Truth is stranger than fiction. Our pick of the 13 best documentaries to stream proves that
What’s up, Doc-umentary? Just keeping it real
Documentaries used to conjure up grainy black-and-white images with narrations that make Alexa sound more human. But did you ever imagine sacrificing sleep to watch a sweaty yogi teach Americans how to stretch while secretly performing the Downward Dog with some of them in hot tubs?
What sounds like soft porn is the synopsis of Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator, a critically acclaimed specimen from this list of revamped genre.
The best documentaries are stranger than fiction, and as addictive as Soni maasi‘s piping hot aloo pakodas, which, incidentally, are the perfect binge-watching snack.
We painstakingly sifted through the index to curate this definitive guide of the best documentaries for the uninitiated — from LGBTQIA+ rights to dark tourism, and from intimate portraits of rock stars to mind boggling true-crimes.
The best documentaries to stream right now
It’s all about loving people
Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (2019)
In 1961, Satyajit Ray made a film on Rabindranath Tagore, and won the National Award for Best Documentary Film.
There’s something deeply poignant about iconic filmmakers paying homage to other icons. On that note, Rolling Thunder Revue (RTR) – A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese. The title is enough to reel you in.
With RTR, Scorsese lets you hitchhike on the Tambourine Man’s tour bus in 1975 across 57 intimate performances (in smaller auditoriums, so the star could interact with his fans).
Other legends hop on and off this tour bus — Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg and Sharon Stone, to name a few.
Watch this rockumentary for the songs, the man and the times that were a-changing.
Watch on Netflix
Paris is Burning, 1990
Loud makeup, louder sentiments, Paris Is Burning lit the brightest beacon for the LGBTQIA+ community and its growing cultural currency in New York City.
A befitting precursor to RuPaul’s Drag Race, Jennie Livingston’s intimate documentary shows us how far we have come since the ‘ballrooms’ of the ’80s, where gay and transgender competitors would host glamorous dance-catwalk competitions.
Paris Is Burning is a throwback to the birthing grounds of gender nonconformity and a community’s eternal search for love and acceptance in the face of society’s brutal rejections.
Watch on Netflix
Have A Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics, 2020
Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics feels like the brainwave that strikes during a sleepover with friends. Writer-producer Donick Cary – who previously worked on Parks and Recreation, The Simpsons and New Girl – invites some of his colleagues and viewers to take a trip down memory lane.
The opening credits slip in the disclaimer, “Don’t get me wrong, drugs can be dangerous, but they can also be hilarious.” But the show unabashedly stands by its pro-LSD agenda.
We see Sting remember the time he helped a cow give birth and Deepak Chopra compare the real world to a quantum soup. Ben Stiller looks back on the moment he called his dad during an acid episode. Adam Scott, and the late legends Carrie Fischer and Anthony Bourdain all share their acidic experiments.
The comedy-sketch “reenactments” and ‘Yellow Submarine’-ish animation only heighten the vibe of this hilarious documentary.
PS: It drives home the idea that out-of-body experiences can treat anxiety disorders, and even cure drug addictions.
Watch on Netflix
For all ages
The World According To Jeff Goldblum, 2019
Remember a certain Dr Ian ‘Life-Finds-A-Way’ Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum) in Jurassic Park? Life has found a way to reunite us with him.
In The World According To Jeff Goldblum, the gifted mathematician from Jurassic Park investigates things we love – coffee, cosmetics, sneakers, ice cream and accessories.
The show features the most eccentric general knowledge content streaming right now. Black-and-white photographs from Goldblum’s childhood announce the subject, followed by trippy animation.
Goldblum’s trademark hyper-enthusiasm (the host randomly bursts into songs, Shakespearean sonnets or nursery rhymes) is interspersed with factoids. We personally loved the ice cream episode where he visits Ben & Jerry’s flavour graveyard to try all the ice cream flavours that never worked.
