The 100 Best Documentaries of All Time
By Elizabeth Jackson, Stacker News
AND Nicole Johnson, Stacker News
On 5/5/21 at 8:00 PM EDT
Great documentaries often give access and illumination to stories that would otherwise go untold. The subject of a great documentary can be anything from a single individual s life to a broader political event, and the effect of the films can be anything from uplifting to devastating.
To celebrate the genre, Stacker created a ranking of the top 100 documentaries of all time by leveraging data on all documentary movies to create a Stacker score that serves as a weighted index split evenly between IMDb and Metacritic scores. To qualify, the film had to be listed as a documentary on IMDb, have a Metascore, and have at least 1,000 IMDb user votes. Ties were broken by Metascore and further ties were broken by votes. Documentary TV series were not included.
Show People (1928) to Quentin Tarantino’s elegiac
Once Upon a Time In Hollywood (2019) films about Hollywood, and by extension Los Angeles, have been there from the start of movies and continued in various guises throughout its multifarious history, often with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Throughout the sixties and early seventies several films were produced that spoke of the end of Hollywood as a creative enterprise, that is, as a field in which artists could examine their emotions and ideas and their response to the contemporary world – a civilization in crisis that they sought to describe or explore in depth from within. From Pier Paolo Pasolini’s