: Jeffrey Blitz

Suspense dominates Spellbound, a documentary that, on paper, could've been voted "Least Likely to Hold Anyone's Attention." After all, it's about a bunch of kids vying to win the Scripss Howard National Spelling Bee—meaning, at first glance, director Jeffrey Blitz's film is about eight kids putting letters together and forming words. But in actuality, Spellbound is so much more than that. It's a story of determination, a character-driven ensemble piece that spans across the nation and turns little kids into dramatic heavyweights. And the tension is paramount. Can you spell "astounding"? —MB

Director: Robert Kenner

Not all farmed food is created equal. Food, Inc. delves into the practices of agribusiness in the United States, and the film's findings are not pleasant. From industrial meat and produce production, to the bloated food lobby, the doc gives a step-by-step analysis of the misdeeds of food conglomerates.

This will be the perfect film for you to quote to your impoverished friends as they opt for Top Ramen and Easy Mac due to budgetary constraints, so that you can make them feel even worse about their situation...jk! —Brenden Gallagher

Director: Morgan Spurlock

By now, everyone's familiar with Morgan Spurlock's 30-day run of eating nothing but McDonald's. That's the premise in a nutshell. Spurlock eats, you watch. He visits the doctor to see how his eating is working out for his body, you wacth. Spurlock eats some more, you watch.

The results—fast food is not good for you—won't surprise anyone but the doc is interesting for its insight into the power of the image. You can read about calories and processed foods all you want, but there's something about seeing these things that affects you on a visceral level no nutrition facts print-out can.

Director: Charles Ferguson

The phrase “inside job” gets thrown around so much that it's lost its significance. Well, producer/director Charles Ferguson fixes that. Through interviewing financial insiders as well as journalists and politicians, he gets inside the American financial crisis that began in 2008. It shows middle America and others who have become jobless and, in some cases, homeless. Meanwhile big business gets bailed out and continues to hand out millions in bonuses.

Ferguson illuminates the gross connective tissue that joins the banks to the government. Past bank CEOs ascend to government officials and cater to the hands that once fed them. And will continue to.

Director: Henry Alex Rubin, Dana Adam Shapiro

Too lazy to get your ass off of that couch and make something of your life? Give Murderball a look and just try to stay unmotivated by its end.

As inspirational as it is adrenaline-pumping and unexpectedly funny, co-directors Henry-Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro's film takes a look at Wheelchair Rugby, the sport where quadriplegics talk tons of smack to one another, crash into each other's wheelchairs with the force of supercharged bumper cars, and tirelessly battle for supremacy.

As a sports doc, Murderball soars, presenting a colorful cast of characters and rousing game footage. More importantly, though, the film shows how admirably driven Wheelchair Rugby's participants are—one player says, without flinching, "I'm not here for a hug—I'm here to win."

Don't feel sorry for anyone in Murderball. If you do, they'll run you over. —MB

Director: Sacha Gervasi

Even if you're not a head-banging metal head, Anvil! The Story of Anvil is a foolproof crowd-pleaser. Because, well, everyone needs a best friend, right? That one person who'll always be by your side, building up your confidence, playing into your seemingly overreaching dreams of taking over the world. All struggle mixtape and blog rappers have them, as do wannabe filmmakers and artists of every kinds. Steve "Lips" Kudlow and Robb Reiner—the two members of the once-popular Canadian heavy metal band Anvil—have each other, and filmmaker Sacha Gervasi's charming comeback story Anvil! thrives on their camaraderie.

Think of Anvil! as the lighthearted counterpart to Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler. Like that film's Randy "The Ram," Kudlow and Reiner want another chance to occupy the spotlight; middle-age is in full swing, and, rather than settle into retirement anonymity, they still want to rock. Anvil! depicts their funny, fast-paced, and at times heartbreaking trials and tribulations. You'll feel like an honorary metal head once its over. —MB

Director: Joshua Zeman, Barbara Brancaccio

During the 1980s, Staten Island kids were told the urban legend of "Cropsey," a child-killer said to stalk the remains of the remaining buildings of the abandoned Willowbrook Mental Institution. Turns out, though, that Cropsey was real, and thought to be a former Willowbrook employee named Andre Rand, who was pinned to the disappearances of five children. Cropsey details those cases and, in the process, makes Freddy Krueger's track record seem like child's play.

The boogeyman is real, kids, and this film reminds us of that without flinching. Child abduction and murder is inherently disturbing, of course, but surprisingly the film's unsettling pièce de résistance has nothing to do with homicide. An argument is made that Rand's fractured mental state traces back to his days working inside Willowbrook, a decrepit hellhole where handicapped patients sat in filth and underwent extensive neglect.

