Best Documentaries of 2024

The rise of the internet as the main avenue of 21st century social communication just happened to coincide with the rise of Tegan and Sara, the indie-rock group fronted by twin sisters Tegan and Sara Quin. They had established a rabid fanbase right from the get-go, many of whom used online forums, chatrooms, etc. to bond over their love of the band. Some fans even started communicating directly with Tegan via DMs on Facebook, with the musician sending them demos, personal pics and a lot of inside dope on their lives. There was just one catch: It was not Tegan. And when the sisters and their management began to look into these communications, they discovered the existence of “Fegan” — a fake Tegan who’d end up exploiting the Quin’s friends and fans for decades and turn their lives into a low-key stalker nightmare. Erin Lee Carr (Thought Crimes) lays all of this out in a way that makes you feel their vulnerability and the violation of it all. We contemplated putting this on our Best Horror Movies list as well.

This look back at the reign of MoviePass — that too-good-to-be-true subscription service that, at one point, offered unlimited movie tickets via their app for a mere $9.95 a month — starts off as a fairly straightforward look at a corporate success story, about a scrappy start-up that brings on former Netflix exec Mitch Lowe and peaks big, before its owners fly a little too close to the sun and gravity takes over, etc. Then director Muta’Ali (Yusef Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn) takes us back to the very beginning, all the better for us to see how Black entrepreneurs Stacy Spikes and Hamet Watt founded the company and then slowly got pushed out in favor of “better business-world optics” (read: old gray-haired white dudes). This turns out to be the tip of the iceberg in terms of questionable practices, and what started as a concise case study expands into a broad primer on How Not to Do Business, 2011 to the Present. Con men play a part. So does paying hundreds of thousand of dollars to throw a party at Coachella in an attempt to buy insta-coolness.

Snapping pictures of everyday South Africans navigating daily life under oppressive, racist laws, photographer Ernest Cole became the primary chronicler of the apartheid that virtually defined the country; his 1967 book House of Bondage remains a key visual representation of the region during that era. He spent much of the rest of his life living in exile in the U.S., continuing to shoot on the streets of New York and in the small towns of the American South until his death in 1990. Cole’s later work was assumed lost forever — until 60,000 negatives were found in a bank vault in Sweden. Most filmmakers would have made that discovery the main subject of their doc, but Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro, Exterminate All the Brutes) wisely keeps the focus on the man rather than the mystery, and the result is a penetrating look at capturing social inequity through the lens of a camera.

Building off the lyrical, non-narrative template of their award-winning 2020 feature The Truffle Hunters, filmmakers Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw focus on modern-day cowboys living in the northwestern foothills of Argentina. These men live a bygone frontier life that earns them the title of “gaucho gaucho,” i.e. the real deals who still tame wild horses and survive off the land; meanwhile, a female teenager attempts to break into the rodeo circuit and learn the ways of the gaucho, helping to keep the tradition alive. Filmed in black-and-white, this almost stream-of-conscious portrait of a subculture is a gorgeous, contemplative look at a world that seems stuck in amber. Yet Dweck and Kershaw add a poetic lilt to their anthropological leanings here, and that makes all the difference.

Mats Steen was a young man living in Norway who loved World of Warcraft. He also suffered from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, which left him nearly immobile; the multiplayer fantasy game was one of his few connections a world outside of his bedroom. After Mats passed away at the age of 25, his parents began receiving dozens of condolences from fellow WoW obsessives, who knew their frail son as “Ibelin,” the mighty and kindhearted warrior who was his in-game avatar. Even better: the members of his Warcraft guild gave them thousands of pages of text conversations that Mats had with them while playing, which allowed them to see a whole other side of their child. And here’s where documentarian Benjamin Ree (The Painter and the Thief) makes a genius decision: He illustrates these interactions via actual online gameplay, thus giving narrative form to Steen’s rich inner life. It’s a formal idea that pays off emotionally in ways you can’t begin to fathom. Keep Kleenex handy.

