The 19 Best Documentaries On Netflix UK Reflect Our Weird World

The Brazilian football legend Edson Arantes do Nascimento – Pelé – is for most of us, just that: legendary. His status as one of the world’s true greats endures yet it’s amazing how little the modern football fan knows of his football, let alone the background and influence of a player who burst on to the scene in the 1958 World Cup as a smiling and brilliant 17-year-old. This Netflix Original surveys that career faithfully, highlighting not just his ability, but the wider expectation and pressure the man had to carry underneath. Containing tearful interviews with the now frail 80-year-old, it’s neither an unflinching character study or an air-brushed hagiography – just a moving and rewarding portrait of a footballing pioneer.

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Should you need reminding of just what a tragedy the recent loss of Ruth Bader Ginsburg was, this unashamedly besotted film is a timely reminder. Directors Betsy West and Julie Cohen shows how Ginsburg ascended to the Supreme Court bench, a position she held for 27 years, via her landmark cases, mainly told through high-calibre talking heads (Gloria Steinem, Bill Clinton, Orrin Hatch) and powerful archive audio of her court work.

The film, which was made when Ginsburg was already in her mid-eighties, shows her working out with her personal trainer, Bryant Johnson (who became famous in his own right when he performed three push-ups in front of her coffin). Her strength is near-superhuman, though devastatingly for us all, not quite.

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Say what you like about M.I.A. – that she’s a loud mouth, that she promotes terrorism, that she’s only had one good tune – but the admirable thing about the Sri Lankan-British musician, as Steve Loveridge’s Sundance Special Jury Award-winning documentary demonstrates, is that she won’t give two hoots. Or OK, she will, but that doesn’t mean she’s going to shut up and she certainly isn’t going to apologise.

The film’s tongue-twisting title speaks to the various personae that Matangi Arulpragasam has adopted over the course of her life, from a hip-hop loving refugee in South London whose father was prominent in the Tamil Resistance Movement, to a budding film-maker at Central Saint Martins, to a neon-nailed music and style icon. The trick though, as the film reveals, is embodying all three at once.

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Jeffrey Epstein's hideous crimes are laid bare in this a forensic study of the women he groomed and preyed on, and the people who shamefully looked the other way.

The four-part docuseries compassionately gives a voice to some of his victims as it follows their stories from meeting the billionaire socialite to finally facing him in court years later. Though hard to watch at times it is vital viewing for understanding how money can obstruct justice and silence the powerless.

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Even the most sports-averse can find joy in this excellent 10-part ESPN documentary which follows the extraordinary career of Michael Jordan and his time with the dominant Chicago Bulls basketball team of the Nineties.

Though Jordan is often calling the shots in terms of what gets said, the extraordinary amount of footage from the time often tells the story better than the talking heads can. There's nostalgic sportswear, moving stories of grief and childhood pain from Jordan and his teammates and dramatic matches relived with such tension you forget you already know the result.

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Michelle Obama's remarkable journey from a struggling childhood in Chicago to becoming the first black First Lady of the United States is the backbone of this documentary about her life.

Becoming follows Obama on a 34-city book tour across America to promote her memoir of the same name. The documentary doesn't quite offer a raw and unrestricted insight into her life but it does still show the warmth with which people feel for her, her gift for motivating people and connecting with them, and the level of restraint she has had to show in the face of so many critics.

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Director Chris Bolan heard the story of how his two great aunts, Former All-American Girls Professional Baseball League player Terry Donahue and her partner Pat Henschel, kept their relationship secret for 70 years when on a trip to visit them.

He decided to turn their account into a documentary, the result giving a moving and honest insight into the horrors of homophobia and the sadness of how living in fear can define people's lives.

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American filmmaker Ava DuVernay (Selma, When They See Us) is at the helm of this chilling documentary named after the constitutional amendment that abolished slavery.

What DuVernay shows is how slavery never truly ended for black people in America, detailing the suppression of African Americans through lynchings and Jim Crow, the ways in which the war on drugs marginalised black people and how the modern industrial prison complex makes millions from the imprisonment and labour of black people.

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What makes you the person that you are today? This nature vs. nurture debate is the defining question in this fascinating documentary which follows a set of identical triplets who are separated when adopted as infants as part of an unethical study.

When they are reunited by chance in their adolescence they find striking similarities between them but also discover differences which they cannot escape, the trauma of being pulled apart a shadow which follows them around.

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The billionaire owner of Chinese glass manufacturer Fuyao reopens an abandoned General Motors plant in a working-class area of Ohio, six years after the recession wreaked havoc on the Rust Belt economy.

Locals are initially hopeful about the return of industry and job creation, but culture clashes between the American blue-collar workers and the Chinese top brass – as well as the overworked Chinese staff imported by the corporation – soon plunge the nascent factory into trouble. Released by the Obama family’s production company, Higher Ground, this Academy Award-winning doc offers a bleak outlook on the uncaring future of post-industrial America.

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Nowadays, there’s a lot more to cheerleading than pom-poms and pyramids. This six-part docuseries follows the cheer team of Navarro College, Corsicana, as they push their bodies to (and often past) the limit for a chance to perform at the national competition in Daytona Beach, Florida.

The expertly drilled squad – diverse in personality and background but bound by determination – break bones, test friendships and suffer mental turmoil in pursuit of the ultimate goal, full in the knowledge that their success in the nationals won’t necessarily lead anywhere. There’s no competitive cheer organisation in the US, and their Olympian abilities often lead them to cheer teaching roles. And so the punishing cycle begins again.

