Best Netflix documentaries to watch right now

In 2022, violent career criminal Casey White was escorted out of jail in Alabama by the prison’s assistant director, Vicky White (no relation), to attend a mental health assessment. The appointment wasn’t real and the pair never returned, having fallen in love while Casey awaited his murder trial.

Gradually, law enforcement and the prison authorities realised the lengths Vicky had gone to in order to pull off the outrageous escape, but that still left the big question: where were they?

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American wrestling is a global phenomenon thanks to one man: longtime CEO and occasional face of the “sport”, Vince McMahon. He made stars of Hulk Hogan, The Rock and the rest, as well as becoming an entertainment brand himself, until allegations around steroid abuse among the wrestlers and, more gravely, sexual abuse by the boss himself brought the circus to a halt.

This series tells the story of a world where, for better but then for worse, everything was artificial and everyone was playing a character.

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A two-part documentary by Ryan White, director of the excellent The Keepers. In 2010, a woman named Cathy Terkanian heard that the girl she had given up for adoption 35 years before was missing. But the disappearance was a long time ago, too: Terkanian’s daughter had not been seen since 1989.

Remarkably, she embarked on a relentless crusade to solve the case, initially armed with nothing more than a mother’s instinct and perseverance, until a band of internet sleuths popped up to share the burden.

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”Houston, we’ve had a problem...” Travel back to a fraught six days in April 1970 with a documentary revisiting an ill-fated voyage to the Moon that had the world biting its fingernails. A blown oxygen tank meant a three-man Nasa crew had to abandon plans for a lunar landing and slingshot their way around the Moon and back home, improvising technological solutions and eking out meagre supplies.

Archive footage re-creates the thrill of the moment, and shows us a lot of sideburned men looking very worried indeed.

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True-crime series Worst Roommate Ever has proved a hit for Netflix, with cases involving cons, stalking and even murder between people living under the same roof, covered across two seasons. Lovers rather than lodgers are at the heart of this new spin-off. Four chilling cases include a custody battle that took a sinister turn and a murder plot that was hatched following a divorce.

Each story unfolds via police recordings and interviews, while animated sequences add further detail to each terrible story.

Frances Taylor

The reliably excellent sports documentary strand scoops up a recent story that you probably won’t be aware of — unless, that is, you follow American college football.

The interviewee is Connor Stalions, an analyst who lost his job at the University of Michigan last year when he was accused of “sign-stealing”. But for someone like Stalions, is it cheating to work out what the opposition are about to do, by learning their secret hand signals? Or is it just being good at your job?

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An American social programme that reconnects imprisoned fathers with their daughters forms the basis of this remarkable documentary. The film follows four families as the men and girls discuss their regrets, fears and wishes surrounding a planned prom-style event held within the prison.

The “Date with Dad” dance itself is chronicled at length in a strongly moving sequence, but it’s the extended aftermath that drives home the film’s complex, political themes of despair and hope.

Calum Baker

Lhakpa Sherpa broke records as the first woman to reach the summit of Everest multiple times. Lucy Walker’s intriguing film joins Lhakpa as she’s working in a Connecticut store, raising two teenage daughters who know little of her former career. But given the chance to tackle Everest one more time, she can’t resist.

The climbing footage is exhilarating, but the film’s unique emotional backbone comes from Lhakpa’s efforts to move on following an abusive marriage.

James Mottram

A warning to those scared of heights: this may destroy you. Russian “rooftoppers” Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus travel the world to scale mankind’s biggest structures, usually illegally. They scurry up staircases, cranes and antennae and make tricksy poses, risking jail or death for an Instagram shot or €500 from a sponsor.

Filmed over six years, this true-life thriller offers some smaller, more personal moments of reflection, but it’s the staggering climbing scenes that stick.

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To the Netherlands for a bewildering tale of deception and strangeness. We meet women who logged onto a sperm-donation website, met a donor without quite following the usual checks and protocols, and ended up conceiving a child — before realising later on that they were among hundreds who had all unwittingly accepted sperm from the same man.