Geraldo Rivera famously documented the institution's poor practices back in 1972 in an exposé titled Willowbrook: The Last Disgrace, shown raw and uncut in Cropsey. It'll make you hate mankind for a good hour or two. —MB

Director: Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Jafar Panahi

This Is Not a Film is a testament to filmmaking itself. Shot largely on an iPhone, director/subject Jafar Panahi's unique and mesmerizing doc captures his time spent while under house arrest in his native Iran, a penalty spurring from his having made films considered to be pro-protesters and anti-state. Even though he's also been banned from making movies from 20 years, Panahi still does what he does best, though, on the surface, it doesn't appear to be a whole lot. He talks to his lawyer on the phone. He hangs out with his pet iguana, Igi. He reads from a screenplay that's been unapproved by the state's censor board.

What he's also doing the entire time, though, and what makes This Is Not a Film so quietly crucial, is encapsulating all that makes cinema so important. As long as there are cameras of any kind, even ones on cellular phones, artists will speak their minds and rebel against "the man." —MB

Director: Leon Gast

You won't find a documentary subject in this list who's more charismatic than Muhammad Ali. Because of that, When We Were Kings is major entertainment. Covering the pugilist's famous 1974 "Rumble in the Jungle" bout against then-champion George Foreman, which took place is Zaire, director Leon Gast's film is a stirring love letter to the man who "floats like a butterfly" and "stings like a bee."

Ali's a superhero to the people of Africa, a standing that gives When We Were Kingsan outright position of being 100% pro-Ali, as it should. With his larger-than-life personality, Ali's a living, breathing quote machine, dropping gems like, ""You think the world was surprised when Nixon resigned? Just wait'll I kick George Foreman's behind."

Greatly assisted by some remarkable in-ring boxing footage, Gast's film is, in terms of sports docs, unbeatable. —MB

Director: Spike Lee

Spike Lee should be just as highly regarded for his non-fictional filmmaking as for his narrative features. 4 Little Girls, originally made for HBO, tells the story of the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The film's title comes from the devastating loss of four young lives as a result of the act of terrorism: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair.

Lee's documentary revisits the most despicable act with interviews with the families of the four girls and one particularly uncomfortable conversation with George Wallace, the former governor of Alabama. —RS

Director: Spike Lee

The running time, 255 minutes, is brutal, and the subject matter even more so. There are few things capable of inspiring as much rage as the gross mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in Lousiana in 2005, and Lee's documentary, thankfully, captures the anguish and incompetance as best it can, making for a film that should be required viewing for generations of Americans to come.

The images of families stranded on roofs, the tales from survivors, the interviews with government officials—you won't soon forget any of this. You can't. —RS

Director: Alex Gibney

The conversation about torture flared up last year with the release of Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty, about the killing of Osama bin Laden. If only that film, which was more boradly about American failure than the immorality of harming another human being for information, had been screened as a double feature with Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side. Then, maybe, the conversation would have been smarter.

Taxi to the Dark Side is the account of the killing of Dilawar, an Afghan taxi driver who was beaten to death by American soldiers at Parwan Detention Facility in Afghanistan. This is really what failure looks like. This is what shame looks like. —RS

Director: Claude Lanzmann

Of all the documentaries to be made about the Holocaust, Claude Lanzmann's Shoah is the most monumental. Over a decade in the making and with a running time of more than nine hours, Shoah is a methodical investigation of the slaughter of six million Jews at the hands of the Nazis during World War II. Lanzmann's film asks you to contemplate what is incomprehensible, and after these nine-and-a-half hours you will be changed. —RS

Director: Göran Olsson

During the Black Power Movement, a group of Swedish journalists traveled to America to document the struggle. The crew gained access to key figures like Stokely Carmichael, Huey P. Newton, and Angela Davis, putting them on camera when the American media thought it best to ignore the revolutionaries. (History has proven the U.S. to be in the wrong.) The footage went unseen for years, until in 2011, when it was put together (along with new interviews) to create The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975.

Director: Barbara Kopple

Harlan County, USA is a documentary about the infamous 1970s coal mine strikers in Harlan County, Kentucky. The film bravelyexposes the dark sides of the miner strikes inside and outside of the workplace. The wives of the miners were also just as essential to the movement as the miners themselves. In fact, the director said that they had to pretend to keep filming even if they were out of film to prevent any strikers from being too violent. A lasting document of American labor, it should be essential viewing this fourth of July. —Vanessa Castro

Director: Kirby Dick

Like a most ornery Michael Moore, Kirby Dick is pissed at the inequalities of the Hollywood rating system and the conservative moralizing of the MPAA—and he's going to do something about it. In This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Dick interviews directors who have had their films savaged by the MPAA to discuss what this shadowy board finds unacceptable. The answer isn't surprisng: sex. But especially gay sex.