In 1998, an ambitious comedian named Tomoaki Hamatsu — nicknamed “Nasubi,” because of eggplant-shaped head — auditioned for a TV show. He was brought to a room with nothing but a floor mat and rack filled with magazines, stripped naked, and told that he had to earn whatever he needed (clothes, food, appliances) by winning them through sweepstakes prizes. His ordeal lasted 15 months. Hamatsu assumed the footage of his daily struggles to survive would never be released. Instead, it was broadcast to an audience of millions. Revisiting a moment in the late 1990s, long before the notion of nonscripted franchises were barely a glint in Mark Burnett’s jaundiced eye, filmmaker Clair Titley’s recounts how what would soon be called “reality TV” could turn an everyday guy into a superstar, one primetime humiliation at a time. It’s both a peerless history lesson on the dawn of 21st century pop culture and a peek at the unfortunate shape of things to come. It’s also a glimpse of the new norm, rushing toward us like a runaway train. We are all contestants now.

In the spring of 2021, a group of workers at Amazon’s “fulfillment center” on Staten Island — led by former employee Chris Smalls and a band of like-minded activists — began to gather signatures for a possible union. Filmmakers Brett Story (The Hottest August) and Stephen Maing (Crime + Punishment) were there, capturing every step toward the eventual recognition of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) by the National Labor Relations Board in 2022. Most folks would have simply built things up toward the victory and ended on a high note. But Story and Maing are equally interested in how the labor-organizing sausage gets made, which is why you also sit in on tempestuous Zoom meetings, get peeks at the anti-union propaganda being forced on workers, ride shotgun with Smalls and his cohorts during late nights protesting in cold weather, and get a real sense of the boots-on-the-ground struggle required to make sure basic rights are recognized. It’s as much a portrait of a struggle as it is a win.

Part personal journal of life during wartime and part first-person cri de couer, this painfully intimate look at the decimation of villages in the West Bank’s Masafer Yatta region was made by a quartet of Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers. Yet two creators in particular take center stage in front of the cameras as well: Basel Adra, a resident of the area who’s been filming the slow but steady dismantling of residences as the area is declared a “military training zone” for years; and Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist who’s fighting back alongside the displaced, enraged citizens. The friendship between these two men offer a counterpoint to the harassment and violence that are a daily occurrence. Yet the stacked-deck situation and sheer indifference of those systematically destroying these communities — the cruelty seems to be the point in many of these bulldozing operations — has a corrosive quality that affects everything around them, including their bond. You think that the film will end on a rare moment of tranquility, with Adra and Abraham wondering aloud what the future holds for them. Then a title card notes that the film was finishing production in October 2023, we see a settler shoot a Palestinian man point blank in the chest, and we realize that things are about to get a lot worse. Essential viewing.

A whirlwind history lesson filtered through an aesthetic of Blue Note album covers and connect-the-dots montages, Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez rewinds back to the moment when American jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie were becoming ambassadors to Africa, Patrice Lumumba was attempting to liberate the Congo from colonialism, and political assassinations were being carried out right under the U.N.’s nose. This tour of 20th century international tensions and intelligence-agency dirty tricks may be one of the most footnoted docs to ever play the festival, and the amount of research and cross-referencing on display here is mind-boggling. “If Africa is shaped like a revolver,” Franz Fanon is quoted as saying, in one of a gajillion intertitles, “then Congo is its trigger.” Grimonprez is essentially charting the arc of the bullets fired during the region’s ongoing tipping point in the 1960s, one bebop riff and hypocritical speech at a time.

Mati Diop’s follow-up to 2019’s Atlantics follows the reclamation of treasures from the West African nation of Benin — formerly known as the Kingdom of Dahomey — stolen in the late 1800s by French occupiers. Once these prized possessions are returned to their rightful home, the reaction from contemporary citizens ranges from relief to rage over the fact that only 26 items out of the hundreds plundered had been handed back. Meanwhile, the objects themselves wonder aloud (!) what it means to be removed from their contextual origins. A thrilling, thoughtful, totally unique take on the legacy of colonialism, the toll of a history that involves the subjugation of others and the way in which cultural artifacts play into a country’s identity.