The most interesting storytelling happening on screen in 2023 came via documentaries. These real-life narratives ran the gamut, from bittersweet love stories to extreme sports disasters, harrowing tales of war, and bone-chilling cult dispatches, but they all had one thing in common: they fascinated and informed us in equal measure. Sure, there are still a few true-crime entries padding out our “Best Of” list below, but this year also gave us an eclectic mix of films and series that expanded our ideas of what documentary filmmaking can do.
Here are the most interesting docs we watched in 2023.
American Symphony (Netflix)
On the same day that artist and Oscar winner Jon Batiste learned he had been nominated for 11 Grammy Awards, his partner, author Suleika Jaouad got a devastating diagnosis — her cancer was back. That’s where director Matthew Heineman’s emotionally charged documentary begins, in the midst of a pendulum swing between joy and heartbreak as Batiste preps a first-of-its-kind symphony for Carnegie Hall and Jaouad confronts a deadly disease she first battled a decade earlier. Both are determined to channel their triumphs and frustrations through their art, painfully peeling back a veneer of privacy to create what may be their greatest joint effort: a raw, earnest look at life and the many beautiful ways we survive it.
Still (Apple TV+)
Needle drops and re-creations help tell the story of the time Back to The Future star Michael J. Fox was the most famous actor in the world, lending a bit of fist-pumping energy to this Davis Guggenheim-directed documentary. But the true heart shines through in Fox’s conversations about his Parkinson’s diagnosis, his family, finding the ability to be present in his life, and the toughness that has allowed him to keep fighting and become a force in philanthropy. We’ve known Fox as an inspiration for the longest time, but with Still we’re reminded of the man at the center of his story – his ambitions, gifts, sacrifices, and the people and lessons that have shaped him.
The Deepest Breath (Netflix)
Halfway through Laura McGann’s Netflix documentary about the doomed love story of a pair of freedivers, you might find yourself mimicking Alessia Zecchini, holding your breath in concert as she descends to watery depths no regular human could withstand. As you exhale, gasping for air, Zecchini forges on, following a thin cable, miles below the surface as darkness swallows her and her lungs are pressurized to near combustion. McGann’s film treads a narrative line as precarious as the metal rope that tethers Zecchini to the surface, teetering between celebrating the woman’s impressive achievements and telling a cautionary tale about obsession, love, and the very human desire to push our bodies past what they can go.
20 Days in Mariupol (Amazon Prime Video)
“I want to live in Ukraine in peace and quiet” says a man clearing debris early on in 20 Days In Mariupol, a documentary showing the destructive and vicious effects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on people simply trying to go about their lives. An intensely difficult and upsetting watch that will make you want to look away often, 20 Days In Mariupol is nevertheless 2023’s most powerful documentary and an invaluable historical document.
Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God (Max)
Hannah Olson’s provocative three-part docuseries opens like a found-footage horror movie. Police cam footage takes on a tour of a dilapidated home filled with half-washed children and jugs of colloidal silver before happening upon the mummified corpse of Amy Carlson, a former McDonald’s-manager-turned-cult-leader who proclaimed herself Mother God. Olson’s story works backward from there, charting Carlson’s shockingly normal childhood, her conspiracy theorist conversion via New Age forums online, and her self-aggrandizing ascent to absolute power over her wayward followers who believed her to be a 19 billion-year-old being, a reincarnation of famous historical figures like Joan of Arc and Marilyn Monroe, and humanity’s true savior. Of course, Carlson was none of those things, but Olson’s ability to earn the trust of her flock who rewarded her with revealing sit-down interviews and unfettered home video access to the group’s inner workings made what Mother God really was — a con artist who took things too far — even more interesting.
Murder In Boston (Max)
A shocking, grisly murder and a strange cover-up are just the beginning of this harrowing tale about a city on the brink. In 1989, Charles Stuart frantically dialed 9-1-1, claiming both he and his pregnant wife had been shot by a Black assailant in a tracksuit. Her death sparked a citywide manhunt that unearthed decades of racial tension and police brutality in Boston, causing a fallout that reverberates to this day. The Last Dance director Jason Hehir deftly manages all of the political and social threads woven through this murder mystery, effectively showing how an unremarkable tragedy leveled an entire city and destroyed a Black community.
Pamela: A Love Story (Netflix)
Pamela Anderson was a global sensation and sex symbol who met the negative side of fame with the release of a private sex tape from her honeymoon and the sexist, sneering jokes made at her expense in the aftermath. More than two decades later, we all got a reminder of that era with Pam & Tommy, a dramatization of Anderson’s life. But that wasn’t the whole story. How could it be when she wasn’t involved in telling it? That’s the setup for Pamela: A Love Story, but the doc does so much more than just explore that time in Anderson’s life, tracking her origins and what she’s been doing in the years since to paint a portrait of a complex and powerful icon, unlucky in love and, often in her career, yet undaunted in her efforts to live on her own terms.
Albert Brooks: Defending My Life (Max)
A treasure chest of late-night bits and revolutionarily smart films is propped open long enough for some of the funniest people in the world to lavish praise on Albert Brooks, a master comic mind whose work as a filmmaker has been obscured by time. What’s better, Brooks lends his perspective to his life and career in conversation with his longtime friend and fellow genius filmmaker Rob Reiner. This could have been three times as long and we would have been deliriously happy to mine the depths of this fascinating career and movies like Real Life, Modern Romance, Lost In America, Defending Your Life, and Mother, that beg exploration and appreciation.
We Kill For Love
This look at the direct-to-video and late-night cable (Skinimax) era of erotic thrillers is a tad overlong, at times seeming encyclopedic in its reminiscence and name checks for what feels like every film in the genre from the late ‘80s to early 2000s. But what feels like a nostalgia trip turns into a concise and fascinating autopsy on a business model smothered to death by the death of the video store, the rise of the internet, and demands for more volume and less art.
Savior Complex (Max)
This three-part docuseries from HBO skewers the white savior complex that fuels Christian missionary work by laying bare its worst, sometimes fatal, flaws. Renee Bach is the case study here, a young woman intent on doing good in a third-world country who overestimates her abilities to the detriment of the deathly ill children and desperate mothers who turn to her for help. Bach’s shelter for malnourished babies and young kids became a pedestal that propped up her self-mythology and though this doc does take some time to break down the racial tensions that exist in Africa thanks to American missionaries using the continent as a conversion experiment, the most interesting takeaways come from Bach’s account of her experience there. How did a woman with no medical training direct doctors and nurses on treating starved kids? And how did she escape the consequences when those treatments turned fatal? The answer is both enraging and completely unsurprising.
