We recently highlighted the 11 Best Picture Oscar Winners now streaming on Netflix, but we decided that documentaries deserved a list of their own.
Rather than including only Oscar winners, we broadened the category for documentaries to include not only films that won Oscars, but also ones that were nominated. You may notice that most of these docs are from the past decade (in fact, mostly the past few years). That’s because very few of the older docs are available to stream (whereas three of last year’s nominated docs are available).
There are only two Oscar nominated docs available from the 1980s and one from the 1990s. It’s also worth noticing that the vast majority of these films were directed by men. The films are listed in chronological order (from newest to oldest). We didn’t rank them because they are all universally terrific.
If you didn’t get the chance to see these docs when they were in theaters, go ahead and stream them on Netflix now:
5 Broken Cameras (2012) – Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi
How To Survive A Plague (2012) – David France
The Invisible War (2012) – Kirby Dick
Undefeated (2011) – TJ Martin, Dan Lindsay and Richard Middlemas
If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front (2011) – Marshall Curry and Sam Cullman
Pina (2011) – Wim Wenders
Restrepo (2010) – Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington
Gasland (2010) – Josh Fox
Waste Land (2010) – Lucy Walker
Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010) – Banksy
Burma VJ (2009) – Anders Østergaard
Which Way Home (2007) – Rebecca Cammissa
No End in Sight (2007) – Charles Ferguson
Man on Wire (2008) – James Marsh
Encounters at the End of the World (2007) – Werner Herzog
An Inconvenient Truth (2006) – Davis Guggenheim
Iraq in Fragments (2006) – James Longley
Bowling for Columbine (2002) – Michael Moore
Prisoner of Paradise (2002) – Malcolm Clarke and Stuart Sender
Children Underground (2001) – Edet Belzberg
Sound and Fury (2001) – Josh Aronson
The Panama Deception (1992) – Barbara Trent and David Kasper
The Thin Blue Line (1988) – Errol Morris
Marlene (1984) – Maximilian Schell
How many of these films have you seen?
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