The documentary often gets a bad rap. Maybe you watched a few boring (or prescriptive) ones in school, in which talking heads drone on about what you ought to think or feel. However, despite its reputation as constrained retelling—emphasis on the “telling”—the medium also offers storytellers practically limitless formal flexibility, and the power to show us reality in dazzling new hues. 

This was a year of numerous stunning nonfiction releases, as well as many festival premieres of works yet to be distributed. When viewing them in unison, it’s clear that the medium’s stylistic and thematic ingenuity could not be in better hands. These 25 films from 2025, hailing from all across the globe, represent the very best of what documentary cinema has to offer. 

From Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra, the brutal, hypnotically textured Afternoons of Solitude skirts traditional documentary conventions by capturing its young bullfighter subject in moments of both performance and privacy, without the use of interviews or voiceover. A radiant, ugly film about death, animal cruelty, and the fragility and beauty of the human form. 

Directed by Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman—and by the numerous Alabama inmates documenting their own abuse on smuggled cellphones—The Alabama Solution is an unflinching look at systems of power, and a full-throated call for reform. Given the risks its subjects take just to be heard, it feels dangerous to watch, as it carefully exposes statewide corruption and the violence it breeds.

In just half an hour, Joshua Seftel’s reflection on American gun violence lends credence to the power of images through its careful composition. All the Empty Rooms follows journalist Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp in their efforts to memorialize schoolchildren lost to mass shootings by capturing their tiny bedrooms—preserved in amber for years by their grieving parents—as a stirring eulogy to the many lives taken far too soon.

What can stone and concrete reveal about a people? Gunda director Viktor Kossakovsky attempts to answer this question through meditative and momentous shots of landscapes, ruins and mineral quarries. These are further interspersed with conversations on architecture, cultural values, and the rise and fall of civilizations—abstractions given solid (and rhythmic) form in Architecton.

Part impressionistic sci-fi, part pulsing visual essay, Kahlil Joseph’s spellbinding feature debut BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions takes after his two-screen OSCAM installation and chronicles African American liberation and revolutionary thought by filtering them through the sounds of Detroit Techno. Academic citations sit side by side with contemporary internet memes, as Joseph traces cultural transformations and the thorny paradoxes inherent in reimagining the world through Black art and history.

From directors Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, the biographical documentary Cover-Up is as reverential as it is confrontational, in its perusal of legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. Set against the largest U.S. government and military scandals of the last half-decade, it captures Hersh’s life and........

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