Ahead of the UK release of Nathan Fielder's hotly anticipated Elizabeth Holmes film, a countdown of the most shocking and affecting true stories ever committed to film has been published. The list spans over a century of cinema, from the Lumière brothers' 1896 short to contemporary true-crime docudramas.
Early Cinema and Re-enactments
The 50-second The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1896) is included for its role in signalling cinema's power of verisimilitude, though the famous anecdote of audiences fleeing in fear of the oncoming locomotive likely never happened.
Keith Maitland's Tower (2016) is praised for revitalising the dramatic re-enactment through rotoscoped animation, offering an account of the 1966 mass shooting at the University of Texas with the emotional immediacy of a thriller.
Maite Alberdi's A Child of My Own (2026) focuses on Ale, a desperate Mexican mother who, after three miscarriages, duped her husband into believing she was pregnant. The docudrama also explores whether Ale was a child-snatcher, doubling as a metaphysical inquiry into the knowability of people.
Urban Deprivation and Corporate Fraud
Marc Singer's Dark Days (2000) introduces viewers to the homeless community of "mole men" living in abandoned subway tunnels extending out of Penn Station in New York City, with DJ Shadow's compositions lighting the way into the gloom.
Alex Gibney's Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) exposed the collapse of the US energy company and its underlying profit-falsifying, now seen as a precursor to tech-company chicanery.
Deep Water (2006) recounts amateur sailor Donald Crowhurst's 1968 solo circumnavigation race, where he faked his own positions for seven months while floundering in the Atlantic. The film also notes French competitor Bernard Moitessier, who, having rounded the globe once, opted to keep going.
War and Experimental Documentaries
Sebastian Junger's and Tim Hetherington's Restrepo (2010) embeds viewers with US soldiers in the Korangal valley in Afghanistan, where the ever-present threat from the Taliban serves as an indictment of the forever war.
Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi (1982) is described as the most monumental city-symphony documentary, juxtaposing neolithic drawings and a rocket launch, soundtracked by Philip Glass's incantatory score.
Leviathan (2012), stowed aboard a Massachusetts trawler, is a narration-free montage of anchors, spume, seagulls and fish, attended to by tattooed seadogs.
Free Solo (2018) captures daredevil Alex Honnold climbing the 900-metre Yosemite landmark El Capitan unroped for the first time, raising ethical questions about the risks to his girlfriend Sanni McCandless and the directors' role in heightening them.
Personal Ordeals and Moral Dilemmas
Les Blank's Burden of Dreams (1982) chronicles Werner Herzog's making of Fitzcarraldo, including dragging a steamboat over a mountain and a decision about letting Indigenous people murder his leading man Klaus Kinski.
Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera (1929) is celebrated for its slo-mo, double time, match cuts, split screen and self-reflexive shots, offering "a truly international language of cinema based on its absolute separation from the language of theatre and literature".
Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (2008), directed by Kurt Kuenne, is a tribute to murdered doctor Andrew Bagby, demonstrating the force of love that allowed his parents to survive co-parenting their grandson with Bagby's accused killer Shirley Turner, who later killed the infant in a murder-suicide.
James Marsh's Man on Wire (2008) tells of French daredevil Philippe Petit's 1974 high-wire act in New York City, featuring an image of him impossibly upright in the void between the twin towers.
Touching the Void (2003), directed by Kevin Macdonald, recounts how alpinist Simon Yates cut the rope on his partner Joe Simpson in the Andes, and Simpson's subsequent three-day crawl over ice and glacial scree to reach safety.
Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man (2005) depicts failed actor turned bear-whisperer Timothy Treadwell, with Herzog deeming the audio of Treadwell's death too raw for our ears but making play of listening to it himself.
Andrew Jarecki's Capturing the Friedmans (2003) navigates the question of whether Long Island computer teacher Arnold Friedman and his son Jesse were violent child molesters or victims of local paedophile panic.
Conmen, Atrocity and Culmination
Bart Layton's The Imposter (2012) investigates the case of French shyster Frédéric Bourdin, who resurfaced as missing Texas teenager Nicholas Barclay three years after the boy's 1994 disappearance, despite having brown eyes unlike Nicholas's blue ones, and was welcomed into the family home.
Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (1956) is described as a devastating warning shot on the Holocaust, calmly laying out how mankind surrenders to its worst instincts in just over half an hour of images.
Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing (2012) takes the number one spot for daring to empathise with perpetrators of violence. Investigating the 1960s Indonesian anti-communist genocide, Oppenheimer allows ageing death-squad hoodlums to re-enact their deeds in the cinematic idiom of film noir and musicals, exposing the reinforcing links between force, state power, moral self-justification and the authorship of history and culture.
