Every documentary movie streaming on Criterion Channel in the US right now — 30 films ranked by rating, checked against Criterion Channel’s live catalog.
Updated July 2026 · Availability refreshed from Criterion Channel US
Directed by Alain Resnais
✦ MovieMuse AI takeResnais' juxtaposition of pastoral present-day footage with archival horror creates devastating cognitive dissonance—documentary's moral power.
Filmmaker Alain Resnais documents the atrocities behind the walls of Hitler's concentration camps.
Directed by Steve James
✦ MovieMuse AI takeThree-hour immersion in systemic exploitation uses accumulating detail over spectacle; patient observation becomes indictment.
Every school day, African-American teenagers William Gates and Arthur Agee travel 90 minutes each way from inner-city Chicago to St. Joseph High School in Westchester, Illinois, a predominately white suburban school well-known for the excellence of its basketball program. Gates and Agee dream of NBA stardom, and with the support of their close-knit families, they battle the social and physical obstacles that stand in their way. This acclaimed documentary was shot over the course of five years.
Directed by Jennie Livingston
✦ MovieMuse AI takeJennie Livingston's embedded access captures voguing's formal codes and community philosophy with anthropological rigor and genuine intimacy.
Where does voguing come from, and what, exactly, is throwing shade? This landmark documentary provides a vibrant snapshot of the 1980s through the eyes of New York City's African American and Latinx Harlem drag-ball scene. Made over seven years, PARIS IS BURNING offers an intimate portrait of rival fashion "houses," from fierce contests for trophies to house mothers offering sustenance in a world rampant with homophobia, transphobia, racism, AIDS, and poverty. Featuring legendary voguers, drag queens, and trans women — including Willi Ninja, Pepper LaBeija, Dorian Corey, and Venus Xtravaganza.
Directed by Rob Epstein
✦ MovieMuse AI takeRob Epstein's archival montage—newsreels, interviews, photographs—constructs historical narrative through assemblage, not narration.
Harvey Milk was an outspoken human rights activist and one of the first openly gay U.S. politicians elected to public office; even after his assassination in 1978, he continues to inspire disenfranchised people around the world.
Directed by Barbara Kopple
✦ MovieMuse AI takeBarbara Kopple's unflinching presence during violent confrontation refuses editorial distance; the camera becomes witness, not commentator.
This film documents the coal miners' strike against the Brookside Mine of the Eastover Mining Company in Harlan County, Kentucky in June, 1973. Eastover's refusal to sign a contract (when the miners joined with the United Mine Workers of America) led to the strike, which lasted more than a year and included violent battles between gun-toting company thugs/scabs and the picketing miners and their supportive women-folk. Director Barbara Kopple puts the strike into perspective by giving us some background on the historical plight of the miners and some history of the UMWA. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with New York Women in Film & Television in 2004.
Directed by Peter Davis
✦ MovieMuse AI takePeter Davis intercuts contradictory testimony—generals, victims, officials—exposing war's ideological fractures through structural montage.
Many times during his presidency, Lyndon B. Johnson said that ultimate victory in the Vietnam War depended upon the U.S. military winning the "hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese people. Filmmaker Peter Davis uses Johnson's phrase in an ironic context in this anti-war documentary, filmed and released while the Vietnam War was still under way, juxtaposing interviews with military figures like U.S. Army Chief of Staff William C. Westmoreland with shocking scenes of violence and brutality.
Directed by Martin Bell
✦ MovieMuse AI takeIntimate handheld photography transforms street kids into unflinching narrators of their own survival, pioneering the observational intimacy that defines modern documentary.
This documentary about teenagers living on the streets in Seattle began as a magazine article. The film follows nine teenagers who discuss how they live by panhandling, prostitution, and petty theft.
Directed by Al Reinert
✦ MovieMuse AI takeKieran Maher's synchronization of silent footage with contemporary interviews creates temporal collapse—past and present inhabit same frame.
A testament to NASA's Apollo program of the 1960s and '70s. Composed of actual NASA footage of the missions and astronaut interviews, the documentary offers the viewpoint of the individuals who braved the remarkable journey to the moon and back.
Directed by Agnès Varda
✦ MovieMuse AI takeVarda's playful auto-biography interrogates cinema itself, using beach walks and memory as formal devices to collapse the distance between filmmaker and subject.
Filmmaking icon Agnès Varda, the award-winning director regarded by many as the grandmother of the French new wave, turns the camera on herself with this unique autobiographical documentary. Composed of film excerpts and elaborate dramatic re-creations, Varda's self-portrait recounts the highs and lows of her professional career, the many friendships that affected her life and her longtime marriage to cinematic giant Jacques Demy.
Directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski
✦ MovieMuse AI takeDeceptively simple two-question framework reveals philosophical depths across human diversity, proving documentary's power lies in constraint, not spectacle.
