Best Netflix documentaries to watch right now

An exhaustive nine-episode history of the Cold War focuses on the shadow that was cast over the back half of the 20th century by nuclear weapons.

The hour-long first instalment tells the story of the Americans fearing a German nuclear bomb in the Second World War, before using one themselves in Japan. With that in everyone’s minds, the series charts the establishment of the Soviet Union and how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has re-ignited the fear that humanity could destroy itself at any moment.

Jack Seale

This Oscar-nominated documentary about a fight for justice begins with the shocking revelation that a 13-year-old girl was raped by three young men in a village in Jharkhand, India. Her father Ranjit is blamed for not protecting her honour and bids to bring the rapists to court.

Director Nisha Pahuja creates real intimacy by using an observational style and the film offers an enlightening, enraging look at Indian masculinity.

James Mottram

Taking extreme action to control “troubled teens” has become an unpleasant global industry, particularly in America and at a mysterious facility in New York state called Ivy Ridge, which operated between 2001 and 2009.

Former pupils return there in a shocking documentary series from Katherine Kubler that details how, once Ivy Ridge had convinced parents to hand their errant teens over, those kids were subjected to horrendous psychological and physical abuse. It’s a heartbreaking, jaw-dropping story.

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If you like a juicy conspiracy, you’ll not want to miss a new series from the producers of Wild, Wild Country. In 1991, investigative journalist Danny Casolaro told friends he was visiting Martinsburg in West Virginia to meet a source for a story about “The Octopus”, a network of eight extremely powerful individuals who had raised eyebrows in America in the years before. Casolaro said if anything were to happen to him, it would be murder…

As it re-investigates Casolaro’s death, the programme tries to cut through a thick knot of intrigue.

Jack Seale

Here’s one of those true-crime documentaries where there isn’t definitely a crime, but there are a lot of unpleasant hidden truths ready to come out. Indrani Mukerjea was a celebrated Indian media executive, who had come from nothing to achieve fortune and respect — then in 2015, she was charged with killing a close family member who’d gone missing three years earlier.

While the timeline of the case and the various theories surrounding it are laid out, the series has a trump-card interviewee to make sure you keep watching: Indrani Mukerjea.

Jack Seale

In 2022, Matthew Hardy was sentenced to nine years in prison — the longest custodial term ever handed down in British history for online stalking. Hardy used multiple accounts, sending phishing messages to his victims’ loved ones and deploying a relentless energy for harassment to terrify his targets, several of whom tell their stories in this atmospheric two-part true-crime doc.

We also see how, gradually, victims and police officers managed to narrow down who and where Hardy was — but not before he’d been harassing women for more than a decade.

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A textbook true-crime documentary that offers romance, jealousy, obsession and violence, in that order, as we follow the queasy undulations and hairpin turns in a case that compelled onlookers and befuddled law enforcers. Newly single Omaha mechanic Dave rejoins the dating scene, hooking up first with Cari, then with Liz. When the two women become aware of each other, Dave begins to receive threatening phone messages — the start of a mysterious harassment campaign that ends in homicide.

You may well guess the big twist, but the details along the way are consistently jaw-dropping.

Jack Seale

Archive footage is combined with Albert Einstein’s own words, including scenes of dramatic reconstruction, in a feature-length documentary exploring the decision that defined the final decade of the great scientist’s life. Having fled from the Nazis, Einstein joined a group of physicists who warned the US about the potential threat from a German nuclear bomb.

When the Americans then created and used such a weapon but the Germans failed to, Einstein was left analysing his own actions and trying to deal with insurmountable guilt.

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France, the 1970s: a man called Claude Vorilhon rebrands as “Raël”, claims to have received deep wisdom from aliens and starts a cult, a way for him to overcome his eccentric hairdo and convince vulnerable women to devote themselves to him.

Up to that point, this documentary series tells a familiar, if still disturbing tale of hysteria and deception, with some cracking archive footage of furious arguments on French TV talk shows. Once “Raëlism” takes off it arrives in unexpected places and propels its leader to global notoriety.

The series interviews the mercurial man himself.

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The makers of The Tinder Swindler are behind this docuseries that takes us back to 2015 in Vallejo, California. Denise Huskins and her boyfriend Aaron Quinn were disturbed in the night by home invaders, who then kidnapped Huskins. She was returned after a hellish two-day ordeal, but the situation almost got worse for the couple from then on, because the police thought their story didn’t add up.

As the papers get hold of a story they dubbed “the real Gone Girl”, a twisted tale develops about what happens when the truth is too implausible to believe.

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European rugby’s annual international competition is captured in an intense, Drive to Survive-style documentary, charting the ups and downs of the 2023 Six Nations championship. Interviewees including Scotland’s Finn Russell and Ireland’s Andrew Porter discuss the business of technique and tactics and also the mental and physical strains of playing rugby union at the highest level.

It shows just how brutal — and majestic — the game can be when it’s played properly.

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Netflix evidently likes this particular documentary format, which jazzes up a regular collection of archive footage and eyewitness interviews by packaging them into a sardonic how-to guide, slyly narrated by Game of Thrones actor Peter Dinklage.

Having previously affected to teach viewers how to be a cult leader and how to be a tyrant, now it offers guidance on emulating Al Capone, Pablo Escobar, John Gotti and more, by laying out the key characteristics of a properly scary gangster. Many of the stories told are classics.

