The 50 best documentaries of all time

Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)

America braced itself for Michael Moore's rage—during a presidential election year, no less. But no one expected the emotional gut punch of interviewee Lila Lipscomb, a patriotic army mother turned disbeliever. Moore's defiant success (it's still the highest-grossing doc of all time) had a massive impact, if not quite the intended result.—Joshua Rothkopf

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The Last Waltz (1978)

Grabbing the brass ring of technical wizardry, Martin Scorsese took the Band's final concert, an intimate San Francisco event tinged with bitterness, and turned it into myth. In many ways, the musicians come off like downbeat characters in a Scorsese picture, one as potent as Taxi Driver.—Joshua Rothkopf

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An Inconvenient Truth (2006)

A politician using facts instead of fabrications—imagine that! Former Vice President Al Gore (working with director Davis Guggenheim) lays out the causes, effects and potential solutions to global warming in an entertainingly persuasive doc that made PowerPoint presentations exciting and spoke strongly to environmentalists.—Keith Uhlich

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When We Were Kings (1996)

Leon Gast's definitive look at the Ali-Foreman "Rumble in the Jungle" is more than just a great-moments-in-sports doc. It's an insightful portrait of Ali as a 20th-century icon transformed into a symbol of tenacity for a beleaguered continent—and proof that the charismatic champ was indeed "the greatest."—David Fear

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A Grin Without a Cat (1977)

A towering, decade-spanning political chronicle summing up nothing less than an international spirit of change, Chris Marker's epic journey takes on Che and Fidel, Vietnam and Chile, Parisian riots and California flower children. The result, beautifully resigned, is a difficult but essential work.—Joshua Rothkopf

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Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (2007)

Stones do the speaking in John Gianvito's stirring experimental doc, composed entirely of images of marked and unmarked grave sites across the United States. Tracing a quietly bracing history of the American Left (we visit the resting places of, among others, Eugene V. Debs and Elizabeth Cady Stanton), the film is an ode to the power of protest.—Keith Uhlich

F for Fake (1973)

Here's yet more evidence that Orson Welles didn't just disappoint after Citizen Kane. Toward the end of his working career, the feisty director mounted this sly, quietly groundbreaking study of the art of lying, one that flits from hoaxer Clifford Irving to Welles's own fake alien invasion, The War of the Worlds.—Joshua Rothkopf

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The Battle of Chile (1975–79)

Patricio Guzmn's three-part doc offers a comprehensive, 360-degree view of Augusto Pinochet's rise to power, as seen through the eyes of everybody from Marxist peasants to the military brass who staged the coup. The combination of big-picture history lessons and newsreel immediacy continues to inspire lefty documentarians and frontline filmmakers.—David Fear

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Monterey Pop (1968)

The first major rock festival of the '60s gave birth to the first major concert film of the era, with D.A Pennebaker paying as much attention to a burgeoning sense of a counterculture as he does to the music itself (though the footage of the Who, Otis Redding and Jimi Hendrix setting his guitar on fire, to name three, is epochal). Something was indeed brewing; Pennebaker lets us see the pot being stirred.—David Fear

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Man on Wire (2008)

On an early, gray morning in August 1974, tightrope-walker Philippe Petit stepped out into an impossible void, the space between the Twin Towers, and danced for an hour. No other film, fictional or otherwise, more fully restores—poetically, with antic humor—our city's loss as does James Marsh's stunner.—Joshua Rothkopf

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