Every documentary movie streaming on MUBI in the US right now — 24 films ranked by rating, checked against MUBI’s live catalog.
Updated July 2026 · Availability refreshed from MUBI US
Directed by Martin Scorsese
✦ MovieMuse AI takeScorsese's concert-interview hybrid revolutionized music documentaries by treating performance and candid conversation as equally essential narrative modes.
Martin Scorsese's documentary intertwines footage from The Band's incredible farewell tour with probing backstage interviews and featured performances by Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, and other rock legends.
Directed by David France
✦ MovieMuse AI takeHidden-camera activism documentation captures real danger, distinguishing investigative courage from conventional portraiture.
This searing investigative work shadows a group of activists risking unimaginable peril to confront the ongoing anti-LGBTQ program raging in the repressive and closed Russian republic. Unfettered access and a remarkable approach to protecting anonymity exposes this under-reported atrocity–and an extraordinary group of people confronting evil.
Directed by Fatih Akin
✦ MovieMuse AI takeHacke's immersive sound design transforms Istanbul itself into the subject, letting music geography reveal cultural identity without imposed thesis.
German musician Alexander Hacke explores Istanbul's rich music culture and attempts to create a portrait of Turkey through music genres. On this journey, he encounters a mosaic that covers countless genres from rock to arabesque, electronic to hip-hop.
Directed by Charlie Siskel
✦ MovieMuse AI takeThe detective-work structure—uncovering a photographer through her own archive—makes archival research itself the dramatic engine of discovery.
Vivian Maier's photos were seemingly destined for obscurity, lost among the clutter of the countless objects she'd collected throughout her life. Instead these images have shaken the world of street photography and irrevocably changed the life of the man who brought them to the public eye. This film brings to life the interesting turns and travails of the improbable saga of John Maloof's discovery of Vivian Maier, unravelling this mysterious tale through her documentary films, photographs, odd collections and personal accounts from the people that knew her. What started as a blog to show her work quickly became a viral sensation in the photography world. Photos destined for the trash heap now line gallery exhibitions, a forthcoming book and this documentary film.
Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho
✦ MovieMuse AI takeTransforms urban ruins into cinema history palimpsest, reading memory and loss through architectural traces of forgotten theatrical spaces.
Downtown Recife’s classic movie palaces from the 20th century are mostly gone. That city area is now an archaeological site of sorts that reveals aspects of life in society which have been lost. And that’s just part of the story.
Directed by Stephen Nomura Schible
✦ MovieMuse AI takeJuxtaposes intimate artistic process footage with environmental urgency, making sound ecology both aesthetic and political witness.
Oscar-winning composer Ryuichi Sakamoto weaves man-made and natural sounds together in his works. His anti-nuclear activism grew after the 2011 Fukushima disaster, and his career only paused after a 2014 cancer diagnosis.
Directed by Jeffrey Schwarz
✦ MovieMuse AI takeArchive assemblage creates a visual autobiography that lets Divine's own image and performance philosophy argue against biographical constraint.
Harris Glenn Milstead, aka Divine (1945-1988) was the ultimate outsider turned underground hero. Spitting in the face of the status quos of body image, gender identity, sexuality, and preconceived notions of beauty, Divine succeeded in becoming an internationally recognized icon, recording artist, and character actor of stage and screen. Glenn went from the often-mocked, schoolyard fat kid to underdog royalty, standing up for millions of gay men and women, drag queens and punk rockers, and countless other socially ostracized misfits and freaks. With a completely committed in-your-face style, he blurred the line between performer and personality, and revolutionized pop culture.
Directed by Joris Ivens
✦ MovieMuse AI takeIvens captures urban energy through fragmented montage and visual poetry, rejecting explanatory narration for sensory immersion in place.
In 1962 Joris Ivens was invited to Chile for teaching and filmmaking. Together with students he made …A Valparaíso, one of his most poetic films. Contrasting the prestigious history of the seaport with the present the film sketches a portrait of the city, built on 42 hills, with its wealth and poverty, its daily life on the streets, the stairs, the rack railways and in the bars. Although the port has lost its importance, the rich past is still present in the impoverished city. The film echoes this ambiguous situation in its dialectical poetic style, interweaving the daily life reality (of 1963) with the history of the city and changing from black and white to colour, finally leaving us with hopeful perspective for the children who are playing on the stairs and hills of this beautiful town.
Directed by Jørgen Leth
✦ MovieMuse AI takeMeta-structure—filmmaker imposing creative constraints on his own past work—collapses the boundary between subject, process, and reflexive critique.
In 1967, experimental filmmaker Jorgen Leth created a striking short film, The Perfect Human, starring a man and women sitting in a box while a narrator poses questions about their relationship and humanity. Years later, Danish director Lars von Trier made a deal with Leth to remake his film five times, each under a different set of circumstances and with von Trier's strictly prescribed rules. As Leth completes each challenge, von Trier creates increasingly further elaborate stipulations.
Directed by Vitaly Mansky
✦ MovieMuse AI takeUnflinching access to North Korean domestic life reveals propaganda's machinery through the family's constrained performances and silences.
Over the course of one year, this film follows the life of an ordinary Pyongyang family whose daughter was chosen to take part in Day of the Shining Star (Kim Jong-il's birthday) celebration. While North Korean government wanted a propaganda film, the director kept on filming between the scripted scenes. The ritualized explosions of color and joy contrast sharply with pale everyday reality, which is not particularly terrible, but rather quite surreal.
Directed by Terence Dixon
✦ MovieMuse AI takeBaldwin's improvised monologues directly confront the camera, making unscripted intellectual conversation the documentary's primary formal strategy.
