Five of Screen’s expert critics select their favourite documentaries from 2025.
Nikki Baughan
Nikki Baughan is Screen International’s reviews editor. Read her top ten films of the year here.
1. Mailin
Dir. Maria Silvia Esteves
This IDFA premiere deals with childhood abuse in ways both sensitive and surprising. Argentinian filmmaker Esteves allows the eponymous subject to tell her own story in her own way — in the form of a dark fairy tale narrated to her daughter — using confident, compassionate craft choices that explore the shape-shifting nature of memory and healing in the aftermath of trauma.
2. Below The Clouds
Dir. Gianfranco Rosi
This meditative black-and-white portrait of Naples asks a lot from its audience, but those who succumb to its hypnotic rhythms are richly rewarded. Rosi links the ancient past and the modern present with looping visuals and shared themes, all framed by textured, evocative cinematography that gives a real sense of a city, its history and its people.
3. Cover-Up
Dirs. Laura Poitras, Mark Obenhaus
Poitras and Obenhaus turn their camera on veteran US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh for a romp through his jaw-dropping career. Hersh makes for a striking narrator of his own story, but the strength of the film lies not in any attempt to lionise its subject, but to highlight the personal and professional challenges that come with speaking truth to power.
Tim Grierson
Screen’s senior US critic, based in Los Angeles, has written for the publication since 2005. Read his top ten films of the year here.
1. Below The Clouds
Dir. Gianfranco Rosi
A study of Naples shot in gorgeous black and white, Below The Clouds observes the lives of scientists, historians, teachers and call-centre operators, all of them existing in their own fascinating niches that feed the vitality of the vibrant Italian city. Rosi demonstrates how Naples’ past intertwines with its present, ghosts from centuries ago still whispering in the ears of its modern residents.
2. The Perfect Neighbor
Dir: Geeta Gandbhir
Drawing largely from police bodycam footage, Gandbhir recounts the events that led to the 2023 fatal shooting of Florida resident Ajike Owens at the hands of her paranoid neighbour. This sobering film casts a harsh light on the gun violence and racial animus that have long plagued the US, illustrating how dispiritingly familiar such killings have become.
3. Predators
Dir. David Osit
Osit examines the lingering societal impact of the shamelessly exploitative true-crime series To Catch A Predator, calculating the cost of the show’s judge-jury-executioner approach to entrapping potential child predators. In the process, Predators is just as critical in its questioning of how all documentarians, including Osit himself, capitalise on sensation to make compelling drama.
Wendy Ide
Ide is Screen’s senior international critic, and is also chief film critic for The Observer. Read her top ten films of the year here.
1. The Tale Of Silyan
Dir. Tamara Kotevska
Themes of migration, the erosion of tradition and a connection to the earth are woven together with a North Macedonian folk tale and a farmer’s bond with an injured stork. This is a subtly profound work, and the most exquisitely photographed non-fiction film of the year.
2. A Want In Her
Dir. Myrid Carten
Carten’s feature documentary debut is a wildly inventive collage that captures the knotty bond between Myrid and her mother Nuala. Shot, in part, during a troubled period in which Nuala relapsed into alcoholism and went missing, it is as intimate as it is boldly cinematic and ambitious.
3. Sanatorium
Dir. Gar O’Rourke
As war rumbles on, the staff and clients of a crumbling health spa near Odessa, Ukraine find comfort in the therapeutic mud of the nearby lake. The spirit of the people is captured with wit, warmth and lots of swearing.
Jonathan Romney
A longtime contributor to Screen, Romney also writes for Film Comment, Sight & Sound and The Observer, and teaches at the UK’s National Film and Television School. Read his top ten films of the year here.
1. Remake
Dir. Ross McElwee
US first-person documentarist McElwee has long contemplated the world through the lens of his personal life. Here he muses on the drug-related death of his adult son Adrian, a frequent presence in his films, and retrospectively questions the value of his long-term project — which, paradoxically, only emerges as more meaningful and precious.
2. Below The Clouds
Dir. Gianfranco Rosi
The latest from the director of Fire At Sea and Sacro GRA, this portrait of Naples — its people, its relics, its landscapes and its volcanically clouded skies — is a magnificent reinvention of the hallowed ‘city symphony’ documentary mode.
3. Cover-Up
Dirs. Laura Poitras, Mark Obenhaus
A portrait of a modern hero: investigative reporter Seymour Hersh who, throughout a long history of US political and military scandals, has continued to speak truth to power and to the public. At a time when the survival of the press is endangered worldwide, Cover-Up reminds us of the need to tell it like it is.
Lee Marshall
Marshall joined Screen in 1996 as an Italy-based film critic. He also writes on travel, design and culture for a range of UK, US and Italian publications. Read his top ten films of the year here.
1. My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air In Moscow
Dir. Julia Loktev
The two best documentaries I saw this year both demonstrated the value of being in the right place at the right time, keeping the camera running and letting a story simply evolve. Loktev presents an embattled group of young, mostly female independent journalists in Putin’s Russia, channelling their passion, wry humour and defiance in the face of Orwellian suppression of press freedom. Then she nudges us into thriller territory. We’re hooked, for more than five hours.
2. The Prince Of Nanawa
Dir. Clarisa Navas
This year’s other remarkable long-form documentary, which lifted the grand prix at Visions du Reel, was a non-fiction Boyhood about a precocious kid from a poor Paraguayan family. It’s a work that explores with sensitivity the social and economic pressures that curdle childhood dreams, and the complex ethics of embedded documentary filmmaking.
3. Below The Clouds
Dir. Gianfranco Rosi
Rosi’s latest cinematic fresco is a nuanced, melancholic portrait of Naples, a city with an ancient soul where history’s moments of hope and despair seem stuck on an endless loop. Shot in sombre black and white, it has a chiaroscuro grandeur that, with the help of Daniel Blumberg’s austere soundtrack, makes the argument for beauty amid the squalor.
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