The World According to Jeff Goldblum is for the whole family if you still haven’t bought all volumes of Encyclopædia Britannica for your younglings.
Watch on Disney+ Hotstar
Prop Culture, 2020
At five, Dan Lanigan obsessively collected action figures from Star Wars. Today, as the host of Prop Culture, he raids studios to tracks down designers and craftsmen in search of the most iconic props in cinematic history.
Mary Poppins’ ginormous umbrella and her magic carpet bag, a Jack Skellington doll from Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, Captain Jack Sparrow’s cast from The Pirates of the Caribbean, you’ll find them all in this eight-part documentary.
We’d like to think that a passionate Lanigan reunites long-lost friends. In the Mary Poppins episode, when actress Karen Dotrice (played Jane Banks) touches her costume, tear dams burst instantly.
The series also takes us BTS of Tron, Who Killed Roger Rabbit?, The Muppet Movie, Honey I Shrunk The Kids and The Chronicles of Narnia.
Watch on Disney+ Hotstar
Catwalk: Tales from the Cat Show Circuit, 2018
In Canada, it’s a cat-astrophe if your cat doesn’t purr in style at the national cat show circuit.
Catwalk: Tales from the Cat Show Circuit follows breeders, judges, cat owners and their feline babies (who have a mind and will of their own) as we find out who becomes Canada’s Best Cat.
The light-hearted documentary shadows two cats: Kim’s Turkish Angora called Bobby and Shirley’s Persian, Oh La La – who is at her swan song.
The fluff balls strut down the ramp being themselves, giving the documentary a sharp comedic edge. Because, well, cats, unlike dogs, aren’t the most obedient pets. In a particularly hilarious Obstacle Race segment, cats knock over the rules, tunnels and tubes, and basically, prance aimlessly.
If you’re still holding close to your secret aspiration of being a cat parent, watch this as a trailer for what your life may look like in the future.
Watch on Netflix
Period. End of Sentence, 2018
If Padman was the seminal chapter of India’s menstrual hygiene story, director Rayka Zehtabchi’s Oscar-winning documentary is a deeper dive into the same — through the eyes of our women.
It’s a cross-sectional look at the women folk in a North Indian village on the outskirts of New Delhi. We see the introduction and novelty of the sanitary pad system in the rural outpost. Period. End of Sentence also peels off layers of social conditioning — the lack of information and awareness surrounding menstruation.
It’s eye-opening even to most urban Indians as we see how these women still resort to using any spare cloth available for absorption. It raises valid questions of safety and hygiene with a heavy dosage of empathy.
What it lacks in sensationalisation and glamorous production value, it makes up for in the meatiness of the content.
Watch on Netflix
What can go wrong, will go wrong
Fyre, 2019
When you’re done watching this brain bash of a documentary, you’ll wonder: how dumb were the ticket buyers? Can I have Billy McFarland’s confidence, please?
Director Chris Smith’s documentary is subtitled The Greatest Party That Never Happened.
Fyre was touted to be the modern-day Woodstock – the greatest music festival ever. It was scheduled to happen in April 2017, at a private island in the Bahamas – owned by a 25-year-old entrepreneur McFarland. The marketing campaigns promoted the festival with visuals from the island, loaded with supermodels having the time of their lives.
Millions of tickets were sold out in under 48 hours. Sadly, as the documentary unravels, we find ourselves in a car wreck: a gargantuan financial fraud, social media debacle, and ultimately, a cancelled fest with millions stranded on the island.
Smith interviews McFarland’s minions who worked relentlessly to make the festival happen and eventually to appease the ticket buyers. It makes you reconsider all your Weekender plans and re-read the terms and conditions obsessively.
If the best documentaries of all time had their own Hall Of Fame, Frye would reserve pride of place.
Watch on Netflix
The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann, 2019
In 2007, she was everywhere. Three-year-old Madeline McCann’s face with a toothy smile was plastered on every surface in the UK – billboards, T-shirts, fliers, soccer stadiums, front page of newspapers and tabloids every day.
