Published Updated

Sort by

Official Top 250 Documentary Films

A companion piece to Dave Vis' list of Letterboxd's official top 250 films of all-time, which excludes documentaries from consideration.

Ranked by average user rating. This list was extracted from here. Updated once a month. This is an official list progress project on all-time stats pages for Pro and Patron users. Expanded from a top 100 to a top 250 on June 27th, 2021, on the list's 3-year anniversary.

~~

ELIGIBILITY RULES:

• Documentaries must be feature-length (45+ minutes), with a theatrical and/or festival release in its entirety.
• TV series, miniseries, and episodes are excluded but docs listed as 'TV movie' on IMDb are eligible. Exceptions made for series and episodes that also had a limited theatrical release.
• No featurettes unless…

Block or Report
  • Stop Making Sense

    1

  • Shoah

    2

  • Paris Is Burning

    3

  • Nathan for You: Finding Frances

    4

  • As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty

    5

  • O.J.: Made in America

    6

  • Hoop Dreams

    7

  • Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks

    8

  • The Act of Killing

    9

  • Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father

    10

  • Streetwise

    11

  • For Sama

    12

  • Gaza Fights for Freedom

    13

  • Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii

    14

  • 13th

    15

  • Koyaanisqatsi

    16

  • Harlan County U.S.A.

    17

  • Twenty Years Later

    18

  • The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On

    19

  • Baraka

    20

  • Minding the Gap

    21

  • The Look of Silence

    22

  • Welfare

    23

  • Man with a Movie Camera

    24

  • The Beaches of Agnès

    25

  • Black Is… Black Ain’t

    26

  • The Battle of Chile: Part I

    27

  • When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts

    28

  • The Battle of Chile: Part II

    29

  • Master, a Building in Copacabana

    30

  • David Byrne's American Utopia

    31

  • Life of Crime: 1984-2020

    32

  • Playing

    33

  • Dominion

    34

  • Tongues Untied

    35

  • Senna

    36

  • 'Til Madness Do Us Part

    37

  • Samsara

    38

  • Sans Soleil

    39

  • A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies

    40

  • Flee

    41

  • The Gleaners and I

    42

  • Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse

    43

  • F for Fake

    44

  • All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

    45

  • Tokyo Olympiad

    46

  • Won't You Be My Neighbor?

    47

  • Human

    48

  • The Salt of the Earth

    49

  • The Last Waltz

    50

  • One More Time with Feeling

    51

  • Concert for George

    52

  • I Am Not Your Negro

    53

  • Alone in the Wilderness

    54

  • 20 Days in Mariupol

    55

  • The Metamorphosis of Birds

    56

  • David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet

    57

  • American Movie

    58

  • Original Cast Album: Company

    59

  • Pictures of the Old World

    60

  • Summer of Soul (...or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

    61

  • Crumb

    62

  • LA 92

    63

  • The Sorrow and the Pity

    64

  • Faces Places

    65

  • Jenin, Jenin

    66

  • HyperNormalisation

    67

  • Woodstock

    68

  • 63 Up

    69

  • The Three Deaths of Marisela Escobedo

    70

  • Heima

    71

  • Hearts and Minds

    72

  • A Grin Without a Cat

    73

  • Grizzly Man

    74

  • 5 Broken Cameras

    75

  • Kanehsatake, 270 Years of Resistance

    76

  • 9/11

    77

  • Histoire(s) du cinéma

    78

  • Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

    79

  • Love, Deutschmarks and Death

    80

  • Cameraperson

    81

  • Mr. Bachmann and His Class

    82

  • No Direction Home: Bob Dylan

    83

  • See Know Evil

    84

  • The Murder of Fred Hampton

    85

  • Blue

    86

  • Prince: Sign O' the Times

    87

  • Jimi Plays Monterey

    88

  • Dressed in Blue

    89

  • Ennio

    90

  • Revolution of Our Times

    91

  • They Shall Not Grow Old

    92

  • Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills

    93

  • The Times of Harvey Milk

    94

  • George Harrison: Living in the Material World

    95

  • Out-Takes from the Life of a Happy Man

    96

  • Diaries, Notes, and Sketches

    97

  • Lessons of Darkness

    98

  • Dont Look Back

    99

  • The Lovely Month of May

    100