As midsummer turns its searing spotlight upon us and dreams of milder days beckon from afar, the year’s glut of documentaries similarly oscillates between incendiary spectacles and chilly domestic fare. The latest additions to Vogue’s ongoing list of 2024’a best documentaries grows more ambitious and baroque, including a Martin Scorsese-produced tribute to the kings of postwar British cinema, a generative portrait of an electronic music composer, and an unusual caper about shopping mall architecture. Each of these new releases highlights the widening scope of documentary and proves non-fiction filmmaking can be as formally innovative and topically complex as any narrative film.
Here, our list of the best documentary films of 2024 (so far).
Ennio (February 9)
This documentary follows the celebrated Italian film composer Ennio Morricone, whose soundtracks for 1960s and ’70s spaghetti westerns, political dramas, gialli, and, later on, American melodramas and action films often rivaled or outshone the movies themselves. Ennio contains detailed interviews with the composer (Morricone died in 2020) on some of the 400 soundtracks he produced throughout his lifetime. The film also includes a who’s who of filmmakers and musicians, including Quentin Tarantino, Bruce Springsteen, Quincy Jones, and Clint Eastwood, who share their thoughts on or memories of Morricone.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV, Prime Video, or YouTube.
High & Low: John Galliano (March 8)
This portrait of enfant terrible and culture vulture John Galliano—former creative director of Givenchy and Dior and current head of Maison Margiela—recalls his ousting from the heights of the fashion world after a very public antisemitic tirade in Paris was caught on video. Kevin Macdonald’s film digs into both the public figure and the private world of Galliano while also examining the high-stakes setting of an industry that causes its leading lights to flame out, often in vividly self-destructive spectacles. Macdonald does not apologize for Galliano’s blunders, misdemeanors, and addictions, but neither does he shy away from the industry titans that abetted them.
How to watch: Stream on Mubi or Prime Video.
Kim’s Video (April 5)
Kim’s Video tells the quirky true story of how New York dry cleaner Youngman Kim founded Kim’s Video, a downtown institution that inspired a generation of cinephiles, filmmakers, and hipsters with its catalog of 55,000 independent, obscure, and bootleg films. When Kim decides to close his chain of stores in 2008 and offer his video collection to buyers, a small Sicilian town with artistic aspirations purchases it intact only to bury its whereabouts. Directors David Redmon and Ashley Sabin travel there to find out what became of Kim’s collection—and hopefully return it to New York.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV, Prime Video, or YouTube.
Uncropped (April 26)
Uncropped is D.W. Young’s chronicle of the life and work of photographer James Hamilton, who captured the famous, infamous, and unique figures of New York City for The Village Voice, Harper’s Bazaar, Creem, and The New York Observer. Hamilton relays the stories behind some of his most famous photogenic subjects, from Lou Reed to Alfred Hitchcock. But Young also manages to bring together colleagues and friends from Hamilton’s Voice days so that the film also acts as an elegy to an era when photojournalism and alternative weeklies still had a tremendous authority to document and celebrate underground culture. Executive produced by Wes Anderson, the film includes interviews with Thurston Moore, Sylvia Plachy, and Anderson himself, among others.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV, Prime Video, or YouTube.
Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg (May 3)
Catching Fire is billed as a never-before-seen portrait of the Rolling Stones muse, actor, and fashion plate, told from the perspective of her children, lovers, and friends, including Keith Richards, Marianne Faithful, and Marlon Richards. The film tackles her infamous public reputation as well as her private life through an archive of home movies and family photos. It also includes excerpts from Pallenberg’s unpublished memoir, voiced by Scarlett Johansson.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV, Prime Video, or YouTube.
Power (May 10)
This provocative political documentary by Yance Ford (The Color of Care, Strong Island) makes the case for policing’s historic and contemporary role in the maintenance of a racist and classist status quo. Ford relies on a heavy mix of archival footage and academic, press, and social-justice interviewees (including a former police officer turned advocate) to explore how the complex hierarchies of law enforcement from the 18th and 19th centuries continue to play out in current battlegrounds such as Minneapolis, the site of George Floyd’s 2020 murder by police officers.
How to watch: Stream on Netflix.
Taking Venice (May 17)
Presented in the manner of a heist or caper film, filmmaker and art critic Amei Wallach’s doc examines the true stories behind the scandalous rumors that Robert Rauschenberg’s Grand Prize win at the 1964 Venice Biennale was rigged. The reason behind the supposed cheat? The American government’s desire to wield soft power over the Russians through cultural export. Wallach looks at the top players working between government and art, including legendary gallerist Leo Castelli and Jewish Museum curator Alan Solomon (an early champion of neo-Dada), whose efforts helped shift the global art capital from Europe to America.