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Leaving aside the choice of host country, the 2022 World Cup in Qatar was an undeniably fantastic tournament, culminating in a historic triumph for Lionel Messi and Argentina. Here’s the Fifa-sanctioned documentary re-living all the action, with the games filmed by ground-level cameras in that nicely intense way these programmes tend to have — and interviews with Messi, Ronaldo, Mbappé, Kane and many more of the tournament’s stars.

Sadly, Harry Kane’s second penalty attempt against France still doesn’t go in.

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Very old film that has been digitally restored and colourised always has an eerie, unreal feel to it, and this documentary admits it combines footage from different events to create a cohesive whole. But take all that on board and this is a stunningly immersive revisiting of World War Two, pitching us right into armed combat and the chaos of civilians trying to survive the Nazis.

From being able to count individual bullets inside a Luftwaffe cockpit in episode one, to hiding out with the resurgent French resistance in episode five, the immediacy of the images is breathtaking.

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The Catholic Church loves a holy relic. This four-part documentary series gains access to hallowed sites across the world, to look at or go on the hunt for some of the faith’s most sought-after treasures, from the Crown of Thorns to the Holy Grail. Do they really have the power to create miracles?

As it looks at the powerful emotional effect the chattels of Christianity can have on believers, the series also explores the ability of faith itself to transport and inspire the faithful.

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When New York mob boss Paul Castellano was gunned down in December 1985, everyone in the Mafia and the police knew who was responsible: rival gangster and the new head of the Gambino family, John Gotti. He had taken a risk by having his superior killed, and law enforcement saw a chance to bring him down. But could they prove it in court?

A colourful documentary takes us back to the Big Apple in the mid-80s, a somewhat benighted, crime-ridden place that came alive when a media circus developed around the case — mainly because Gotti was so visibly enjoying every second of it.

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The animal world of today is just a brief snapshot of an endless epic story; these are the survivors of evolutionary battles and natural disasters that have been raging for millennia. Using the latest CGI, the freshest scientific breakthroughs and the epic, gravelly tones of Morgan Freeman as narrator, a new natural history series revitalises the stories of dinosaurs and other ancient creatures who ruled the earth, until one day they were lost for ever.

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Vjeran Tomic’s most famous Paris heist was on the Musée d’Art Moderne in 2010, when he half-inched a Matisse, a Picasso, a Braque, a Léger and a Modigliani from under the guards’ noses — but that was a regular theft, achieved by cutting through a padlock and breaking a window. The Parisian criminal community has greater respect for his earlier work, when he would break into top-floor luxury flats by climbing up freestyle and leaping from roof to roof.

This film combines head-camera re-enactments with the words of Tomic himself.

Jack Seale

Many fictional horror stories have been inspired by it, but factual telly hasn’t examined the 1981 murder of Alan Bono in Brookfield, Connecticut, in much depth until now. Many of those involved tell their stories for the first time in this documentary, as it revisits the “Devil Made Me Do It” case — the killer claimed that he was not guilty on grounds of demonic possession.

As the case became the focus of “demonologists” and paranormal investigators as well as reporters, a disturbing backstory emerged. The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, a horror movie based on the case, is also on Netflix.

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A gentle, intimate half-hour documentary follows Milana, a Ukrainian girl, as she arrives in the Austrian Alps and — accompanied by her grandmother, Olga — enrols in a week-long summer camp. They have fled the war with Russia and now young Milana faces an uncertain future. The resilience and bravery she’ll need in life are about to be tested as she attempts some vertiginous climbing activities, with the trauma of what she’s already experienced still raw.

It’s a simple but stirring metaphor for the struggles of kids displaced by conflict, and an inspiring story in its own right.

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It remains one of the oddest cases in British criminal history. In April 1999, Jill Dando — not just a BBC presenter and newsreader but the highest-profile TV personality in the country, widely admired for her easy relatability and Princess Diana-esque air of elegant glamour — was shot dead in broad daylight on her own doorstep, and we still have no idea who did it or why.

This three-part documentary sifts through every element of the mystery, from the initial shock and the multiple theories on who might have been responsible, to the fraught murder trial two years later that proved to be a miscarriage of justice. It’s one of those true-crime docs that, at every turn, unleashes an interviewee whose insight or unusual demeanour adds another layer of intrigue.

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New Netflix docuseries Encounters explores four true stories of human contact with otherworldly phenomena, featuring revelations from military whistleblowers of alien encounters, UFOs and clandestine Pentagon programmes, as well as coverage from major news corporations.

Each episode dives into a different encounter, whether it be with a submersible spacecraft off the coast of a Welsh village or an alien encounter experienced by a group of children in Zimbabwe.

Katelyn Mensah

The accident during Stage 8 of this year’s Tour de France, which broke Mark Cavendish’s collarbone and put him out of the race, isn’t the news background this documentary’s producers would have chosen. Then again, it is a story of struggle and bad luck as well as great triumph: with intimate access to Mark Cavendish himself as well as his family and his colleagues, it charts how Cavendish’s comeback performance in the 2021 Tour de France ended five years of injury, illness and depression.

Like Netflix’s recent documentary Tour de France: Unchained, it brings home the sheer intensity of elite cycling

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