People of different age, profession and social status answer two simple questions: who they are and what they want from life.
Directed by Errol Morris
✦ MovieMuse AI takeErrol Morris weaponizes stylized reenactment to expose investigative failure, proving dramatization can interrogate truth rather than obscure it.
This unique documentary dramatically re-enacts the crime scene and investigation of a police officer's murder in Dallas.
Directed by Sacha Gervasi
✦ MovieMuse AI takeDecades of archival footage crystallize one band's unwavering delusion into an unexpectedly moving meditation on artistic faith versus commercial reality.
At 14, best friends Robb Reiner and Lips made a pact to rock together forever. Their band, Anvil, hailed as the "demi-gods of Canadian metal" influenced a musical generation that includes Metallica, Slayer, and Anthrax. Following a calamitous European tour, Lips and Robb, now in their fifties, set off to record their 13th album in one last attempt to fulfill their boyhood dreams.
Directed by Marie Pérennou
✦ MovieMuse AI takeMicrocosmos achieves the miraculous through pure technical virtuosity—macro-cinematography and temporal manipulation reveal an alien world without narration or anthropomorphism.
A documentary of insect life in meadows and ponds, using incredible close-ups, slow motion, and time-lapse photography. It includes bees collecting nectar, ladybugs eating mites, snails mating, spiders wrapping their catch, a scarab beetle relentlessly pushing its ball of dung uphill, endless lines of caterpillars, an underwater spider creating an air bubble to live in, and a mosquito hatching.
Directed by Leon Gast
✦ MovieMuse AI takeFreeze-frames and archival photographs reconstruct Ali's psychological dominance before the fight, proving montage can capture the invisible machinery of legend.
It's 1974. Muhammad Ali is 32 and thought by many to be past his prime. George Foreman is ten years younger and the heavyweight champion of the world. Promoter Don King wants to make a name for himself and offers both fighters five million dollars apiece to fight one another, and when they accept, King has only to come up with the money. He finds a willing backer in Mobutu Sese Suko, the dictator of Zaire, and the "Rumble in the Jungle" is set, including a musical festival featuring some of America's top black performers, like James Brown and B.B. King.
Directed by D. A. Pennebaker
✦ MovieMuse AI takePennebaker's fly-on-the-wall observational style captures Dylan's artistic transformation through naturalistic dialogue, not designed sequences.
In this wildly entertaining vision of one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists, Bob Dylan is surrounded by teen fans, gets into heated philosophical jousts with journalists, and kicks back with fellow musicians Joan Baez, Donovan, and Alan Price.
Directed by Les Blank
✦ MovieMuse AI takeBurden of Dreams embodies the documentary-within-documentary paradox: Herzog's megalomania becomes the true subject, not the jungle or the film being made.
The Amazon rain forest, 1979. The crew of Fitzcarraldo (1982), a film directed by German director Werner Herzog, soon finds itself with problems related to casting, tribal struggles and accidents, among many other setbacks; but nothing compared to dragging a huge steamboat up a mountain, while Herzog embraces the path of a certain madness to make his vision come true.
Directed by D. A. Pennebaker
✦ MovieMuse AI takeD.A. Pennebaker's split-screen editing and handheld aesthetic define direct cinema; music becomes visual experience.
Featuring performances by popular artists of the 1960s, this concert film highlights the music of the 1967 California festival. Although not all musicians who performed at the Monterey Pop Festival are on film, some of the notable acts include the Mamas and the Papas, Simon & Garfunkel, Jefferson Airplane, the Who, Otis Redding, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Hendrix's post-performance antics -- lighting a guitar on fire, breaking it and tossing a part into the audience -- are captured.
Directed by Charlotte Zwerin
✦ MovieMuse AI takeGimme Shelter captures documentary's moral crisis in real-time: the camera's presence at violence raises unbearable questions about recording versus intervening.
A detailed chronicle of the famous 1969 tour of the United States by the British rock band The Rolling Stones, which culminated with the disastrous and tragic concert held on December 6 at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival, an event of historical significance, as it marked the end of an era: the generation of peace and love suddenly became the generation of disillusionment.
Directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski
✦ MovieMuse AI takeCamera Buff satirizes how documentary apparatus itself corrupts reality, transforming innocent observation into surveillance and complicity.
Filip buys an 8mm movie camera when his first child is born. Because it's the first camera in town, he's named official photographer by the local Party boss. His horizons widen when he is sent to regional film festivals with his first works but his focus on movie making also leads to domestic strife and philosophical dilemmas.
Directed by Forugh Farrokhzad
✦ MovieMuse AI takeKiarostami's stark chiaroscuro—light against darkness—visually embodies the film's central paradox: beauty's existence within suffering.
