Our Favorite Netflix Original Documentaries

Plus: We review Spike Lee's remarkable new movie, Da 5 Bloods

Jun 19, 2020

We’ve given you our top 10 Netflix Original movies, so now it’s time to recommend a few Netflix Original documentaries. Netflix has been churning out docs in the last several years, many of them extraordinary. With American Factory and Icarus, they have won two of the last three Academy Awards for Best Documentary.

Below you will find three very different, but very worthwhile, Netflix Original docs. Let us know which ones we didn’t pick that you’d recommend. And stick around for our review of Spike Lee’s new Netflix movie, Da 5 Bloods.

Drew recommends...

13th (streaming on Netflix and YouTube)

13th only came out a few years ago, but I’m guessing they are already showing it in schools. In just one hour and 40 minutes, this documentary carefully shows you how the United States ended up with a quarter of the world’s prison population, and why African American men make up such a shockingly disproportionate percentage of it. 13th is a dense and educational doc that nonetheless never feels like homework. It’s one of the very best Netflix Original docs and especially significant right now.

Mass incarceration and racism in America are heavy topics, but director Ava DuVernay keeps things moving in her documentary by covering a lot of ground without it feeling rushed. Her interviews with a host of credible and serious-minded activists, historians, and politicians flesh out her main argument, which is that even after the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery black people have been disadvantaged and controlled through Jim Crow laws and mass incarceration. You won’t know everything after a single 100-minute doc, but 13th is a great starting point to learn about the history of the prison-industrial complex and how the war on drugs has affected minority communities. It’s a frequently eye-opening and infuriating watch that won’t allow you to just go on with your day afterwards.

DuVernay has started to make a career out of translating the history of U.S. race relations on screen in a straightforward and compelling manner. In 2014, she directed Selma, which chronicled Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s struggle to gain equal voting rights via the Selma marches. Just last year she made the Netflix miniseries When They See Us, about the Central Park Five. While both of those have their merits, I think 13th is her most effective piece of storytelling. It’s impressive how efficiently this doc lays out our devastating current day problem and how we got here. And yet, 13th ends with a note of hope that change could be underway.

FYRE (streaming on Netflix)

Way back in early 2019, a much simpler time, two different documentaries came out almost simultaneously to tell the story of a catastrophic music festival. Hulu released Fyre Fraud and a few days later Netflix dropped FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened. What event could merit this kind of coverage? Fyre Festival, the expensive (and fraudulent) 2017 music festival set in the Bahamas. It turns out that a very public disaster of greed, incompetence, and fraud makes for great documentary material.

FYRE, the Netflix doc, tracks the behind the scenes developments leading up to and following the infamous Fyre Festival. It’s a wildly entertaining portrait of stunning hubris and brazen manipulation by co-founders Billy McFarland and rapper Ja Rule, as well as countless others that enabled their delusional scheme. Director Chris Smith (who also directed the phenomenal Jim Carrey doc, Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond), gets insider sources to open up about what went wrong and how it all came crashing down.

(I never watched the Hulu doc, because they actually paid McFarland for an interview. I wasn’t interested in hearing him talk about why he ripped off so many people. However, it’s worth noting that the Netflix doc was produced in partnership with two groups that helped promote the festival, so both docs had their ethical issues.)

FYRE tells this ridiculous story with hilarious incredulity, zeroing in on how our culture’s celebrity and image-obsessed nature bears some of the blame, since celebrities posting about the festival on Instagram is how it became so big in the first place. However, while FYRE allows for some fun schadenfreude at the expense of rich kids that paid thousands of dollars for a fake music festival, the doc does still take the time to spotlight how McFarland’s scam affected hundreds of local workers in the Bahamas that were abandoned without being paid for their services. McFarland is in prison for wire fraud right now, so you can rest assured that someone was held accountable for this crazy mess. You will watch FYRE in disbelief that it even happened in the first place.

Billy recommends…

Shirkers (streaming on Netflix)

It is amazing how certain areas of the world are able to have their “new wave” and others are struggling to have access to film in general. Singapore is an area that needed to take bold avenues to find movies that so many areas had easy access to. Shirkers tells the story of three women who are film enthusiasts. Their limited access to classic and new films forced them to trust their friend Georges Cardona to facilitate their vision for a movie that should have been influential.

The “them” focuses on Sandi, Jasmine, and Sophia who grew up in Singapore watching anything that they could get their hands on. Sandi being the driving force behind their cinephile upbringing. Her path to movies is like many connoisseurs. While struggling to find commonality in her own world she was drawn to films that are fantastical, but relatable. Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotapes being the movie that brought Cardona and Sandi together. Cardona brought a face and security to the films that Sandi loved. Sandi took her interest in film and created a community that brought Jasmine and Sophia into the mix. A friendship that unexpectedly turned professional and because of Cardona’s involvement the professional took a turn that was unexpected.

Sandi, Jasmine, and Sophia have talents that should allow them to have had the influence that they desire. Instead they wanted to or felt like they had to put their dreams into the self-proclaimed connected Hollywood director that they could trust. This is where Shirkers takes a lot of bold claims, but I love the conversation behind it. Shirkers claims that this movie would have changed the way we would have thought about film. While the claim may be true I think that the goal of this documentary, Shirkers, was to show the indie or “new wave” has a flaw.

The claim that this movie would have changed the world is premature, but Singapore had never had much of an opportunity to create their own wave. The western film world has a Christopher Columbus vibe after Shirkers ends. While not nearly as sinister it is absolutely apprehensive to the advancement to other film cultures. Shirkers is incredibly entertaining while creating a commentary on cinema that is worthy of the critique.

Recent Release Mini-Reviews

Da 5 Bloods (streaming on Netflix)

Drew: Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods is a Vietnam war drama and buddy comedy wrapped up in a treasure-hunting adventure movie -- and, somehow, it’s so much more than even that convoluted genre description. Spike usually packs a lot into his films, and it doesn’t always work, but I was riveted by his latest. It had me chuckling, anxiously biting my nails, and also thoughtfully considering our nation’s difficult past (and present), sometimes all in one scene.

Spike takes an ambitious aim in Da 5 Bloods, focusing mainly on America’s misguided involvement in Vietnam and how our country treated its black soldiers when they came back. The historical context he weaves in is fascinating, as documentary footage from the 60s and 70s drops in alongside the compelling fictional narrative we are watching. With terrific performances across the board and a resonant soundtrack (mostly due to Marvin Gaye), Spike’s new movie is up there with the best work of his 35-year career. - 4.5 / 5 Apples

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