This Is the Best Documentary of All Time

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Nov 4, 9:57AM EDT · Published Nov 4, 7:30AM EDT

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Documentaries are a major and important part of films and film history. The Academy Award has a category for Best Documentary Feature, and “My Octopus Teacher” won this year. There is also one for Best Documentary Shorts. Most of these are obscure movies, compared to those that win such categories as Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor and Actress. Few make it into theater distribution across America’s 4,000 plus theaters. They are also rarely promoted by streaming services like Amazon and Netflix.

To identify the best documentary of all time, 24/7 Tempo reviewed the 22,407 movies in our database for which data was available from both IMDb, an online movie database owned by Amazon, and Rotten Tomatoes, an online movie and TV review aggregator. We developed an index using average IMDb ratings and a combination of audience scores and Tomatometer scores on Rotten Tomatoes. Ties were broken based on the number of IMDb votes. Directorial credits come from IMDb.

Some of those we considered are heart-wrenching narratives straight from the mouths of people who survived some of the worst atrocities of our times, including the Holocaust and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many are concerts and band biographies. Others are inspiring accounts of great athletic feats and the perseverance of those who accomplished them.

Many of the documentaries we considered are calls to arms, delving into current crises with empathy and urgency and covering topics such as racism, income inequality and environmental devastation. At their best, documentaries have the power to shape how we view the world and to motivate change.
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The best documentary of all time is “O.J.: Made in America” (2016), directed by Ezra Edelman. It has an IMDb average rating of 8.9 (18,706 votes) and a Rotten Tomatoes audience score of 98% (1,747 votes).

This five-part miniseries explores racial tensions, violence, celebrity and achievement in America through the story of former football star O.J. Simpson, delving not only into his trial for the murder of his ex-wife but also his conviction for robbery in 2008.

Click here to read about the 50 best documentaries of all time.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.