© 2009, William L. Sinclair
Genre Rank – Title (Director, Year) # Overall Rank
1. Man With a Movie Camera, The (Vertov, Dziga,1929) #782. 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
Woodstock (1970)
The Police: Synchronicity Concert (2000)
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).
