By We're living through a golden age for documentaries in 2018. But with so many worthy series and films to sift through, it's easy to get cold feet 15 minutes into whatever you've finally settled on. So, trust us - from crazy cults to assassinations to the greatest England managers of all time - these are the documentaries worth finding time for.
Wild Wild Country (Netflix)
Cults will never not be brilliant subjects for documentaries, and the story of how Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh moved his sect from India to Oregon in 1981 is the best example for years. It's got everything you'd want in a cult doc - corruption, sex, espionage, attempted murder, Hollywood glamour and interviews with slightly spaced lifelong hippies - and it's so brilliantly constructed, the weirdness and revelations just keep cranking up.
McQueen
This study of the brash and brilliant Alexander McQueen goes beyond analysing his nuclear impact on fashion and gets to the heart of the man. Raw interviews with close friends - still clearly shocked by his death - and very, very funny never-before-seen home videos make this a much more vibrant and vivid retelling of McQueen's myth than anything that's gone before.
The Staircase (Netflix)
The third series of The Staircase - the first came in 2004, with a follow-up in 2012 - continues telling an apparently simple whodunnit about the death of Kathleen Peterson, which mutates into a sprawling family saga. Her husband, Michael Peterson, is accused of beating her to death with a fireplace tool. He says he's not guilty. So who is responsible? It sounds bleak, and it is at times, but the whole thing is so strange and so thoroughly suffused with tragicomedy (especially a scene with a dodgy PowerPoint presentation) that it transcends that. Top tip: watch it all, make your mind up on Peterson's guilt, then look up the owl theory. It'll melt your brain.
Bobby Kennedy For President (Netflix)
JFK dominates reminiscences of the 1960s so thoroughly that Bobby Kennedy's life and death tends to get shuffled a fair way down the pecking order. This doc is a necessary corrective: it's the whole story of John's kid brother, from assisting Joe McCarthy in his hunt for communists in the American establishment to running John's presidential campaign, and on to Bobby's conversion to fighting for civil rights and against poverty and Vietnam, before his assassination and the long swirl of conspiracy which followed. It suggests he was exactly the leader the 1968 generation needed - impassioned but pragmatic, idealistic but worldly - and was cruelly denied.
Explained (Netflix)
The poppy, peppy instalments in this Netflix series are all less than 20 minutes long and all give a simple but vigorous overview of a completely unrelated subjects: cricket, the stock market, weed, astrology, K-pop (pictured) and monogamy to name just a few. They're not just jaunty little intros, though. While each episode is tightly put together, there's room enough to let the expert talking heads get into some depth and they swerve simplistic explanations. It's quite an achievement to explain what cricket is, how it works, where it came from and why it matters, while also weaving in the thesis that cricket's story is that of the rise, decline and overhauling of the British Empire by its former colonies, in 18 minutes.
Managing England: The Impossible Job (BBC)
Screened on the eve of the World Cup, this doc gave a potted history of each England manager since 1966 - Alf Ramsey, Nobby dancing, etc - and revealed it to be exactly as torturous, claustrophobic and irresistible as it looks. The best bits are the new interviews with recent managers: incredibly, Sam Allardyce puts down his pint of wine to admit to being exactly as jealous and bereft as you assume he is, and Fabio Capello is brilliantly untranslatable, calling the 1966 World Cup win "that ghost... smothering you with its white tentacles". So why does anyone still bother? It might be as Gary Lineker suggests: "everyone in England's an England manager."
Civilisations (BBC)
This update of Kenneth Clark's landmark 1969 series Civilisation, which told the story of Western civilisation from the Celts onwards via its artworks, takes the blinkers off Clark's Eurocentric, male-only vision. Presenters Simon Schama, David Olusoga and Mary Beard ramble a little more loosely around the story of how humanity worked out its place the world and came to dominate it. It's a little patchy in places and doesn't have Clark's lyricism, but it looks eye-poppingly gorgeous and when it clicks - as it does on Schama's opening episode about prehistoric artwork - it's properly staggering.
Travels in Trumpland with Ed Balls (BBC)
Despite popping up on Strictly, former Labour shadow chancellor Ed Balls still hasn't quite segued from Westminster swamp-dweller to warmly-regarded all-purpose presenter. Travels In Trumpland was a revelation, though, in which he managed to combine the two halves of his public life - first as skilled political operator, then as chummy and self-effacing bloke for hire - to get a different angle on the Trump phenomenon to the usual horror and revulsion. He launches straight into the heartland, gets to know individual Trump fans and muses with gentle intelligence on why the tide rose.
Seeing Allred (Netflix)
Taking on the powerful men who abused women and thought that their standing and wealth would protect them from recriminations is a terrifying prospect, but superstar lawyer Gloria Allred has made taking on terrifying prospects something of a speciality over her career. Championing the rights of women and LGBT people and representing women accusing Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby and other powerful men would be big enough challenges on their own, but, as this film shows, Allred had to fight through a reflexively sexist culture to do it. Her tenacity, competence, tenderness and unshakeable conviction in holding venal men to account is incredible.
A Northern Soul
Hip hop fan Steve lives with his 90-year-old parents in Hull, works in a warehouse and feels trapped by his job and his debts. However, his hometown's year in the sun as UK City Of Culture gives him a chance to chase his dream: decking out a bus he's borrowed from his bosses with musical gear and taking it around the suburbs, estates and outskirts of Hull so underprivileged kids can give themselves a voice through arts and music workshops on the 'beats bus'. So far, so oh-captain-my-captain. It is straightforwardly uplifting at points, but it's also a lot more complicated than that in a city split by Brexit and at the sharp end of years of austerity. There's no condescension or judgement - just hard beats and harder truths.
Bobby Robson: More Than A Manager
The key snapshots of Bobby Robson's managerial career - Maradona's half-evil, half-divine double against England in 1986 and That Night In Turin in 1990 - have been turned over so many times and become part of the weft of English football's folklore, but this doc goes well beyond them. It shows how his working class upbringing instilled his sense of decency and doesn't shirk the vicious press campaign Robson faced as England manager, the political sniping he was caught in the middle of at Barcelona, and the discovery of his brain tumour. That the likes of Sir Alex Ferguson, Pep Guardiola, Jose Mourinho, Ronaldo, Paul Gascoigne and other luminaries wanted to talk about Robson's impact says a lot, and, most movingly, the film uncovers Sir Bobby's 11 simple, unpretentious commandments for motivating players, which explain why his myth and legacy are so potent still. Read our full review of Bobby Robson: More Than A Manager here.
