The best documentaries of 2023

Explorations of zeitgeist-gripping commercial trends have enjoyed a recent cinematic boom, and many of these fiction adaptations (BlackBerry, The Beanie Bubble, Tetris) are quite entertaining. Billion Dollar Babies, though, serves up a nonfiction chronicling that is equal parts entertaining and shrewdly insightful. Narrated by Neil Patrick Harris, the movie includes candid interviews with the businessmen (Xavier Roberts, Roger Schlaifer, Al Kahn) responsible for crafting and shepherding the consumer phenomenon, while also edging into more ruminative territory. Comparing favorably to other stories of popular products wrested away from their entrepreneurs (see also: Instant Life, about the creator of Sea Monkeys, and Burt’s Buzz, about the Burt’s Bees founder), Billion Dollar Babies is a fascinating look at arguably ground zero for America’s cult of consumerism.

The story of America’s misguided quest to protect childhood innocence through, you know, simply not talking about things with kids is one told over and over, dressed up in different ways across many generations. An entertainingly invaluable resource, friend, and one-woman diversionary program for many would-be lost souls receives her (overdue) due in Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok’s warm documentary, which celebrates the bestselling author of its title. A movie of forthright eloquence, Judy Blume Forever reflects the huge heart of its subject—trying to throw her arms around the world—but also shows how meaningful art and literature can help shape and save lives.

Despots count on the fact that the grim realities of war understandably grind most of us down. But 20 Days In Mariupol, a World Cinema Audience Award winner at the Sundance Film Festival, is a work that punches beyond the news cycle, a sobering piece of frontline docu-journalism that achieves its own special transcendence. Director Mstyslav Chernov’s film is a gripping historical record, yes, but it’s shot through with moments of extraordinary bravery that counterbalance its bleakness. It gives one hope even as it breaks your heart. Watch it in tandem with 2022’s Navalny for a fuller understanding of the stakes of the war in Ukraine.

Rejecting the expected construction and tone of so many glad-handing biographical snapshots, Alexandre O. Philippe’s engaging and introspective You Can Call Me Bill instead delves into the passions, hopes, and concerns of actor William Shatner, and leans heavily on his prowess as a natural-born storyteller. The result is a movie that honors the boundless curiosity of its larger-than-life subject and imparts some magical lessons from a life lived with few filters.

History is often so dryly presented as to be off-putting to millions of people. Sex-adjacent subject matter helps, of course, but the skillful, tapestral construction and additionally bolstering visual vocabulary of director Nicole Newnham’s The Disappearance Of Shere Hite is what most recommend it. An absorbing portrait of groundbreaking sex researcher Shere Hite, her rise to fame and notoriety, and her retreat from the public eye, this astutely interwoven mélange of character study and mystery embraces the complexities and many contradictions of its subject, making history come alive.

Any number of documentaries have plumbed unjust criminal convictions, but few recently with as much commingled compassion and contextualization as Raoul Peck’s riveting and moving recounting of the plight of the North Carolina Reels family. The novel nature of the seed of its focus (purloined land rights) is perhaps part of its hook, but Silver Dollar Road also strikes a unique balance, assaying intersections of racial justice, capitalistic exploitation, gender issues, and more. By leaving certain questions unanswered, the movie hints at the unsolvable nature of certain modern problems with deep-stretching roots, sparking thought and conversation.

A special music documentary that affectingly doubles as a story about the fuller dimensions and depths of love, Matthew Heineman’s American Symphony begins as a portrait of Grammy-winning multi-instrumentalist Jon Batiste, tackling the challenge of composing an original symphony that reimagines the classical traditions of the form. This effort is upended when Batiste’s life partner, author Suleika Jaouad, learns that her cancer has returned. A uniquely gifted hybrid filmmaker, Heineman has deep experience in conflict zones, but here captures roiling inner landscapes, delivering an incredibly intimate and lived-in film that lingers on questions of the human heart as much as art and the creative process.

A documentary about film preservation and restoration would seem to have a self-selecting (and rather limited) audience. Yet Inés Toharia’s absorbing Film: The Living Record Of Our Memory possesses a trenchant instructiveness and sneaky emotional punching power for those willing to submit to its probing thesis. Spanning both time and the globe, and full of all manner of fascinating narrative tangents, the film asks viewers to consider how diminished our world and thus our shared humanity would (or, darkly, will) be without the ability to retain and see films from different eras and cultures? This is more than just a cinematic cri de coeur—it’s a standout work on its own.

Wim Wenders is a filmmaker who has, from almost the first flashes of the digital age, committed to marrying his interests in the fine arts with advances in state-of-the-art technology. Anchored by Leonard Küssner’s enveloping, award-winning score, and shot in both 3D and 6K resolution, Wenders’ meticulously constructed film delves into the work of innovative German painter and sculptor Anselm Keifer, delivering a fascinating meditation on human existence.

Part art-heist thriller, part personal history, married co-directors Sara Nodjoumi and Till Schauder deliver an engrossing portrait of one of Iran’s most revolutionary artists — who also happens to be Nodjoumi’s father. In telling the story of his quest to locate more than 100 of his so-called “treasonous” paintings that disappeared after the Iranian Revolution, A Revolution On Canvas is, naturally, shot through with social and political commentary. But there are so many other threads here, too, making it a work that substantively addresses personal identity’s relationship to family history, as well as a generational portrait of a woman’s sacrifice. The big, looming question, though: voices of political opposition can be exiled, and protestors tortured or even killed, but what does it mean to a society to vanish works of culture?

