10 Best Documentary Movies Of The Last Decade
The unmissable documentaries released in the past ten years.
Sometimes life, as the saying goes, is stranger than fiction. And nowhere is this phrase better understood than in the sphere of documentary filmmaking.
A place where anyone can pick up a camera and have their voice heard, documentaries are a means for real people to capture the stories and experiences of themselves or others in a way that gives audiences a direct insight into their lives. Free from the artifice of narrative cinema, documentaries are intended to capture the world as it through the lens of the filmmaker's experience.
Throughout the history of cinema, documentaries have been a captivating window into the world, with the likes of Nanook Of The North and Man With A Movie Camera pioneering the way for decades to come. Since then, documentaries have continued to fascinate cinephiles and spark their curiosity, offering everything from the weird to the wonderful.
And this breed of filmmaking shows no sign of going away any time soon. If anything, the rise of streaming services has given more documentarians platforms to tell their stories.
The past decade has been spectacular for documentaries, with these being just some of the unmissable highlights.
10. Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened (2018)
Every now and again one documentary is released that’s so unbelievable that it becomes a viral sensation. In 2018 that film was Netflix documentary Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened.
Re-telling the story of the now infamous Fyre Festival, this flick chronicles the insane tale of how a music festival dramatically descended into a disaster.
Intended to be a luxurious getaway with supermodels, high-end accommodation, gourmet food, and headline acts from the world’s biggest artists, this festival was pedalled by wealthy social media millennials as being the most exclusive event on the planet. However, the result was anything but. Enjoying the sunshine with Blink-182 became pictures of cheese on bread and water-logged mattresses. Everything that could go wrong did so in a spectacular fashion, and it was this monumental comedy of errors which turned this festival from a dream into a nightmare.
While the schadenfreude of watching entitled influencers pay thousands of dollars for the luxury of not having anywhere to sleep when they arrived was entertaining, the revelations surrounding the scale of festival creator Billy McFarland’s deception and hubris were equally as shocking.
Throw in a poignant reflection on social media, and Fyre also becomes a stark reflection on popular culture.