2022 offered a slate of great documentaries covering everything from political activism (All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Navalny) to unconventional love stories (Fire of Love). In this guide, we’ve compiled a list of the 30 best documentaries from 2022 and where you can stream them.
One of the best documentaries of the year is Navalny, which picked up the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature at the 95th Academy Awards. The documentary follows the story of Alexei Navalny, the world-famous Russian politician (and former presidential candidate) who was poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent in 2020. Other contenders in the category included All That Breathes, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Fire of Love and A House Made of Splinters.
Although it wasn’t an Oscar-nominee, fans could finally enjoy the long-awaited Jackass reunion with another unhinged daredevil doc, Jackass Forever. The year also marked the release of Netflix’s The Tinder Swindler – a stranger-than-fiction story of a group of women who were swindled by a serial online manipulator. It broke Netflix’s viewership records at the time, becoming the streaming service’s most watched documentary ever. Netflix also produced 2022 docs such as Bad Vegan: Fame. Fraud. Fugitives. and Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist.
2022 was also the year popular streaming services ramped up their efforts to produce behind-the-scenes documentaries about their original content. For example, Disney+ released Lawrence Kasdan’s Light and Magic, a six-episode series showing the development of Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) and the company’s enduring impact on how movies are made to this day. Netflix followed suit with a behind-the-scenes look at Guillermo del Toro’s award-winning stop-motion animation, Pinocchio. There were also a number of popular music documentaries released in 2022. Director Brett Morgan told the story of rock icon David Bowie with Moonage Daydream, while several international pop stars shed light on what life is like behind the microphone in documentaries such as Olivia Rodrigo: Good 4 U and Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me.
With so many fascinating real-life stories documented on film in 2022, here are the X of the best (and where you can watch them).
