The Best Documentaries on Netflix Right Now

A filmmaker spends a year free-diving every day in a South African kelp forest, forming an extraordinary bond with a wild octopus. Won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Sounds niche; feels universal. One of the most unexpectedly moving films Netflix has ever produced.

Ava DuVernay's documentary on the 13th Amendment — which abolished slavery 'except as punishment for crime' — and how that clause created the modern prison-industrial complex. Precise, furious, and necessary. One of the highest-rated documentaries on the platform.

Bryan Fogel sets out to test how easy it is to cheat in amateur cycling. He ends up entangled with a Russian scientist who reveals the state-sponsored doping programme that corrupted the Olympics — and whose life is then put at risk. A personal experiment that accidentally broke one of the biggest sports scandals in history. Won the Academy Award for Best Documentary.

In post-industrial Ohio, a Chinese billionaire reopens a shuttered General Motors plant. The collision of American and Chinese working cultures — and what it reveals about the future of labour — is sobering and often funny. Won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. The first film produced by Barack and Michelle Obama's Higher Ground Productions.

The engineers and designers who built social media's attention economy explain — from the inside — how it actually works, and why they're frightened of what they made. Mixes documentary interviews with dramatised sequences. One of Netflix's most-watched documentaries ever; genuinely changed how many people use their phones.

In 1971, a scrappy summer camp for disabled teenagers in upstate New York becomes a catalyst for the American disability rights movement. A joyful, urgent film about people who changed federal law through sheer determination. Oscar-nominated for Best Documentary; co-produced by Barack and Michelle Obama.

Director Kirsten Johnson stages elaborate fake deaths for her elderly father as he loses his memory to dementia — falls, accidents, an angel descending from heaven. Part grief processing, part absurdist comedy, part act of love. Nothing else on Netflix feels quite like it.

Jonah Hill turns the camera on his psychiatrist, Dr. Phil Stutz, exploring therapy, mental health tools, and what it genuinely takes to improve your life. Breaks the fourth wall repeatedly. More warm and practical than it sounds — and more honest than most celebrity documentaries.

A man posing as a billionaire diamond merchant romances women on Tinder, convinces them he's in danger, and borrows enormous sums he never repays. The three women who were defrauded — and then decided not to remain victims — are the real story. Netflix's most-watched documentary at the time of release.

An American student is convicted, acquitted, and reconvicted of murdering her British flatmate in Perugia in one of the most media-distorted criminal cases of the 21st century. The documentary gives Knox and Raffaele Sollecito a platform to speak directly — and asks hard questions about how tabloid coverage creates guilt before any verdict.

Built almost entirely from text messages, social media posts, and police body-cam footage, this documentary reconstructs the murders of Shanann Watts and her two daughters. There is no talking-head narration — just the raw digital record of a family, and then its destruction. Quietly devastating.

The inside story of the Fyre Festival — a luxury music event in the Bahamas that collapsed catastrophically, leaving thousands stranded with no food or shelter. Billy McFarland's fraud and the influencer marketing culture that enabled it are dissected with uncomfortable precision. Enraging and compulsively watchable.