50 Top Ranked Documentaries

From our survey of Top Ranked Films on the Internet, these are the top documentaries, which cover a wide variety of subjects: history, culture, music, sports, war. Man With a Movie Camera remains fresh and innovative today, and the Riefenstahl films, even though propaganda, are as important for history as they are for film technique.
© 2009, William L. Sinclair

Genre Rank – Title (Director, Year) # Overall Rank
1. Man With a Movie Camera, The (Vertov, Dziga,1929) #78
2. Nanook of the North (Flaherty, Robert,1922) #447
3. Triumph of the Will (Riefenstahl, Leni,1935) #455
4. Night and Fog (Resnais, Alain,1955) #457
5. Man of Aran (Flaherty, Robert,1934) #518
6. F for Fake (Welles, Orson,1973) #524
7. Olympia (Riefenstahl, Leni,1938) #532
8. Don't Look Back (Pennebaker, D.A.,1967) #545
9. Listen to Britain (Jennings, Humphrey,1941) #563
10. Scorpio Rising (Anger, Kenneth,1964) #566

11. Crumb (Zwigoff, Terry,1994) #610
12. I Am Cuba (Kalatozishvili, Mikheil,1964) #638
13. My Voyage to Italy (Scorsese, Martin,1999) #654
14. Que viva Mexico! (Eisenstein, Sergei,1932) #664
15. Capturing the Friedmans (Jarecki, Andrew,2003) #691
16. 4 Little Girls (Lee, Spike,1997) #707
17. Man on Wire (Marsh, James,2008) #712
18. Hour of the Furnaces, The (Getino, Octavio & Fernando E. Solanas,1968) #721
19. Région centrale, La (Snow, Michael,1971) #726
20. No End in Sight (Ferguson, Charles,2007) #731

21. Stop Making Sense (Demme, Jonathan,1984) #734
22. Maîtres fous, Les (Rouch, Jean,1955) #751
23. Hôtel Terminus (Ophüls, Marcel,1988) #760
24. Salesman (Maysles, Albert/David Maysles/Charlotte Zwerin,1968) #787
25. Land Without Bread (Buñuel, Luis,1933) #794
26. Fires Were Started (Jennings, Humphrey,1943) #801
27. Fog of War, The (Morris, Errol,2003) #809
28. Tarnation (Caouette, Jonathan,2003) #834
29. Murderball (Rubin, Henry Alex & Shapiro, Dana Adam,2005) #838
30. Grizzly Man (Herzog, Werner,2005) #841

31. Hitler: A Film from Germany (Syberberg, Hans-Jürgen,1977) #858
32. 42 UP (Apted, Michael,1998) #861
33. To Be and to Have (Philibert, Nicolas,2002) #873
34. Russian Ark (Sokurov, Aleksandr,2002) #901
35. Deliver Us from Evil (Berg, Amy,2006) #905
36. Art of Vision, The (Brakhage, Stan,1965) #919
37. This Is England (Meadows, Shane,2006) #923
38. Histoire(s) du cinéma (Godard, Jean-Luc,1997) #933
39. Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film (Workman, Chuck,1991) #942
40. Children Underground (Belzberg, Edet,2001) #963

41. Los Angeles Plays Itself (Andersen, Thom,2003) #977
42. Festival Express (Smeaton & Cvitanovich,2003) #987
43. Gimme Shelter (Maysles, Albert/David Maysles/Charlotte Zwerin,1970) #1002
44. Love & Diane (Dworkin, Jennifer,2002) #1009
45. Domestic Violence (Wiseman, Frederick,2001) #1010
46. Neil Young: Heart of Gold (Demme, Jonathan,2006) #1013
47. Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Ruttmann, Walter,1927) #1021
48. Moana (Flaherty, Robert,1926) #1045
49. Chronicle of a Summer (Rouch, Jean & Edgar Morin,1960) #1060
50. Tale of the Wind, A (Ivens, Joris,1988) #1069

To this list I would add:
Winged Migration (2001) - the nature documentary a decade in the making that followed migrating birds
Woodstock (1970) - great documenatry of a seminal event in history, how could they leave it off? if Gimme Shelter made it..
The Police: Synchronicity Concert (2000) - a great concert, worth listing here, should be just after Stop Making Sense
Burden of Dreams (1982) - about the making of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo
Hearts of Darkness (1992) - cut from 60 hrs of footage shot by Eleanor Coppola during the making of Apocalypse Now.

Also, from TV: Planet Earth (2006), and HBO's The Memory Loss Tapes (2008).