More than ever, the documentary has become an essential form of communication, grounding us in a moment while providing historical context and nuance. Among 2025’s best examples of the form are portraits of female icons, celebrations of major moments in music, and an explosive entry to the true-crime genre. Here, a round-up:
Apocalypse in the Tropics
Brazilian director Petra Costa follows up on her Oscar-nominated film The Edge of Democracy, an examination of the collapses of the left-wing governments of Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, with Apocalypse in the Tropics, a similar look into the role of evangelical Christianity in the rise of Jair Bolsonaro’s far-right presidency. Costa interviews eminent subjects on both sides of the ideological divide, including current president Lula, former president Bolsonaro, and evangelical minister (and Bolsonaro ally) Silas Malafaia. At its heart, the film is more than an exposé of contemporary Brazilian politics; it is also a portrait of the power of religious faith to both energize and challenge democracy.
Becoming Katharine Graham
Katharine Graham presided over The Washington Post from 1963 to 1991, a period covering both its reporting on the Pentagon Papers and its investigation into the Watergate scandal. Her astonishing life has been the subject of many books (including Graham’s own Pulitzer Prize–winning autobiography, Personal History, from 1997) and a Steven Spielberg–directed drama (2017’s The Post, starring Meryl Streep). Yet a new documentary on Graham from filmmakers George Kunhardt and Teddy Kunhardt is riveting viewing, featuring new interviews with friends, family, and former employees (including Warren Buffett, Gloria Steinem, Don Graham, Lally Weymouth, David Remnick, Bob Woodward, and Carl Bernstein), as well as fairly shocking excerpts from the Nixon tapes.
The Encampments
This documentary directed and produced by Michael T. Workman and Kei Pritsker takes a measured and compassionate look at the Gaza solidarity movement as it played out on college campuses in the U.S. in 2024. While so much mainstream reporting on the movement played up the angle of privileged college kids meddling in global affairs they allegedly knew little about, The Encampments is notable for speaking directly to young people whose fates are inextricably bound up with Palestinian liberation, among them Columbia student and ICE detainee Mahmoud Khalil and Palestinian journalist and activist Bisan Owda.
Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery
This documentary from director Ally Pankiw dives deep into Lilith Fair, the iconic female-artist-focused music festival founded by Sarah McLachlan in 1997. McLachlan grants an interview for the film, as does an impressive lineup of musical talent including Paula Cole, Sheryl Crow, Brandi Carlile, Erykah Badu, Bonnie Raitt, Jewel, Indigo Girls, Mya, and more. Fair warning, watching this movie may make you want to teleport back to the late ’90s (or at least change up your most-listened playlists).
Pangolin: Kulu’s Journey
Pippa Ehrlich, an Oscar winner for My Octopus Teacher, returns with another documentary about the mysteries of human-animal connection. In this film, a wildlife photographer rescues an endangered baby pangolin from South Africa’s illegal animal trade before setting out to return the creature to its natural habitat. Ehrlich’s call for wildlife conservation is strengthened by her detailed portrait of friendship across species.
Pee-wee as Himself
There’s a lot more to Pee-wee Herman than you might have known before watching this two-part HBO docuseries. Paul Reubens, who died in 2023, publicly comes out as gay on the series, challenging the narrative around his public fall from grace in the late ’90s and complicating public perception of his iconic alter ego in a courageous and deeply necessary way.
Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché
The 2021 limited-release documentary about punk iconoclast and Anglo-Somali proto-riot grrrl Marianne Elliott-Said, a.k.a. Poly Styrene, has finally found its way to US streaming platforms. But the film is more than simply another entry in the women-in-punk subgenre, popularized by recent portraits of Kathleen Hanna, Suzi Q, and The Slits. Codirected and narrated by Celeste Bell, Elliott-Said’s daughter, the film centers on a tumultuous mother-daughter relationship. It also features voiceover from actress Ruth Negga, reading from the punk musician’s diaries.
Pretty Dirty: The Life and Times of Marilyn Minter
As explosively colorful—and occasionally unsettling—as the work at their story’s center, Pretty Dirty: The Life and Times of Marilyn Minter, from Jennifer Ash Rudick and Amanda M. Benchley, is the portrait of an endlessly creative and influential American artist, with poignant detours through familial trauma and addiction. The result is powerfully compelling, however you rate Minter’s dewy, sticky, fog-smeared style.
Titan: The OceanGate Disaster
Titan is director Mark Monroe’s investigation of the OceanGate Titan implosion, which killed its five-member crew during an expedition to the Titanic wreckage site in 2023. An international news story at the time and a subsequent cautionary tale, the Titan becomes, in Monroe’s film, a 21st-century counterpart to the Titanic—a symbol of the hubris that comes from the marriage of tech innovation with superwealth. At the center of the film is a portrait of OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, whose heedless designs of the submersible led to his own death onboard the Titan.
We Want the Funk!
We Want the Funk! is a new musical documentary from Emmy winner and MacArthur Fellow Stanley Nelson, whose previous films Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution and Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool investigated the nexus between the Black experience and the American counterculture. Nelson’s latest presents an equally intellectual history of funk music, from its West African, soul, and jazz roots to its later incarnations in disco, new wave, and hip-hop. New and archival interviews from both Black and white innovators in the genre include James Brown, George Clinton, and David Bowie.
The Yogurt Shop Murders
This searing docuseries about the brutal murder of four teenage girls in an Austin, Texas yogurt shop in 1991 was riveting even before the case was (likely) solved in September 2025. But the fact that the significant break in the decades-old case came just a few months after the HBO Max release of The Yogurt Shop Murders—directed by Margaret Brown and produced by a team including Emma Stone and her husband, Dave McCary—makes the timing of the long-awaited and carefully researched project all the more eerie.