How and why anyone would want to pull such a trick is the central mystery, but when the women band together to investigate, the story gets weirder.

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Behind that rather blasé title is a true-crime series telling tales of domestic horror: season one included the stories of a lodger who would trick his way in and then refuse to leave, and a kindly Sacramento pensioner who ran a boarding house for the homeless, but was really a serial killer. The latest, second run has further creepy recollections, including one about a housemate who seems to be trying to impersonate a poltergeist.

Since it’s mostly interviewees relating their experiences, the show sometimes fills in the gaps with animation, an unusual solution that works well.

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It’s 50 years since one of the most astonishing archaeological discoveries of all time: an 8,000-strong army of terracotta figures, buried in 210 BC to protect Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, in the afterlife.

From the makers of Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb, this feature-length documentary looks at how the terracotta soldiers were unearthed, what further finds followed, and why they lay buried for so long: Qin’s legacy was not, for quite a while at least, what he would have intended.

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To 1990s Seattle for a feature documentary telling the story of an extraordinary criminal. The city’s judicial and financial institutions became ever more incensed by a series of bank robberies, carried out by a charismatic rebel who went by the name of Hollywood, conducted his business like a movie villain and vanished after every job. What kind of man was he? Would they ever catch him?

Dramatised scenes and even animation complement first-hand testimonies as the tale builds towards one last, all-or-nothing heist.

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The Nuremberg trials are the centre point of a documentary series that looks at the rise of Adolf Hitler and the sheer scale of Nazi wrongdoing, asking how it happened and whether it could happen again. Historians analyse how the dictator tapped into existing feelings within Germany, convincing apparently ordinary folk to help exterminate an entire people.

Among the uncomfortable questions posed is whether the trials could ever possibly provide satisfactory justice.

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Even in the super-savvy social media era, it seems young people can still be brainwashed into joining a good old-fashioned cult. That is, at least, the accusation levelled in this documentary series against an unusual Los Angeles pastor, who as well as running his own church was the boss of a management company that found and nurtured young dancers who had risen to fame on TikTok.

Loved ones describe a familiar pattern of all contact being broken — this time by use of the “block” button.

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The dating website Ashley Madison is still a going concern in North America, but in 2015 it became a notorious fable of the digital era. It had set itself up as a facilitator of married people’s affairs. But then hackers obtained and released the very private personal details of the people who’d signed up.

In this documentary series, the site’s disgruntled users and the businessman behind Ashley Madison compete furiously to see who can be less endearing.

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This documentary explores the history of policing in the US, tracing its development since the country’s first force was formed, in 1838 Boston. Director Yance Ford (Oscar-nominated for Strong Island, about a similar topic) makes his points clearly, using interviews and often shocking archive footage to note the police’s foundational aims and limitations, as well as its disturbing evolution into an effective militia.

It’s a calmly presented primer to a vital social issue, though offers little new thinking.

Calum Baker

The latest archaeological finds are the soil-encrusted backbone of a documentary that looks hundreds of thousands of years back in time. The Neanderthals were spread right across what is now Europe, and evidence of their lives is still there below ground — it suggests that they might have been mentally and spiritually more advanced than was previously thought. But then they suffered a calamity that could bear some lessons for us today.

The story is lent gravitas by narration from Patrick Stewart.

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A case that shocked Canada in 2010 is recalled in this feature-length true-crime documentary. Police receive an emergency call from Jennifer Pan, a young Vietnamese-Canadian woman who lives with her parents and has suffered a lethal home invasion: gunmen have entered the house, killed her mother and left her father seriously wounded.

As the investigation goes on, however, secrets about Pan’s past, and the fact that her father is not dead, allow the even darker real story to be uncovered.

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Almost no animals live in true isolation, and the natural world’s interconnectedness is the theme of a handsomely filmed documentary series, narrated by Cate Blanchett.

It travels the world looking at how the living creatures within different ecosystems rely on each other’s existence to survive — and shows that sometimes those networks spread more widely than you think. Its other main point is that almost every such system is affected by the actions of one animal in particular — us.

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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.

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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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