A challenging but hypnotic journey through decades of ossified official rhetoric, Ceaușescu copmiles the self-deception of a leader and his snowballing of an entire nation over a decades-long span, avoiding easy ironies and capturing the political and social flavor of an era.

A thousand hours of archival footage (mostly state-made propaganda supplemented towards the end by amateur video of the captured dictator’s final hours) were edited down to three. The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu (2010)Īnother archival compilation, this time from rigorous Romanian master Andrei Ujică (co-director with the late Harun Farocki of Videograms of the Revolution). A devastating film about depression hidden and expressed, it’s almost as hypnotized by the juxtaposition of different digital sources indelibly of their time as it is by Gray’s eloquent words. Steven Soderbergh’s portrait of the late Spalding Gray is assembled entirely from pre-existing footage of the monologuist narrating his life in various contexts. On the plus side there’s Broomfield’s 1992 documentary Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer and its even more morbidly compelling follow-up, 2003’s Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, which boasts the final interview conducted with its clearly unwell subject and some not entirely satisfying but queasily arresting self-interrogation by her documentarian. Netflix stocks six films by the sometimes-disreputable Nick Broomfield, including such lesser-loved titles as 1998’s controversial conspiracy-mongering Kurt & Courtney and 2011’s Sarah Palin: You Betcha!, roundly derided as a too-easy attack job with no new information. Note that Netflix has both the two-hour theatrical cut and the less-circulated director’s cut, which runs 159 minutes.Īileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003) Joshua Oppenheimer’s elegantly disturbing investigation into the determinedly suppressed legacy of Indonesia’s 1965-66 mass killings has been discussed at length here and elsewhere.

I cleared away the underwhelming underbrush to find (in alphabetical order) a semi-idiosyncratic selection of the 20 best non-fiction films available for current streaming on Instant. subscribers, including some relatively slept-on films. Still, careful mining reveals a decent selection of titles to catch up on if you’re one of the company’s 35 million+ U.S. Netflix’s ever-shifting catalog is subject to sudden deletions and additions, the latter skewed far more to recent fare than a balanced sampling of all film history.

Best history programs on netflix