Doc Corner: Best Documentaries of 2023

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

I usually give myself until the Oscar ceremony to do any best-of-the-year lists. Mostly because I like to be as thorough as I can be. This year, however, lent me a few extra hurdles to jump over, which meant it took me a little bit longer than normal. Buying my first home, a litany of illnesses, the loss of a close friend, and general exhaustion with the movies of 2023. But, hey, here we are at the end of March and, honestly, movies don’t just vanish once the year is out so why not finally go about publishing my best documentaries of the year list?

This year in documentary lacked the sort of movie like All the Beauty and the Bloodshed or Collective that loomed over the entire end-of-year discussion and therefore there was no clear number one title of the year. For me, at least. But that didn’t mean there weren’t many to choose from. Most critics groups lingered on the sort of American movies that the Academy does not gravitate towards. Some didn’t like that the Academy ignored them all, but if the industry is so hung up on American features not being nominated then maybe they need to fund and release more challenging works. Just a thought.

I wanted to start, however, with a few special citations before we get to the top 15 documentaries of the year.

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168 Documentaries to Compete for the Oscar

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

The Academy has announced the long (long, very long) list for this year’s Best Documentary Feature category. 168 titles have qualified for members of the doc branch to whittle down to a 15-wide shortlist and then a nominated five. That figure is higher than last year, which had 144 eligible titles and which culminated in a win for Daniel Roher’s Navalny. 

If you were to ask me right now what titles I expect to find on this year’s shortlist, I might say the following: Against the Tide (Sarvnik Kaur), American Symphony (Matthew Heineman), Anonymous Sister (Jamie Boyle), The Eternal Memory (Maite Alberdi), Four Daughters (Kaouther Ben Hania), Lakota Nation vs United States (Laura Tomaselli, Jesse Short Bull), Little Richard: I Am Everything (Lisa Cortés), The Mission (Jesse Moss, Amanda McBaine), Occupied City (Steve McQueen), Silver Dollar Road (Raoul Peck), Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (Anna Hints), A Still Small Voice (Luke Lorentzen), Still: A Michael J Fox Movie (Davis Guggenheim), To Kill a Tiger (Nisha Pahuja) and 20 Days in Mariupol (Mstyslav Chernov). But the whims of this branch can change on a dime, so we won’t know until the shortlists announcements later this month.

You can scroll through the entire list below beginning with After Sherman through to Your Fat Friend. I have linked to reviews of titles where we have them, but also included ten short capsules for other titles that I have seen and been unfortunately lax in actually writing about.

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Errol Morris's Returns to the Fog with 'The Unknown Known'

Ten years ago Errol Morris won the Best Documentary Oscar for his investigation of former Secretary of Defence, Robert S. McNamara. It’s telling that even Morris was surprised, noting in his speech that “I thought it would never happen.” Given his stance as one of the most important documentarians of his time, it genuinely was surprising that he had never even been nominated before let alone won. I guess it didn’t help that titles like Fast, Cheap & Out of Control and Gates of Heaven were likely easily swept aside as unsubstantial, but The Thin Blue Line? A Brief History of Time? It seemed like the documentary branch clearly weren’t fans.

Still, The Fog of War was fairly hard to ignore even for the Academy who have an innate ability to let grudges and bug bears continue for decades and vice versa (I hear Mia Farrow has an appointment to change her name to John Williams).

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