The Best Documentaries Of The Decade [2010s]

We could write something really meaningful about documentaries and how they impacted the decade, changed our lives, made us cry, made us angry, gave us a call to action, or shined a light on something we otherwise might not know about. We could talk about the portraits of people we adored, people we lost, or chronicles of injustice or venality or obscure spotlights on little-known subjects. And we’ll do that, eventually, but right now, it’s Friday, and we just want to sleep and drink and possibly never wake up, so please enjoy our Best Documentaries of The Decade feature, this placeholder we may or may not update when we’re feeling alive, and our genuine thanks and appreciation for all your reading, sharing, clicking, etc. Right now, we’ll just lay down for a little bit.

READ MORE: The 100 Best Films Of The Decade

More best of year and decade content is here too, the 100 Most Anticipated Films Of 2020The 100 Best Films Of The Decade, the 25 Best Films Of 2019, the Best Performances Of The DecadeBest Cinematography of the DecadeBest Soundtracks of the DecadeBest TV of the DecadeBest TV of 2019Best Posters, and Trailers of 2019 and more to come.

READ MORE: The 100 Most Anticipated Films Of 2020

55. “West of Memphis” (2012)
There are few stronger cases for the power of nonfiction cinema – specifically, the form’s ability to change perceptions and save lives – than the story of the West Memphis Three. Imprisoned for more than 18 years for the brutal slayings of three young Arkansas boys, Jessie Misskelley, Damien Echols, and Jason Baldwin’s story was brought to national attention via the three “Paradise Lost” films by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, while this documentary prompted producer Peter Jackson to fund a new round of forensic testing and investigation. But beyond its legal importance, “West of Memphis” is a devastating work of nonfiction filmmaking, a classically Hitchcockian story of the wrong man (or men) accused and convicted, stretched into an existential dirge of three lives squandered and barely saved (as justice remained unserved). – Jason Bailey

54.Love, Antosha” (2019)
Whether Anton Yelchin was playing a reluctant punk-rock hero in Jeremy Saulnier’s grindhouse throwback “Green Room” or a lovestruck young man in Drake Dormeus’Like Crazy,” the young, remarkably gifted actor was never anything less than totally convincing and present in the roles he chose. He was also something of a creative multihyphenate, dabbling in both music and photography in the later years of his life: his curious mind was a guiding light that led him to San Fernando Valley sex clubs as well as the set of a “Star Trek” reboot. Anton was also born with Cystic Fibrosis – a terrible condition that acted as something of an underlying motivating factor for his career trajectory, initiating a potentially deathly ticking clock years before his untimely demise. Anton’s passing was a loss that reverberated well beyond the filmmaking community that openly embraced him. The circumstances of his death, to this day, are so bizarre and unfair that they defy comprehension. Garret Price’sLove, Antosha,” one of the great documentaries ever made about an actor, doesn’t subscribe to the hackneyed notion that the good die young. It rejects the storybook nonsense we’re fed as children that certain stars burn the brightest before they fade away forever. “Love, Antosha” offers heartbreaking confirmation that we were all beyond fortunate to have had this incredible young man in our lives, for however long that may have been. Anton may be gone, but “Love, Antosha” restores his one-of-a-kind memory in a way that allows his indomitable spirit to live on. – Nicholas Laskin

53.No Home Movie” (2016)
Chantal Akerman’s final film “No Home Movie” is a mix of quiet heartbreak and trying tedium, but there’s no doubt that in retrospect, it’s really devastating. An intimate, deeply personal portrait of her aging mother, a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz, mostly set inside her cramped Brussels apartment, “No Home Movie” can be a patience-testing experience, filled with non-sequiturs and tangents—a long excursion into the desert to film the wind is both exasperating and an accurate reflection of loneliness—but many times, it simply serves as Akerman preserving her mother, taking one long, affectionate gaze at the women she clearly adores one long last time. Essentially just a series of conversations, the Skype calls are especially difficult and abstract. Visually flat, and as if she’s through opaque shattered glass, the filmmaker doesn’t care because she gets to hear her mother’s voice for a few more precious moments. Sadly, Akerman’s mother died just a few short months after filming was complete. She would complete the film a year, later, premiere it in August 2015, and take her own life a few months later, suggesting a world where her mother didn’t exist was simply too unbearable to live in. – Rodrigo Perez

52. “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” (2010)
Werner Herzog is one of the most tireless and determined searchers in the history of cinema: as a documentarian, Herzog’s restless curiosity has taken him to the sites of active volcanoes (“Into The Inferno”), the rugged Alaskan wilderness (“Grizzly Man”), the remote reaches of Antarctica (“Encounters at the End of the World”), and the edge of the information superhighway (“Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World”). In the late aughts, Herzog’s tireless, inquisitive nature took him to the Chauvet cave in the South of France, which is home to some of the oldest known cave paintings on the face of the earth. The resulting film, “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” is something of an outlier in Herzog’s larger filmography, but don’t let the movie’s beguiling pageant of oddities prevent you from seeking it out. “Cave” is an ode to mysticism and human ingenuity throughout the ages, and how one can find beauty in even the most unsuspecting of places. Herzog was limited to a spartan crew for the film (including the cinematographer and sound person), and much of the footage was captured via 3D cameras so that Herzog could honor the imagination of the painters themselves. “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” isn’t one of Herzog’s most well-known or reputed documentary works, but it nevertheless stands as a testament to the notion that true, ageless beauty is often lying in plain sight – or, you know, near the bottom of a prehistoric cavern. – NL

51.Wormwood” (2017)
Anyone who is reading this list probably already knows who Errol Morris is, and why he’s inarguably one of our greatest living documentary filmmakers. From “Gates of Heaven” to “The Thin Blue Line,” all the way through from “The Fog of War” to last year’s “American Dharma,” Morris has proven to be a doggedly resolved nonfiction chronicler of bureaucratic infrastructure and domestic eccentricity, determined above all else to sniff out treachery, injustice, and bullshit at every level of American life. “Wormwood” is a high-wire act, even by Morris’ standards. It’s a six-part Netflix docudrama that masterfully weaves together a tapestry of fictional recreations (which are handsome and absorbing, featuring wonderful actors like Peter Sarsgaard, Jimmi Simpson, and Tim Blake Nelson) and sobering, sometimes destabilizing non-fiction journalism. “Wormwood” is the story of deceased former CIA scientist and Project MKUltra participant Frank Olson, told primarily by his living son, Eric. In November of 1953, Olson was discretely dosed with high-grade LSD by one of his CIA supervisors before tumbling out of the tenth story of a New York City hotel room and falling to his death below. Was this a suicide? Something more sinister? Part of an insidious cover-up? Throughout “Wormwood,” Morris is determined to get to the bottom of the shadowy circumstances surrounding Frank Olson’s enigmatic expiry, and Eric’s bitter, hard-won belief that his father didn’t actually kill himself supplies the movie with a very compelling and necessary through line. “Wormwood” is truly wild stuff: an ambitious, engrossing experiment in form from one of the masters of the medium. – NL