It is arguably the most famous missing child’s case that UK ever registered, and remains unsolved.
Director Chris Smith’s eight-part documentary takes the rest of the world back in time to the fateful day when Madeleine was kidnapped from an apartment in Praia da Luz in Portugal while her parents were with friends at a nearby restaurant. The show also follows the exhaustive years of police investigation through Europe – talking to close kin, suspects, members of the media, neighbours.
While the British audience complained that the documentary didn’t provide anything new, the series gives a microscopic view of the monstrous case still in process to everyone else unfamiliar with the mysterious disappearance.
Watch on Netflix
Rotten, 2018
Rotten, but doesn’t stink.
The best documentaries hit close to home. This one shreds humanity’s most common unifier – food – and some of the most popular ingredients – honey, garlic, chicken. It takes us on a behind-the-scenes culinary journey from the peanut farms of Georgia to rice fields in China, from meat processing units in Brazil to New England fisheries. And as the trailer says, “Nobody’s hands are clean.”
Food scientists wear detective hats to expose the nefarious fraud and corruption that dominates the global food industry.
Be prepared to be shocked as you see fake food (fake fish fillings in sushi, for instance) trickle down the corporation-led food chains onto your plate.
Keep an eye out for the episode that unearths how a British man died due to traces of peanut in his chicken tikka masala. Trusting labels will not be the same after you watch Rotten, but there’s enough food for thought in here.
Watch on Netflix
The world around us
Jack Whitehall: Travels with My Father, 2017
UK’s star comic Jack Whitehall uses his “gap year” to travel the world with his father, Michael – a Brexit-supporting, Churchill-loving, conservative Englishman.
The ‘unlike father-unlike son’ duo takes us on a hilarious journey around the globe, often resulting in cultural conundrums – giving us an insight into the local life.
Michael is most genuine with his remarks. Our favourite being, “What the fu*k am I doing going to Thailand?” In the later seasons, they traverse parts of Europe and the USA as well.
Family drama aside, it’s an innovative travel documentary that drives off the beaten path — in to the ruins of Hilter’s holiday home, bat-filled caves and even bowl-shaped indigenous rafts called coracles in Vietnam.
After watching this, we dare every desi father-son duo to hike together and not kill each other.
Watch on Netflix
Dark Tourist, 2019
Would you spend your hard-earned peanuts to vacation at the site of a man-made disaster? Maybe you won’t. But there are others who would, and millions are profiting from this morbid fascination. Schadenfreude 101.
In this Netflix documentary, Kiwi journalist David Farrier journeys to find out what makes “people avoid the ordinary and instead head for holidays in war zones, disaster sites.”
From the Pablo Escobar-themed vacation in Colombia and exorcism cults in Mexico, to the tour of the Manson Family Murders in Los Angeles, and all the way to Japan’s Tomioka, the site affected during the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Farrier gives us a real world version of Black Mirror.
The scribe peels off layers of the tourism industry by talking to tour guides, vacationers and locals to decode the strange obsession with someone else’s misfortune.
Watch on Netflix
Our Planet, 2019
Netflix’s first step into nature programming has everything you’d expect: expansive aerial shots over the frozen Tundra, a still decrepit Chernobyl, the vast Peruvian coast, synced to our favourite eco-warrior David Attenborough’s baritone.
Swarms of bees buzzing in chorus and penguins with their happy feet waddling on snow – the scenes take your breath away. And soon after, choke you.
This entry on our list of best documentaries is not sorry to burst that happy bubble. The eight episodes are stark reality checks. Our planet and all its wonders are on the verge of extinction. Attenborough reminds us every now and then, “These tigers are dying”. The primates, the critters, the leopards, they are all dying.
With some of the most breathtaking visuals, Our Planet actually shows us the worst case scenario our fauna can go through. The bitter truth: it’s the reality.
Watch on Netflix
