Since the best documentary feature category was first established at the Oscars in 1942, the nominees have been like a snapshot of the year: wars and social concerns, heroes and headlines. This year is no exception. On paper, each of the five nominees look as if they’re ripped from the headlines, chosen for some metric like “urgency” or “timeliness.”
But these are no ordinary documentaries. In the past decade, the Academy has gotten much better about nominating nonfiction films that stretch and push at their boundaries, challenging audiences in how they convey their subject matter. Most opt to confront world events through intensely personal stories, and all of them carefully show why their individual stories have far-reaching implications.
So, as the 2025 Oscars are upon us, here’s a quick guide to the nominated films and why you should watch them.
With “Black Box Diaries” (streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime), the director Shitori Ito takes a courageously personal approach to her biting critique of the handling of sexual assault cases in Japan. In 2017, Ito held a news conference to announce allegations that a prominent Japanese journalist had raped her. In the documentary, she chronicles the fallout of that accusation. The film is both intimate and enraging. As Manohla Dargis wrote in her review, it’s “a tense and tangled crime story, one in which Ito is at once the victim, lead investigator, dogged prosecutor and crusading reporter.”
My colleagues and I have written about “No Other Land” (in select theaters) a lot during the past year. It’s probably the most acclaimed documentary of the year, centering on the lives of families who have witnessed their homes, in the occupied West Bank region of Masafer Yatta, be demolished over and over again. Despite its obviously timely story and a directorial team of two Palestinian and two Israeli filmmakers, it hasn’t been able to secure a distribution deal in the United States, which is why it isn’t available to stream here. If you can see it in a theater, don’t overlook how well it’s made, mixing home video archives, journalistic footage and conversations between the filmmakers to powerful effect.
“Porcelain War” (in select theaters) has picked up a raft of awards from guilds and critics this season. It, too, looks through the lens of the personal to tell an urgent story — this one about the war in Ukraine. The film centers on Slava Leontyev, who directed the film with Brendan Bellomo, and who is a ceramist as well as a member of a Ukrainian special forces unit. Art and warfare blend in the film, which melds GoPro footage from the battlefield with looks at Leontyev’s work, finally landing on a hopeful note about the value of beauty in darkness.
If you’ve seen “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” (streaming on Kino Film Collection and available on demand), you already know it’s not personal at all: It’s expansive, a sweeping, furious, propulsive dive into history, focusing on the reportedly C.I.A.-led assassination of the Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba in 1960. The story moves along at a pace that makes your heart race: It’s a thriller, a history lesson and a warning, all in one.
“Sugarcane” (streaming on Hulu and Disney+) taps into history, too — both on a personal and a national level. Julian Brave NoiseCat, who directed the film with Emily Kassie, uses his own painful family history as a jumping-off point for a lyrical, devastating investigative journey into Canada’s history of abuse at Catholic residential schools for Indigenous children. “Sugarcane” will break your heart, and it’s also an exemplary documentary for our moment. Personal stories resonate across history and space, and in turn, national and global narratives have real individual consequences.
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