"Top 19 True-Crime Documentaries You Can't Miss | Vanity Fair"
By Matthew Jacobs
Everywhere you look, there’s more of it. True crime has taken over Hollywood, with networks and streaming services pumping out nonfiction accounts of scandalous misdeeds, wrongful convictions, and sordid scams at a rate that even the genre's diehards struggle to keep up with.
The best true-crime documentaries bring principled reportage to the intrigue they chronicle, giving equal or greater weight to the victims as to the perpetrators whose psychology seizes our collective imagination. This list attempts to encapsulate the format’s varying modes, from serious digests to seedy diversions; although one person’s true-crime trash is another’s treasure, these recommendations steer clear of the genre’s tawdriest impulses. All of our picks are available to stream or rent somewhere, and when you’re done, you can find dozens more at the ready.
One of the most devastating wrongful convictions of the 20th century put five innocent Black and Latino teenagers behind bars. Police coerced confessions out of them after a white woman was attacked and raped in Central Park in 1989, but the DNA evidence that exonerated the group more than a decade later has made the case an exemplar of racist law tactics. Ken Burns’ vital documentary lays out how it happened, and the grave effect it had on all five men's lives.
A somewhat forgotten highlight from an era when true crime wasn’t yet ubiquitous, Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens’ thrill ride is a buffet of shocking details. The eponymous romance revolves around successful New York City attorney Burt Pugach, who had an extramarital affair with a younger woman and hired goons to attack her when she ended things. If you think that sounds wild, it’s only the start of the story. The New York Times once called the ordeal “one of the most celebrated crimes of passion in New York history.”
This seven-part Netflix series’ tagline alone is compelling: “Who Killed Sister Cathy?” That would be Catherine Cesnik, a nun who disappeared at age 26 after students at a Catholic all-girls school confided in her about a priest who had sexually abused them. Her body was discovered two months later. The case remains unsolved, but director Ryan White (The Case Against 8, Good Night Oppy) sketches a thorough, damning connection between Cesnik’s death and the assault that occurred before she could speak up about it.
Want a documentary that’s also one of the most spine-chilling horror movies you’ve ever seen? Cropsey starts with an urban legend involving child abductions that gripped Staten Island throughout the 1970s. Locals spoke of a boogeyman with ties to an infamously abusive mental institution that was shuttered in 1987. Codirectors Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio trace the crimes, and their effects on a community haunted by the nightmarish kidnappings, to a Rikers Island inmate found guilty of similar terrors. Along the way, they encounter underground tunnels, purported Satan worship, serial killers, and a web of myth-building that raises all sorts of unsettling questions.
Wrenching and combative, Dear Zachary arraigns the Canadian justice system for its soft approach to a case involving director Kurt Kuenne's childhood best friend, Andrew Bagby, a med school resident shot to death by his unstable ex-girlfriend. She later gave birth to his child, and Kuenne’s film follows Bagby’s parents as they seek custody in hopes of protecting their grandson. It’s also a tear-jerking ode to a life lost too soon, functioning as a record of a man whose absence has left his loved ones bereft.
Michelle McNamara was an obsessive true-crime blogger (and the wife of comedian Patton Oswalt) who wrote a bestselling book of the same name about a prolific criminal she named the Golden State Killer. The HBO docuseries based on her work centers on McNamara’s investigation, focusing on the victims instead of their killer. It’s also a tender profile of McNamara herself, who died of a mixture of prescription drugs she’d ingested before she got to see the arrest that resulted from her tireless journalism.
Bart Layton's juicy retelling of a French defrauder who convinced a Texas family that he was their long-lost relative invigorated the true-crime genre when it became an acclaimed hit in 2012. The Imposter isn’t only about a trickster—it’s also fixated on the chilling circumstances that led the family to fall for the ruse. Follow the film with David Grann’s riveting New Yorker story about the same saga.
A cultural sensation when it debuted on HBO, The Jinx came about in the strangest possible way. Director Andrew Jerecki (Capturing the Friedmans) made a little-seen fiction movie inspired by the three murders that New York real estate heir Robert Durst was accused of committing, and Durst liked it enough to ask Jerecki if he’d care to make a documentary about him. (Being portrayed by Ryan Gosling would be a glow-up for anyone.) In the process, Durst became a public spectacle and further incriminated himself. The six-part series is a fascinating study of criminality, wealthy family resentments, and warped self-mythology. Apparently, there’s more to the story too: HBO recently announced a second season.
The name of the murderer in HBO’s four-part Last Call isn’t revealed until the end of the third episode. The series’ focus is not the psychology of the perpetrator—it’s the lives of his victims, gay and bisexual men in the Northeast. These deaths, occurring shortly before and during the AIDS crisis, happened at a time when law enforcement and the government weren’t inclined to lend queer people a helping hand in the first place. In adapting Elon Green's book from 2021, director Anthony Caronna (Susanne Bartsch: On Top) plots an exhaustive portrait of a demographic haunted by a body politic that didn’t want much to do with them.