More than just providing a lesson about Hollywood (and America's) weird prudishness—you can savagely kill a character and get an R rating, but show any thrusting and you have an NC-17 on your hands—Dick tries to expose the members of the MPAA (they're sworn to secrecy). The result is an upsetting and strange detective story about film. —RS

Director: Errol Morris

Private detective turned documentary filmmaker extraordinaire, Errol Morris and his film The Thin Blue Line got an innocent man out of prison. How's that for impactful? While investigating a prosecution psychiatrist named Dr. James Grigson, Morris beame interested in the case of Randall Dale Adams, who was sentenced to life in prison for murder.

In November 1976, a Dallas police officer was shot and killed during a traffic stop. Adams, who was riding in the car with a man named David Ray Harris, was convicted of killing the shooting, but through recreations and new interviews, Morris proves his innocence. Powerful stuff. —RS

Director: Alain Resnais

Released 10 years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, Night and Fog is a documentary about the impossibility of documentation. At a lean 32 minutes, it is one of the most profound meditations on the Holocaust, and documentary filmmaking as well.

Alain Resnais, the director of the masterpiece Hiroshima, Mon Amour, moves his camera across the landscape of the death camps in 1955 and incorporates footage and stills from when the camps were active. And the conclusion he comes to is that it is impossible to capture what happened there. Knowledge collapses in the face it. —RS

Director: Michael Moore

When General Motor's CEO Roger Smith purged Flint, Michigan of several auto plants, the city flatlined. With the manufacturing plants that once powered Flint's economy gone, tens of thousands of people lost their jobs. And Michael Moore captured it all.

Make no mistake, crushing poverty is just as tough to watch as gross violence. Moore documents the merciless evictions of thousands of families from their homes, many only days away from Christmas; their possesions, damaged, broken and wet, sitting on pavement covered with snow.

Moore's main mission was to gain a meeting with Roger Smith himself, and predictably, it's extremely difficult. Along the way, the director takes you on an eye-opening journey through a proud city left to rot. —Debbie Encalada

Director: Werner Herzog

German filmmaker (and superhuman) Werner Herzog turned his camera on Timothy Treadwell, a bear enthusiast who spent 13 summers in Katmai National Park and Preserve, Alaska, developing a relationship with bears. Or so he thought. Treadwell saw something kindred in the animals, something almost human that he believed bonded him to the bears.

Herzog looks at the footage and at the animals and sees nothing, a cold statement that becomes more powerful when coupled with Treadwell's fate: In 2003, he and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard were killed by a bear. It was captured on tape, and though Herzog (thankfully) never plays the audio for the viewer, you do get to watch the director listen to the footage on headphones. It's just one brilliant move in a documentary full of them. —RS

Director: David France

When Ed Koch died, many were quick to point out the former NYC mayor's failure to address the AIDS crisis in his city. David France's powerful doc, How to Survive a Plague, covers the early days of AIDs, when the general public seemed content to paint it as punishment for being gay. The film was nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar at the 2012 Academy Awards.

Director: Terry Zwigoff

Prior to the release of this documentary, Robert Crumb was known as the cartoonist responsible for such beloved comic strips as Keep on Truckin' and Fritz the Cat. Though it's funnier in tone than the other films on this list, Crumb isn't without its creep factor. The man's a walking picture of sexual dysfunction, which viewers learn through interviews with members of his family and from the mouth of Crumb himself.

OK, so we'll admit that we've fancied a couple animated ladies in our day (Jasmine and Jessica Rabbit, anyone?). But when Robert Crumb talks about how Bugs Bunny got him hot and bothered when he was five years old, we can't help but cringe. It doesn't help the guy's case that his family is just as bizarre. Take his younger brother Maxon, who sleeps on a bed of nails and swallows ropes in order to defecate. All that being said, what's perhaps most disturbing is that, despite his perverse eccentricities, we love Crumb even more once the film ends. —MB

Director: Fax Bahr, George Hickenlooper, Eleanor Coppola

Art is pain—just ask Francis Ford Coppola. He'll tell you all about the nightmare that was his Apocalypse Now production, an endless succession of environmental interruptions, over-budget concerns, and health problems, both physical and mental. It's all captured with honesty and precision by the director's wife, Eleanor Coppola, who gave her raw behind-the-scenes footage to filmmakers Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper, who then shot all-new interviews and worked everything into the greatest documentary about the making of a movie ever.