Set in a leper colony in the north of Iran, The House is Black juxtaposes "ugliness," of which there is much in the world as stated in the opening scenes, with religion and gratitude.
Directed by Kon Ichikawa
✦ MovieMuse AI takeLeni-influenced montage elevates the unseen crowd and infrastructure into co-stars, revealing Olympics as choreographed mass spectacle rather than individual achievement.
This impressionistic portrait of the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics pays as much attention to the crowds and workers as it does to the actual competitive events. Highlights include an epic pole-vaulting match between West Germany and America, and the final marathon race through Tokyo's streets. Two athletes are highlighted: Ethiopian marathon runner Abebe Bikila, who receives his second gold medal, and runner Ahamed Isa from Chad, representing a country younger than he is.
Directed by Orson Welles
✦ MovieMuse AI takeGodard-adjacent meta-documentary confuses fact and fabrication so deliberately that viewers become investigators, implicating themselves in the act of believing.
Documents the lives of infamous fakers Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving. De Hory, who later committed suicide to avoid more prison time, made his name by selling forged works of art by painters like Picasso and Matisse. Irving was infamous for writing a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes. Welles moves between documentary and fiction as he examines the fundamental elements of fraud and the people who commit fraud at the expense of others.
Directed by Chris Marker
✦ MovieMuse AI takeWithout linear narrative, Marker assembles footage into philosophical argument, proving documentary needn't explain—it can meditate and question.
A woman narrates the thoughts of a world traveler, meditations on time and memory expressed in words and images from places as far-flung as Japan, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland, and San Francisco.
Directed by Agnès Varda
✦ MovieMuse AI takeVarda's handheld curiosity turns the marginalized act of gleaning into an aesthetic and political act of reclamation, camera as protest.
Varda focuses her eye on gleaners: those who scour already-reaped fields for the odd potato or turnip. Her investigation leads from forgotten corners of the French countryside to off-hours at the green markets of Paris, following those who insist on finding a use for that which society has cast off, whether out of necessity or activism.
Directed by Leni Riefenstahl
✦ MovieMuse AI takeRiefenstahl's architectural framing and rhythmic editing transform athletic bodies into Leni's own formal obsession, making technique inseparable from ideology.
Starting with a long and lyrical overture, evoking the origins of the Olympic Games in ancient Greece, Riefenstahl covers twenty-one athletic events in the first half of this two-part love letter to the human body and spirit, culminating with the marathon, where Jesse Owens became the first track and field athlete to win four gold medals in a single Olympics.
Directed by Georges Franju
✦ MovieMuse AI takeCartier-Bresson's stark juxtaposition—idyllic suburbs against industrial slaughter—invents the visceral social-contrast montage.
An early example of ultra-realism, this movie contrasts the quiet, bucolic life in the outskirts of Paris with the harsh, gory conditions inside the nearby slaughterhouses. Describes the fate of the animals and that of the workers in graphic detail.
Directed by Jeffrey Friedman
✦ MovieMuse AI takeOral testimony becomes archive; survivor voices restore humanity to statistics, proving documentary's irreplaceable power to preserve erased lives.
During the Nazi regime, there was widespread persecution of homosexual men, which started in 1871 with the Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code. Thousands were murdered in concentration camps. This powerful and disturbing documentary, narrated by Rupert Everett, presents for the first time the largely untold testimonies of some of those who survived.
Directed by Benjamin Christensen
✦ MovieMuse AI takeChristensen's pseudo-scholarly dramatizations predate modern docudrama by 80 years, using staged scenes to interrogate the documentary impulse itself.
Grave robbing, torture, possessed nuns, and a satanic Sabbath: Benjamin Christensen's legendary film uses a series of dramatic vignettes to explore the scientific hypothesis that the witches of the Middle Ages suffered the same hysteria as turn-of-the-century psychiatric patients. But the film itself is far from serious-- instead it's a witches' brew of the scary, gross, and darkly humorous.
Directed by Wim Wenders
✦ MovieMuse AI takeCooder orchestrates a resurrecting jam session that feels like cinema capturing the precise moment memory becomes living presence.
In this fascinating Oscar-nominated documentary, American guitarist Ry Cooder brings together a group of legendary Cuban folk musicians (some in their 90s) to record a Grammy-winning CD in their native city of Havana. The result is a spectacular compilation of concert footage from the group's gigs in Amsterdam and New York City's famed Carnegie Hall, with director Wim Wenders capturing not only the music -- but also the musicians' life stories.
Directed by Ceyda Torun
✦ MovieMuse AI takeObservational cinema at its finest: cats become unreliable narrators guiding us through Istanbul's layered urban geography and human stories.
A profile of Istanbul and its unique people, seen through the eyes of the most mysterious and beloved animal humans have ever known, the Cat.
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