The 15 Best Documentaries of 2017

I’ll admit that documentaries aren’t necessarily my jam – it’s not that I don’t like them, it’s that the way I’m wired I tend to find more truth in fiction than in fact – but I’m happy to watch them, and happier still when they strike me the way that narrative featuresp do. So here I am writing about Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow for Paste Magazine’s annual list of the year’s best docs, which also happens to include a blurb from my review of Trophy. (It also happens to include a blurb for one of the films on my top ten list, though don’t think for a second I’m going to give that one away just yet. It’s not time! Hold your horses, there, you eager beaver.) 

Having seen most of these, I’d recommend them all, especially Rat Film, of course Human Flow, Faces Places, Trophy, and Karl Marx City, which I wrote about last year and still hold in high regard.