There's Martin Sheen raving like a madman while getting ready for a particularly harrowing scene, roaring with such unbridled intensity that you're waiting for him to pounce upon Coppola and his crew. Marlon Brando, meanwhile, earning $1 million a week, hovers onto set without being fully prepared, quarrels with the director, and walks away mid-scene. All of which leads Coppola to a near breakdown, unaware that he's about to unleash one of the most powerful films of all time, when all's said and done. —MB

Director: Steve James

Hoop Dreams, the gripping story of Chicago high-school basketball players William Gates and Arthur Agee is as much about race, class, and education in America as it is about sports. Those qualities make this cinematic masterpiece not just the greatest sports doc, but also one of the best documentaries in recent memory. Don't be intimated by the long run time—Steve James' achievement is thoroughly compelling. It'll be the shortest three hours of your life. —RS

Director: Kurt Kuenne

Andrew Bagby, a pleasant, fun-loving medical resident, fell in love with an unstable woman, Shirley Jane Turner, and in 2001, the 28-year-old Bagby was murdered after breaking up with her. Kurt Kuenne, Bagby's close friend, immortalized his pal with this heart-shredding film, which he began shooting after Turner announced that she was pregnant with Bagby's child, later named Zachary.

What makes Dear Zachary so disturbing? Where to begin? The film's central conceit (a love letter to an unborn child) is heavy enough, as are the tears pouring from the eyes of Bagby's family members as Turner regains custody of Zachary. The emotional sledgehammer, however, is the film's sad endgame reveal: In August 2003, Turner committed suicide by jumping into the Atlantic Ocean with infant Zachary in her arms.

Dear Zachary, as a result, is in fact a memorial for both Bagby and the son he never had a chance to meet. If you're not crying yourself by the movie's end, check your vitals. —MB

Director: Andrew Jarecki

The Friedmans appeared to be a normal, upperclass Jewish family living in Great Neck, New York. Yet, a late 1980's police investigation exposed a world of child pornography and molestation. At the center of the story are the family's patriarch, Arnold Friedman, who was a computer teacher working from home with a roster of underaged students, and his son Jesse, alleged to be his father's accomplice.

The creepiest thing about Capturing the Friedmans is how run-of-the-mill the family seems on the surface. It's a classic example of what really goes on behind closed doors, how the most idyllic-looking of folks can harbor some disgusting secrets. While filmmaker Andrew Jarecki takes an objective stance, the finished product proves that Friedman was a pedophile, and that sickos aren't restricted to news reports and newspaper clippings—more often than not, they live right next door. Capturing the Friedmans is a suburban nightmare. —MB

Director: James Marsh

Keep the handkerchiefs nearby for this one. From Man on Wire director James Marsh comes Project Nim emotionally wrenching examination of a chimpanzee named Nim that anchored a 1970s experiment designed to see if apes could co-exist with people on a human level. Early on, the film is quite funny, reveling in Nim's cuteness and genuine lovability. As Project Nim carries along, though, Marsh's real intent becomes rather clear: By trying to make an animal human, Nim's handlers erased their own humanity and, ultimately, led to the corruption and devastation of a kind-hearted creature. —MB

Director: James Marsh

You'd be hard-pressed to find a recent film with more humanity than James Marsh's Man on Wire, which tells the story of Philippe Petit, who walked a tightrope between the World Trade Center's Twin Towers in 1974. The generosity of spirit displayed by Petit's beautiful (and illegal) act takes on special significance in light of the destruction of the Towers, making the film even more emotional.

Really, if you need to find a glimmer of hope in a nasty world, Man on Wire will convince you that being human in the face of oppressive superstructures is possible. —RS

Director: Frederick Wiseman

Titicut Follies was subjected to a worldwide ban until 1992, after the Massachusetts State Municipal Court ruled that it invaded inmate privacy. Considering the nature of what was shown in the film, privacy should've been the last of the patients' worries.

Filmmaker Frederick Wiseman reveals the mistreatment of patients at Bridgewater State Hospital, located in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. The black-and-white doc shows catatonic inmates being bullied by staff members and forced to sleep in dark cells without being washed.

One hard-to-watch scene involves guards shaving one crazy man's face while repeatedly questioning the cleanliness of his room; the inquiries drive him berserk, causing him to run down a hallway naked, his mouth bleeding profusely. Another patient is force-fed food through a tube in his nose, scenes of which are intercut with the preparation of his soon-to-be dead body.

Life as a mentally handicapped person shouldn't be so rough. —MB

Director: Errol Morris

The Fog of War focuses on former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara without making him into a sinner or a saint. Morris collected 20 hours of interview footage from his “Interrotron,” which forces almost direct-eye contact between 85-year-old McNamara and the audience. Through historical footage, phone conversations, and charts Morris follows McNamara from childhood to adulthood, paying special attention to his involvement in the Vietnam War, among other conflicts.

In the end McNamara takes responsibility for his choices, implying that everyone makes mistakes. (Questions of scale are pertinent, of course.) He shows us that the fog isn't limited to war, and carries into life itself. —Debbie Encalada