How to watch: In select theaters
Queen of the Deuce (May 24)
Valerie Kontakos’s film is a zany family portrait of Chelly Wilson, a Greek-born Jew who escaped Athens on the eve of World War II and resettled in New York City, where she eventually ran a network of porn theaters in Times Square. A savvy businesswoman in an industry then dominated by men, Wilson helped make 42nd Street into the Deuce, a mecca for sex tourism in the ’70s and ’80s. Her most unusual story is told through archival recordings, home movies, animation, and family interviews.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV, Prime Video, or YouTube.
Rowdy Girl (May 31)
Rowdy Girl centers on the titular Texas cattle ranch turned animal sanctuary founded by Renee King-Sonnen and her husband, Tommy. After their story becomes a national media sensation, King-Sonnen sets up the Rancher Advocacy Program to encourage other ranchers to transition to plant-based agriculture and adopt a vegan lifestyle. First-time director Jason Goldman follows King-Sonnen over two years as she shares her personal story of conversion and her efforts to transform an industry one ranch at a time.
The Conqueror: Hollywood Fallout (June 28)
This Hollywood insider doc from William Nunez examines the fascinating story behind the making of The Conqueror, Howard Hughes’s soapy epic starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan. Considered one of the worst movies of the 1950s, The Conqueror became notorious for another reason: Its filming took place close to the Nevada military site where nearly a dozen atomic bombs were tested in the previous year. Nunez investigates the US government’s brazen negligence during the height of its atomic tests, along with the movie studio’s willful ignorance of the dangers. The director also tracks the dozens of cases of terminal cancer suffered by The Conqueror’s cast and crew, including Wayne and Susan Hayward.
How to watch: Stream on Spectrum TV.
Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger (in theaters July 12)
This Martin Scorsese-narrated and produced documentary is a love letter to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the English directing duo known as the Archers, whose sumptuous films—filled with fairy tales, ballet, opera, and melodrama—helped to create a new romantic template for filmmaking throughout the 1940s and ’50s. Scorsese recounts his own childhood memories of watching films like The Thief of Baghdad and The Tales of Hoffmann, and proceeds to take the audience through a master class on the British Golden Age, ending with Powell’s notorious fall from grace with the release of 1960’s Peeping Tom. The film also highlights how Powell and Pressburger’s films directly inspired Scorsese’s own singular vision in films like Mean Streets and The Age of Innocence. A treasure trove for both film scholars and lovers of midcentury cinema.
Eno (in theaters July 26)
Filmmaker and collaborator Gary Hustwit (Helvetica, Rams) presents a unique portrait of electronic music producer, innovator, and “sonic landscaper” Brian Eno with the help of generative software technology. Using as source material hundreds of hours of unreleased video footage and music by Eno as well as interviews with the man himself, Hustwit’s film shuffles and recreates sequences to produce a new version of itself with each viewing. Like much of Eno’s work in incidental music, granular sound, and digital algorithms, Hustwit’s Eno attempts to invent a new art form that mines the emotional within the computational.
War Game (in theaters August 2)
Premiering at Sundance earlier this year, Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss’s political thriller follows a team of former government officials and policymakers who role-play a contested American election leading to a political coup and potential civil war. On the heels of Alex Garland’s “what if” epic Civil War, War Game takes a “huis clos” approach, ushering the viewer into the closed-door meetings that would negotiate crises like a military collapse and a Washington invasion. Timed for release a few months shy of the contentious November elections, the film looks less like dystopian fantasy and more like a roadmap.
Union (in theaters October 18)
The winner of this year’s US documentary special jury award for the art of change at Sundance, Union spotlights a small group of Staten Island–based Amazon workers from the Amazon Labor Union, founded by organizer Chris Smalls (named one of Time magazine’s most influential people of 2022). The film follows the group as it attempts to unionize against one of the most powerful and profitable companies in the world.
Secret Mall Apartment (release date TBA)
Director Jeremy Workman (The World Before Your Feet, Lily Topples the World) continues his oeuvre dedicated to everyday eccentrics with Secret Mall Apartment, a film about a group of eight Rhode Island visual artists who secretly fashioned a functioning apartment inside a Providence shopping mall in the early 2000s. Based on digital videos recorded by artist Michael Townsend during the course of the group’s guerrilla project, the film is both an elaborate archaeological excavation and a creative re-enchantment of urban corporate space. It is also a strangely nostalgic elegy to the last years of a pre-social media era when Main Street and IRL community actions still defined the parameters of the public domain.
Ibelin (Netflix release date TBA)
A fascinating Norwegian documentary about Mats Steen, a young quadriplegic whose premature death at 25 from Duchenne, a degenerative muscular disease, led to his family’s discovery of Steen’s secret passion for World of Warcraft. Director Benjamin Ree creates a posthumous portrait of Steen’s years’ long digital life as Ibelin Redwood, his handsome, medieval avatar, using gaming archives, internet chat rooms, and animation. This multifaceted, multimedia approach to Steen’s virtual adolescence produces a four-dimensional type of world-building that stretches the definition of a documentary film.