When we think of true crime, we tend to think of three things: murder, cults, and corporate subterfuge. McMillions is a shining example of the latter. In six episodes, the series unpacks a 12-year, $24 million fraud scheme in which a former cop nicknamed “Uncle Jerry” gamed his way through the Monopoly stickers that won lucky McDonald’s customers money. Jerry was the head of security at the marketing company running the fast-food chain’s promotions, which allowed him to rig the competition with the help of a criminal cabal that included alleged mafia connections. His scam gets the tantalizing treatment it deserves thanks to this HBO romp.
Even if you already know the particulars, the mother-daughter psychodrama at the center of this HBO doc is stunning. Erin Lee Carr, who also made Thought Crimes: The Case of the Cannibal Cop and I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth V. Michelle Carter, peels back the curtain on a Munchausen-syndrome-by-proxy calamity that gripped the internet in the mid-2010s and inspired Hulu's The Act. In a nutshell, Dee Dee Blanchard, a seemingly cheerful Mississippi woman, was killed by her daughter, whose myriad illnesses she had induced or outright invented. Mommy Dead and Dearest recounts one of this century’s most twisted true-crime sensations.
During the brief period when movies released both theatrically and on television could receive Oscar and Emmy nominations, O.J.: Made in America won both. It also garnered a Peabody Award and a handful of other prizes, proving what a magnum opus it was for sports documentarian Ezra Edelmen. Clocking in at nearly eight hours (split into five episodes for TV), Made in America is worth every minute. It's sort of an anti-true-crime doc, foregoing sensationalism to assess the infamous athlete’s scandals through the thorny lenses of race, athletics, and celebrity culture.
Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s sprawling film won raves for its insider access to a notorious court case involving teenage boys, known as the West Memphis Three, convicted under dubious circumstances for the murder of three kids during a supposed Satanic ritual. To this day, Paradise Lost contains some of the most thorough footage seen in a true-crime film, including video from inside the courtroom and in the judge’s chambers. The movie spawned two sequels depicting the men’s quest to prove their innocence.
French director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade followed his Oscar-winning wrongful-conviction doc Murder on a Sunday Morning with this knotty miniseries about the trial of war novelist Michael Peterson, who was convicted of killing his wife in 2001. Peterson has maintained his innocence, and theories about what happened that night abound. What started as an eight-episode chronicle has since ballooned to 13, with follow-ups covering new revelations in the case. The details still spark intrigue, as evidenced by Max's popular scripted series from 2022 starring Colin Firth and Toni Collette.
In April 1992, Yance Ford’s brother, an unarmed 24-year-old teacher on Long Island, was shot and killed when he confronted a white man about a repair at an auto body shop. A grand jury opted not to indict the suspect, sending Ford’s already stunned relatives into an existential tailspin. The filmmaker, known for his work with PBS and on the queer-history docuseries Pride, became the first openly transgender director nominated for an Oscar when Strong Island made the Best Documentary Feature roster. The movie revisits the inciting incident and explores how it reshaped his family.
No true-crime list would be complete without the genre’s urtext. Errol Morris’s influential film examines the case of a Dallas man convicted for the murder of a police officer, in turn revealing his innocence and identifying the actual killer. At the time, the techniques employed in The Thin Blue Line were radical. Morris treats his subjects like characters in a fiction story, and his stylized music and aesthetics flout the vérité objectivity that was more or less seen as essential to documentary filmmaking at the time. Even his reenactments—once considered sacrilege in nonfiction—were controversial enough to keep the movie from Oscar consideration. Today, the entire form owes some debt to Morris and The Thin Blue Line.
A lightning rod for discourse about police misconduct, wrongful convictions, and the ethics of true crime, Making a Murderer arrived like a dispatch from a near future in which the genre took over the world. That’s essentially what happened after Netflix released its first season, a watercooler fixture focused on a Wisconsin exoneree charged with murder while pursuing a lawsuit concerning his earlier sentencing. Enthusiasm for unseemly transgressions was nothing new, but the copycats that Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos’ Emmy-winning series inspired are still inescapable. (Also check out American Vandal, a pitch-perfect parody.)
This searing six-part series isn’t about hair-raising murder or corporate chicanery. Instead, Time’s subject matter is all too human. Kalief Browder was 16 when Bronx police booked him for allegedly stealing a backpack, a nightmare that resulted in a three-year Rikers Island incarceration—two of which were spent in solitary confinement—without a trial or formal conviction. Director Jenner Furst, who has since made glossier true-crime hits like LuLaRich and The Pharmacist, launches from Browder’s story into an indictment of the prison system and the racist laws that prompted this injustice.
Many cult documentaries, like Holy Hell and The Vow, start by surveying makeshift utopias. What would it be like to join a like-minded cohort in an enclave unburdened by everyday reality? Then, without fail, things darken. Wild Wild Country, arguably the most gripping cult doc to date, follows Rajneeshpuram, a spiritual-sexual ashram that began in India and moved to rural Oregon under the guardianship of a demigod whose top deputy was convicted for attempted murder and assault. Along the way, the maroon-clad group allegedly committed bioterrorism, arson, and immigration crimes. Emmy-winning directors Chapman Way and Maclain Way combine fascinating footage of the commune with present-day interviews and news archives to paint a detailed portrait of life inside Rajneeshpuram.
