By Darren Durlach | Co-Owner, Director, Showrunner
Festival-tested. Critically respected. Impossible to ignore.
Every year, a handful of documentaries rise above the noise—not because they check some box of “importance,” but because they’re genuinely compelling. These are films that grab you and don’t let go.
2025 has been a particularly strong year for nonfiction. From Sundance to international festivals to wider releases, these films have dominated the conversation and reminded us why documentary filmmaking matters.
This list represents films from 2025, selected for their critical reception, audience response, and that ineffable quality of being completely absorbing.
Festival Darlings & Critical Heavyweights
The Perfect Neighbor
Winner of the Sundance Directing Award
One of the most unsettling documentaries of the year. The Perfect Neighbor reconstructs a fatal neighborhood dispute using only existing footage: Ring doorbells, police body cams, 911 calls.
The result plays like a thriller in real time. You know the ending, but the tension never lets up. It’s a devastating look at escalation, fear, and “stand your ground” culture—proof that disciplined archival work can be as powerful as any narrative.
Apocalypse in the Tropics
From Petra Costa (The Edge of Democracy)
Costa returns with another deeply unsettling political documentary, this time examining the collision of evangelical Christianity and Brazilian politics.
Rather than treating religion as background, the film positions it as a central political force reshaping power and public life. For American audiences, it doesn’t feel like a foreign story. It feels like a warning. Haunting, precise, disturbingly timely.
Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius)
A Sundance premiere from Questlove
This isn’t a standard music biography. Questlove’s portrait of Sly Stone skips the familiar rise-and-fall narrative and instead explores genius as something complicated and costly.
Intimate, sometimes uncomfortable, deeply human—the film examines creativity, addiction, and the weight placed on artists who change culture. It’s one of the most thoughtful music documentaries in years, and probably the definitive Sly Stone film.
Hidden Gems & Audience Favorites
Secret Mall Apartment
A surprise crowd-pleaser
In a year full of heavy subject matter, this became an unexpected favorite. It tells the true story of eight artists who, in the early 2000s, secretly built a fully functioning apartment inside a Providence shopping mall—and lived there for four years without being discovered.
It’s funny, quietly radical, oddly inspiring. A gentle act of rebellion disguised as a prank.
Endless Cookie
A Canadian cult hit
This genre-defying film blends live-action documentary with surreal animation, following two eccentric friends on a road trip that dissolves into memory, fantasy, and snack-fueled absurdity.
Strange, warm, difficult to describe—which is exactly why audiences have fallen for it. Endless Cookie feels like a movie you discover at midnight and immediately text your friends about.
Come See Me in the Good Light
A breakout emotional favorite
This intimate portrait of spoken-word poet Andrea Gibson—following a diagnosis of ovarian cancer—refuses to be a tragedy.
Instead, it becomes a film about love, art, presence, and choosing how to live when time feels fragile. Viewers routinely describe leaving screenings in tears but uplifted. Tender without being sentimental, honest without being bleak.
“Can’t Look Away” Chaos
Megadoc (The Making of Megalopolis)
A festival-buzz sensation
Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis was one of the most divisive films in recent memory. This documentary about its production is something else entirely.
Captured by Mike Figgis, Megadoc chronicles ballooning budgets, creative clashes, and a legendary filmmaker pushing forward at all costs. Think Hearts of Darkness updated for the modern, hyper-documented era. A train wreck of ambition you can’t stop watching.
Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever
A modern obsession captured on film
This documentary follows tech centimillionaire Bryan Johnson as he spends millions of dollars a year trying to reverse his biological age.
Blood transfusions, algorithmic diets, relentless data tracking—his body becomes a laboratory. The film is fascinating and grotesque, revealing not just longevity culture but our broader fixations on control, fear, and the fantasy of beating time.
Predators
A Sundance critical standout
David Osit’s Predators revisits the early-2000s reality show To Catch a Predator, but not with nostalgia.
Instead, it dissects the ethics of public shaming as entertainment and asks uncomfortable questions about why audiences—ourselves included—found it so satisfying to watch. The subject matter may seem like “trash,” but the execution is sharp, thoughtful, deeply unsettling.
Final Thought
What unites the best documentaries of 2025 isn’t prestige or subject matter—it’s command. These films know exactly what they are, why they exist, and how to hold your attention.
They don’t ask politely to be watched. They demand it.
If you’re looking for documentaries that challenge, disturb, comfort, or completely absorb you, start here.
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