Best Netflix documentaries to watch right now

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.

Jack Seale

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.

Jack Seale

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.

Jack Seale

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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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Jack Seale