In 1970, a British film crew set out to make a straightforward literary portrait of James Baldwin set in Paris, insisting on setting aside his political activism. Baldwin bristled at their questions, and the result is a fascinating, confrontational, often uncomfortable butting of heads between the filmmakers and their subject, in which the author visits the Bastille and other Parisian landmarks and reflects on revolution, colonialism, and what it means to be a Black expatriate in Europe.
Directed by Elizabeth Sankey
✦ MovieMuse AI takePersonal essay form—Sankey's voiceover weaves cinema history with gynecological trauma—democratizes documentary authority through vulnerable first-person.
Elizabeth Sankey's deeply personal documentary examines the relationship between the cinematic portrayals of witches and the all-too-real experiences of postpartum depression by utilizing footage that spans the entirety of film history alongside heartrending personal testimony.
Directed by Frédéric Tcheng
✦ MovieMuse AI takeBehind-the-scenes access becomes anthropological study of labor, desire, and class hierarchies within a single luxury institution.
Behind-the-scenes documentary revealing what goes on inside the colourful, privileged, and sometimes stressful Christian Dior fashion house.
Directed by Michael Glawogger
✦ MovieMuse AI takeComparative geography—cutting between three sex-work economies—uses formal parallels to expose systemic inequalities without didactic commentary.
In Bangkok, Thailand, women punch a clock and wait for clients in a brightly lit glass box; in the red-light district of Faridpur, Bangladesh, a madam haggles over the price of a teenage girl; and in the border town of Reynosa, Mexico, crack-addicted women pray to a deity named Lady Death.
Directed by Sergei Loznitsa
✦ MovieMuse AI takeArchive footage of Stalin's funeral becomes spectacle-as-text, where pageantry itself reveals the cult's mechanisms through visual grandeur.
The enigma of the personality cult is revealed in the grand spectacle of Stalin’s funeral. The film is based on unique archive footage, shot in the USSR on March 5 - 9, 1953, when the country mourned and buried Joseph Stalin.
Directed by Laura Gabbert
✦ MovieMuse AI takeFood critic's voiceover transforms Los Angeles through sensory particularity, making vernacular cuisine the document of hidden cultural depth.
As the unabashed cradle of Hollywood superficiality and smoggy urban sprawl, Los Angeles has long been condemned as a cultural wasteland. In the richly penetrating documentary odyssey City of Gold, Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold shows us another Los Angeles, where ethnic cooking is a kaleidoscopic portal to the mysteries of an unwieldy city and the soul of America.
Directed by Albert Serra
✦ MovieMuse AI takeReal-time observation compresses ritual into durational intensity, letting bullfighting's visceral ceremony speak through unflinching temporal commitment.
The life of the bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey during a day of bullfighting, from the moment he dresses up to the moment he undresses.
Directed by Anna Hints
✦ MovieMuse AI takeSauna's steam and darkness create visual abstraction that allows intimate revelation while protecting faces—form serves emotional authenticity.
Women share their innermost secrets and intimate experiences inside an Estonian smoke sauna. Cleansing their bodies and baring their souls, they embrace the healing power of sisterhood.
Directed by Alice Rohrwacher
✦ MovieMuse AI take16mm grain and zoom lens limitations become metaphor for quarantine observation, making technological constraint express social distance.
In the absence of any physical connection, this short explores alternative forms of contact among neighbors by making use of an old 16mm camera, a zoom lens, and a few meters of expired film.
Directed by Vitaly Mansky
✦ MovieMuse AI takeArchive newsreel collage reconstructs power transfer through official propaganda, letting state media contradict its own messaging.
Russian Federation, December 31, 1999. After President Boris Yeltsin's unexpected resignation, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin becomes acting president of the country. From that day and for a year, Vitaly Mansky's camera documented Putin's rise to power. The story of a privileged witness. The harsh explanation of the reason why politics is the art of possibility of achieving the best with the support of many, but also of giving the worst in return.
Directed by Sam Crane
✦ MovieMuse AI takeVirtual world staging exposes how reality—unemployment, heartbreak, mortality—refuses to stay confined within fictional frames.
Two unemployed friends have a fresh idea: they want to stage Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' in Grand Theft Auto. But even in a virtual world, reality intrudes in a wild and trippy film shot entirely inside the ultra-violent video game.
Directed by Mati Diop
✦ MovieMuse AI takeRepatriation becomes cinematic event, where the physical return of artifacts makes colonial extraction legible through ceremonial restoration.
Thousands of royal artifacts of Dahomey, a West African kingdom, were taken by French colonists in the 19th century for collection and display in Paris. Centuries later, a fraction returned to their home in modern-day Benin. This dramatized documentary follows the journey of 26 of the treasures as told by cultural art historians, embattled university students, and one of the repatriated statues himself.
Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
✦ MovieMuse AI takeLomoKino's lo-fi material limitations—grainy 35mm, mechanical simplicity—become philosophical statement about cinema's essential, unadorned power.
In collaboration with Lomo, an Austrian camera company, and Mubi, a global film website, Weerasethakul was invited to make a work to launch the new LomoKino, a portable motion picture camera. Ashes juxtaposes the intimacy of his daily routine with the destruction of memories and his observations of the dark side of Thailand’s social realities.
Directed by Peter Tscherkassky
✦ MovieMuse AI takeCollage of found footage fragments reconstructs cinema's invisible grammar through obsessive reediting and reframing of gesture.
A tangled network woven with tiny particles of movements broken out of found footage and compiled anew: the elements of the "to the left, to the right, back and forth" grammar of narrative space, discharged from all semantic burden. What remains is a self-sufficient swarm of splinters, fleeting vectors of lost direction, furrowed with the traces of the manual process of production.
MovieMuse finds the perfect movie for tonight across your streaming services —
swipe through documentary picks matched to your taste.
Founding period: everything is free — early members keep Premium free for a year.