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If you’re watching a documentary to distract from the news cycle, Pandemic may not be the best choice. This sobering docuseries explains how viruses develop and spread, and follows the doctors and scientists constantly putting their lives at risk in the bid to stop pandemics before they transmit from animals to humans.

Released at the start of the year, producer Sheri Fink has revealed her regret that it couldn’t impact hygiene habits long before the emergence of the Coronavirus.

“People have said the docuseries Pandemic came out at a perfect time, but in fact we made it because some of us had seen the system tested in smaller ways and knew its vulnerabilities. We hoped to inform before, not after, another dangerous pathogen emerged,” she said on Twitter. Still, it's always worth reminding yourself of why you need to wash your damn hands.

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It took the Gallagher brothers just four years to really make and break Oasis. From 1993 to 1996, they signed a record deal, released two decade-defining albums, habitually disbanded in drug- fuelled acrimony, and performed to more than 250,000 people at Knebworth in the most sought-after set of gigs in British history.

More than twenty years later, Asif Kapadia and James Gay-Rees’s (Amy, Senna) access-all- areas documentary charts the bumpy road that led to those two momentous nights. With the help of unearthed behind-the-scenes footage and revealing commentary from the band, Supersonic manages to fully encapsulate the chaos that came with being the biggest rock stars on the planet.

Of course, Noel and Liam’s sibling rivalry takes centre-stage once again. But while their constant fall-outs are a tediously well-trodden subject, a focus on what unites the pair makes Supersonic the most affecting insight into their relationship yet. A mutual hatred for their physically abusive father, as well as candid moments of heart-warming brotherly affection, lifts their familiar story away from the tabloids and far closer to tragedy.

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Following a dire bottom-place finish in the Premier League, Sunderland start the 2017/2018 season in The Championship for the first time in 10 years. As fierce rivals Newcastle simultaneously frog jump them into the top flight and their best players depart, it feels like things can't possibly get worse for the debt-ridden club.

Needless to say, things get much, much worse. This docu-series follows another desperate campaign that sees the Black Cats crumble away into the third tier of English football, and the loyal fans who refuse to give up on a club that resolutely disappoints them.

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One of the two documentaries that emerged from the bread, cheese and rubble of 2018’s disastrous Fyre Festival, Netflix’s offering got more access to the major players behind the farce than its (still impressive) Amazon Prime rival. Entrepreneur Billy McFarlane and pop star Ja Rule set out to host the world’s first luxury music festival on a private Bahamian Island– enlisting Insta-famous models such as Bella Hadid to build hype – but ended up creating an end-of-days hellscape of mass panic and broken promises.

Upon landing, festival-goers who paid up to $12,000 for tickets soon realise they’ve been swindled and stranded, left with no power, little food and mere tents to protect them against the tropical rainstorm. It isn’t long until things get very Lord of the Flies, and while the opportunity for schadenfreude is high, many innocent people's lives are left irreversible changed by McFarlane’s crookedness.

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"To those who are enthralled by mountains, their wonder is beyond all dispute. To those who are not, their allure is a kind of madness. What is this strange force that draws us upwards?"

So asks Willem Dafoe, the suitably dramatic narrator of this spine-tinglingly beautiful documentary from Australian filmmaker Jennifer Peedom. Soundtracked by stirring music from the Australian Chamber Orchestra and packed with stunning sky-high footage, it doesn't exactly shy from 'colonial' criticisms many Western mountaineers receive, but it is first and foremost a love story to mountains and the brave souls who try to conquer them.

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Some sports stars go down in history for all the wrong reasons. They humiliate themselves on the world-stage, say, or throw a wobbly on major television. Sometimes they’re just left to flounder out of their depth for far too long, and their careers become a running joke. Whatever the case, their legacies are cemented in the public consciousness for generations. Almost all athletes lose, but not all athletes are ‘losers’.

But these reputations are rarely fair, and they never tell the whole story. That’s why director Mickey Duzyj decided to delve into the lives of these ridiculed and scorned figures across different sporting disciplines: to bring attention to their strengths, rather than their moments of weakness. Through beautiful animation and touching interviews, he does just that.

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Falls from grace rarely come more tragic than Whitney Houston’s death in a hotel bathtub in 2012.The questions how and why persist, and this documentary from Nick Broomfield attempts to at least consider the possible factors. The first half explores her gospel roots, family ties and characterful personality, most of which appears to have been suppressed or downplayed as Houston’s ‘Queen of Pop’ image was carefully marketed to appeal to a largely white audience. Broomfield shares directing credits with Rudi Dolezal, in order to secure the latter’s archive footage from her 1999 World Tour, which dominates the second half of the film. This fly on the wall footage is undeniably compelling, though you’re left feeling the film relies on it too much. Many questions remain unanswered and, when it happens, her decline feels just as shocking here as it did at the time.

In an era in which, for most of us, our greatest daily professional achievement in not breaking wind during a Zoom call, there’s something deeply edifying about this documentary following a team of Egyptian archaeologists as they excavate a breathtaking tomb in Bubasteion Necropolis, an Ancient burial site west of Cairo.

They’re a veritable A-team of experts – Salima’s specialism is animal mummies! Nermeen and Nabil can read hieroglyphics like they’re the back of cereal boxes! – and, though director James Tovell is keen to whip up the drama (will they make any major new discoveries before their funding runs out? Gasp?!) it is watching these bona fide brainboxes at work that really gives you your kicks. Also, there’s not a single posh white English bloke in a dish-dash. Refreshing.

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