The Best Netflix Documentaries Of 2019 (So Far)
We're living through a golden age of documentaries. In fact, this age might be slightly too golden. It can get a bit disorientating, wading through the streaming swamp and trying to pick out something to watch. You might get lucky and land on Wild Wild Country or Pumping Iron. Or you might panic and accidentally find yourself 20 minutes into The Pyramid Code, wondering exactly why you've never heard that the Great Pyramids at Giza were built by the aliens as secret water purification plants.
So, to help, use this handy guide. Netflix has had a glut of great new docs join its enormous roster since the start of this year, and these are our picks.
Losers
"If you are first you are first," Bill Shankly famously observed. "If you are second, you are nowhere." Shanks probably wouldn't have got very far without that attitude, obviously, but this anthology series, which mixes archive, new interviews and some gorgeous animation, shows that a defeat can be much more richly fascinating than any victory.
Some of the sporting stories told on Losers rank among the most famous of all time, like Jean Van De Velde's heartbreaking meltdown on the final hole at the 1999 Open Championship. Needing just a double-bogey six on the final hole for a shock victory, he ended up shin-deep in a water hazard, triple-bogeyed to seven and lost a three-way play-off. Others are much more obscure, like the great rivalry in Canadian curling which led the loser to radically reinvent the whole game and nearly kill it stone dead in the process, or a life-and-death duel during a dog sled race in Nebraska.
What ties them all together is the examination of the psychological trauma of losing and - just as importantly - how true personal victories aren't necessarily found at the top of the podium.
Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened
We can argue about which of the two ethically compromised Fyre documentaries is the more ethically compromised Fyre documentary until the cows come home to find their shed is actually a soiled hurricane relief tent. This one was co-produced by the festival's marketing team, who you might suspect would want to minimise the scale of their involvement and responsibility for the fiasco; the Hulu one paid Billy McFarland a sweet sum for his interview. Neither is squeaky clean, but the intrigue here adds another layer of meta weirdness to the story even, though it's more than strange and incredible enough on its own to bear repeated watches.
Every two or three minutes or so, some new jaw-dropping rock bottom moment arrives. Andy King's commitment to getting hold of that bottled water provided the memes, but there are so many mad details - Billy's executive jetski, people pissing on mattresses, Billy setting up another scam while out on bail - that it all gets a bit overwhelming. It also makes a decent fist of pointing out the wreckage that this hubris left behind for the people of Exuma in the Bahamas, and that this was something far more serious than a party that went wrong.
Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story
Martin Scorsese's film about Bob Dylan's 1975 American theatre tour is a much more interesting take on your classic Ageing Rock Legend's Concert Film than the usual, and definitely a far more fitting way of exploring Dylan's mythos than a compilation of audiences holding up lighters through 'Knockin' On Heaven's Door'.
It's partly a concert film, yes, but it also works in fictional characters like documentarian Stefan van Dorp (actually actor Martin von Haselberg) and fictionalised remembrances by real people. It's a series of sly misdirections, knowing homages and deadpan gags. But then there's the very genuinely electrifying performance itself, which restates exactly why this tour is so legendary.
Knock Down the House
After two years of Donald Trump's presidency, the race to get into Congress in the 2018 midterms was one of the more urgent campaigns in recent American political history. Rachel Lears was there to document it by following four women standing for the Democrats to challenge establishment Republicans: Paula Jean Swearingen from West Virginia; Cori Bush from Missouri; Amy Vilela from Nevada; and the midterms' breakout star, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York.
Each has a uniquely fascinating motivation which draws them into politics, but the film's great strength is that it doesn't over-egg the human drama, instead sticking sternly to a more spartan fly-on-the-wall style which lets their stories and convictions speak for themselves. It's a vindication of the slightly old-fashioned idea that politics can be noble, heartfelt and courageous, and an extremely welcome reminder that there are loads of people with the energy to enthuse everyone about democracy again.
Abducted In Plain Sight
Fair warning: this, which is from 2017 but only landed on Netflix this year, is not a knockabout Saturday night flick. It starts out as a fairly conventional - if harrowing - account of how Jan Broberg Felt was kidnapped by a neighbour and sexually assaulted at the age of 12. But there are so many twists and turns which come afterwards: the way Felt's abuser forced her to comply by convincing her that aliens wanted her to give birth to the saviour of their civilisation, a second kidnapping, bizarre parenting decisions and an unexpected menage-a-trois.
It's a story about how trust can be abused and where naivety ends and neglect begins. AIt also shows what an absurd attitude America had toward protecting children in the very recent past. It can be extremely gruelling viewing, but with so many surprising turns and narrative whiplash moments, this is a doc you've got to see to believe.
Our Planet
Even if Sir David Attenborough's defection to Netflix from the BBC felt like something of a betrayal to his home nation, this eight-parter is an ultra high-end rendering of the world's natural wonders in a similarly cinematic and stirring style as his past series.
Our Planet, though, goes further than most of Attenborough's previous shows in hammering home exactly how badly humans are ruining the planet, emphasising the way that seemingly unconnected habitats and species are codependent on each other. It's as unflinching in its depiction of the current desolation of the planet as it is joyous in showing how diverse, strange and beautiful Earth still is.
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