The Best Underrated Documentaries That Actually Changed How I Think

There’s a category of documentary that gets talked about constantly — the ones that generate controversies, spawn Netflix recommendation algorithms, get turned into podcasts. Those films have their place. But there’s another category: the documentaries that quietly rearranged something in how you see the world, that you press on friends not because they’re entertaining (though they often are) but because something in them feels genuinely necessary. These are the ones I keep returning to.

Manufactured Landscapes (2006)

This film follows photographer Edward Burtynsky as he documents industrial landscapes in China — factory floors that stretch so far you can’t see the end of them, mountains of discarded electronics, the Three Gorges Dam displacement. Director Jennifer Baichwal does something unusual: she lets images breathe at a pace that’s almost uncomfortable. There’s a famous opening shot of a factory floor that goes on for several minutes, and the effect is vertiginous. You stop looking for narrative and start just absorbing the scale of what human industrialization actually looks like from the inside.

What changed for me after watching it was that I stopped being able to think about products as abstract. The iPhone in my pocket has a manufacturing chain that looks like those images. That cognitive shift — from consumer abstraction to physical reality — is one the film accomplishes without argument, without narration, just through the sustained contemplation of images. That’s a particular kind of documentary power that argumentative films rarely achieve.

Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles (2011)

This film is ostensibly about mysterious tiles embedded in the asphalt of major East Coast American cities — cryptic messages referencing Stanley Kubrick and a plan to resurrect the dead on Jupiter. But it’s really about obsession, about what it means to spend years pursuing an answer to an unanswerable question, and about the genuinely strange collision between mental illness and creativity that the tiles represent. Director Jon Foy follows Justin Duerr, an amateur investigator who has spent years trying to identify the tiles’ creator.

What this film gave me was a more complicated relationship with the idea of legacy. The tiles’ creator — almost certainly a reclusive man named Severt Möller — spent decades embedding his strange cosmology into city streets where almost no one noticed it. The question of whether that constitutes a failure or a success, whether communication requires an audience, whether strange obsessions have dignity — none of that is resolved, but it’s asked in a way I found genuinely hard to shake.

The Act of Killing (2012)

This one is more widely known than the others on this list, but it remains criminally underseen given what it does. Joshua Oppenheimer asked the perpetrators of the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-66 — men who are celebrated rather than prosecuted in their country — to reenact their killings in the style of their favorite movie genres. What results is something that shouldn’t work and somehow does: a film about the performance of atrocity, about the theatrical distance humans use to process what they’ve done, and about what happens when that distance collapses.

It changed how I think about confession, about the mechanisms humans use to avoid reckoning, and about what accountability even means when the social framework surrounding you celebrates your crimes. It’s an uncomfortable, essential film.

Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus (2003)

A film about American Southern music — specifically the music that lives in the margins of the margins, in pentecostal churches, on prison work farms, in roadside bars. Director Andrew Douglas follows musician Jim White through the American South, collecting musicians and stories with the logic of a road movie and the soul of an ethnographic document. The music alone would make it worth watching. What makes it transformative is how it complicates every received idea about authenticity, poverty, religion, and American identity.

There’s a sequence in a Pentecostal service that’s among the most genuinely moving things I’ve ever seen on film. It’s not mocking, it’s not reverent — it’s just intensely present. That quality of presence without judgment is something this film achieves throughout, and it’s harder to pull off than it looks.

My Best Fiend (1999)

Werner Herzog’s documentary about his working relationship with Klaus Kinski is, on the surface, a film about a famously difficult actor. What it actually is: a meditation on creative collaboration at the extreme edges, on the line between inspiration and abuse, on what filmmakers sometimes do to each other in the name of art. Herzog’s narration is typically idiosyncratic — fond, horrified, admiring, and deeply strange all at once. Kinski tried to have Herzog killed during one production. Herzog threatened Kinski back. The films they made together include some of the greatest cinema of the twentieth century.

What the film gave me was a more honest reckoning with the fact that extraordinary art sometimes emerges from genuinely terrible circumstances and relationships. That doesn’t justify anything — but understanding it means understanding something true about creativity that more comfortable narratives tend to skip over.