A work of sober reflection, both on the part of the subject and its maker, documentarian Errol Morris’ latest offering begins as a straightforward interrogation of the life of David Cornwell, the British former spy who’s enjoyed a celebrated career writing under the pen name John le Carré. Slowly, almost surreptitiously, however, the movie extends into more universal themes, and an examination of the current state of the world. Richly sharing stories of his upbringing and his absent mother and especially his con-man father (“I can see my own life as a succession of embraces and escapes,” he says), Cornwell eloquently elucidates some of the perceived value of assumed masks and false identities—qualities that are richly evident in political and social realms today.

In 1993, the biggest rock ’n’ roll band in the world, U2, chose to effectively splash cold water in the faces of hundreds of thousands of European concertgoers. As part of its groundbreaking Zoo TV Tour, the band featured live nightly satellite link-ups to citizens trapped in Sarajevo during the bloody Bosnian War. It was both heartrending and eye-opening. Director Nenad Cicin-Sain’s Kiss The Future, which had its world premiere in Berlin, tells the story of how this risky emotional high-wire gambit came to be, plus all that flowed from it. The end result uncommonly balances insight and uplift — showcasing the pulsing, indefatigable human need for creative expression, as well as art’s essential role in combatting the horrors of war and weaponized ethnic hatred.

Winner of both the Cannes L’Oeil D’or and Gotham Award documentary prizes, director Kaouther Ben Hania’s film is a profoundly introspective work of inventive and layered storytelling, staged with a deceptive simplicity. A piece of cinematic therapy, Four Daughters reconstructs the story of Olfa Hamrouni, a Tunisian woman whose two eldest children have been lost to the radicalization of Islamic extremists. By casting professional actresses as the missing daughters, along with acclaimed Egyptian-Tunisian actress Hend Sabari as Olfa, the movie explores trauma and taps into a deep wellspring of the human spirit, while honoring the complexities of motherhood, loss, grief, and resilience.

Last year Daniel Roher’s Oscar-winning Navalny, named for the leading Russian political opposition leader, presented an incredible tale of personal sacrifice in an autocratic state. Bobi Wine is no less engaging as a portrait of resilience and unfathomable courage. The top prize winner at the International Documentary Awards, Moses Bwayo and Christopher Sharp’s film follows the titular 41-year-old music star, activist, and opposition leader during Uganda’s 2021 presidential election. Beautifully and intuitively balancing the intimate and the dynamic, Bobi Wine is a well-crafted movie that sweeps you up in both the personal and broader arcs of its stories.

Few nonfiction films of 2023 present more jaw-dropping moments than Beyond Utopia, which tells the story of various families as they attempt to escape the brutally oppressive North Korea. Director-editor Madeleine Gavin has a keen grasp on pacing and tone; the film’s embedded-viewer aesthetic gives it an inherent tension and propulsiveness, but she also knows how to elicit incredible viewer investment in character, especially in the form of a man who has served as a longtime guide to freedom. In-the-moment explorations of life-or-death stakes don’t get much more compelling than this.

Paying loving tribute to a French family’s culinary legacy, legendary documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s latest effort, Menus-Plaisirs: Les Troisgros centers on a Michelin-starred restaurant that has remained in the same family for four generations. Languidly paced but never dull, the film showcases everything for which one could yearn in a movie — interesting characters, conflict, humor, and the application of enormous skill and discipline in a pursuit of a dream. Skip The Food Network’s clamorous holiday programming and slot this affectionate, inquisitive gem at the front end of a double feature with The Taste Of Things, before treating yourself to a sumptuous meal.

Buoyed by a canny, superlative, and enriching technical package, director David Guggenheim’s documentary is an elevated, stirring tale of unbowed hopefulness and continued engagement with the world at large, despite its subject’s grappling with the debilitating effects of Parkinson’s Disease. Working with editor Michael Harte, Guggenheim incorporates footage from Fox’s filmography and blends it with flashes of staged recreation, other archival footage, and interviews old and new to craft a narrative which courses with a lively, forward-leaning energy that perfectly complements the remarkably gifted Fox. Affecting but also thought-provoking, Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie makes a powerful statement about living and loving.

Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine’s film tells the story of a young man, John Allen Chau, who embraced the fervor of religious evangelicalism. Left unsatisfied by a number of missionary trips, Chau then set his sights on a sort of holy grail of Christian conversion—making contact with and preaching the gospel of Jesus to a small pre-Neolithic island tribe off the coast of India. The casual brilliance of The Mission lies in the way it examines everything from white-saviorism and modern influencer culture to hormonal male energy and the impact of familial embarrassment. All of this is done in a way that presents questions without definitive answers, deftly acknowledging the polarities of a world that will sometimes remain unbowed and indifferent to even our strongest convictions.

The tragedy of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, and more broadly the fragility of life, are affectingly unpacked in this singular documentary, which traces eight years of romance and heartrending cognitive decline as Chilean journalist and television presenter Augusto Góngora is cared for by his wife Paulina Urrutia, both before and through COVID. While not short on direct emotionalism, director Maite Alberdi’s skillfully edited The Eternal Memory eschews cheap sentimentality, connecting eroded memory on an individual level to the broader issue of a country’s identity.

A high-wire act of emotional excavation, Asmae El Moudir’s cinematic memoir takes as its leaping-off point the question of why there exists only one grainy and somewhat dubious photo of her as a child. The Best Director winner in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival and the International Documentary Awards (where it was also nominated in the Best Feature and Best Writing categories), The Mother Of All Lies is a sort of spiritual cousin, perhaps, to Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell—a high-degree-of-difficulty unpacking of personal identity, family, trauma and unspoken truths, incredibly interweaving interviews and voiceover narration with miniature puppets and sets which painstakingly recreate the Casablanca neighborhood of El Moudir’s youth. The one-of-a-kind end result, in which layers of additional resonance and meaning come slowly into focus, is the most deeply personally felt movie of the year.