You can see everything on this list: the 20 most jaw-dropping documentaries – ranked!

Ahead of the UK release of Nathan Fielder’s hotly anticipated Elizabeth Holmes flick, we count down the most shocking and affecting true stories ever committed to film

A 50-second dispatch from daily life blew the whistle on the approaching juggernaut of cinema and its unbeatable horsepower of verisimilitude. But if we must be strictly factual about the iconic Lumière brothers’ short, the anecdote about audience members fleeing their seats in fear of being crushed by the oncoming locomotive probably never happened.

The dramatic re-enactment is the car chase of the documentary industry: a crude way of keeping our attention. But by using rotoscoped animation, Keith Maitland’s riveting account of the 1966 mass shooting at the University of Texas completely revitalises the re-enactment as part of the documentary toolkit. It leaves us prone under the killer’s crosshairs with the emotional immediacy of a thriller and an oddly elegiac comedown.

Amid the 21st century true-crime deluge, it’s a relief to stumble on a less violent mystery that foregrounds women’s lives rather than their deaths. But the Chilean director Maite Alberdi’s docudrama still skirts the boundaries of credibility: it focuses on Ale, a desperate Mexican mother who, after three miscarriages, duped her husband into believing she was pregnant. With Alberdi also trying to verify whether Ale was a child-snatcher, the story of this bizarre long con doubles up as a metaphysical inquiry into the ultimate knowability of people.

Documentaries often introduce us to indelible personalities, but it’s vanishingly rare when they initiate us, Narnia-style, into entire new realms. Marc Singer unearthed one in the homeless community of “mole men” living in abandoned subway tunnels extending out of Penn Station in New York City. With DJ Shadow’s mindscape compositions lighting the way into the gloom, this is a grimly transfixing voyage to the centre of urban deprivation.

This early Alex Gibney cut was shocking in the mid-00s – surely boardroom cynicism and corporate fraud couldn’t occur on this scale? Now, its revelations about the collapse of the US energy company – and the underlying profit-falsifying – feel like a taster for You Can See Everything’s tech-company chicanery and the post-truth air we all breathe.

A prime cut of Werner Herzogian insanity, yet somehow the great master never laid claim to this high-seas tragedy. The amateur sailor Donald Crowhurst bit off more than he could chew when he entered a 1968 solo circumnavigation race. Floundering in the Atlantic, he faked his own positions for seven months. The quixotic madness seems to infect everyone: a French competitor, Bernard Moitessier, having rounded the globe once, opts to keep going.

From Frank Capra’s recruitment drive to Ken Burns’ Vietnam panorama, war documentaries employ all manner of tactics. But for sheer concussive immersiveness, it’s hard to beat Sebastian Junger’s and Tim Hetherington’s stint embedded with the US’s lost boys in the Korangal valley in Afghanistan. Although it ducks political commentary, the ever-present sense of threat from the Taliban is indictment enough of the forever war.

The city-symphony documentary is as old as cinema – and Godfrey Reggio’s Gesamtkunstwerk is the most monumental. Pulling a Kubrick, it starts by juxtaposing neolithic drawings and a rocket launch, then blasts us through ever-accelerating stages of human civilisation in between, soundtracked by Philip Glass’s incantatory score. How about an update for capitalism’s endgame phase of AI chaos?

Stowed aboard a Massachusetts trawler, this experimental marvel is like swilling around in the chowder of Captain Ahab’s dreams. It’s a narration-free montage of hurtling anchors, churning spume, loitering seagulls and asphyxiated fish sliding into the maw of the boat – presumably the leviathan of the title. Attended to by tattooed, cigarette-toting seadogs, you feel as if you’re merging with the vessel’s consciousness.

Any footage of someone climbing the 900-metre Yosemite landmark El Capitan would have captured our attention. But doing it unroped for the first time, as the daredevil Alex Honnold does here, adds a distinct edge and extra viewing investment. There’s the ethical quandary: to what is Honnold subjecting his girlfriend, Sanni McCandless? Then there’s the possibility that the directors, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, are heightening the risks by filming this brinkmanship.

The line between Herzog and his gallery of hubristic dreamers is thin – and never so pointedly highlighted as in Les Blank’s chronicling of Herzog’s 1982 adventure epic Fitzcarraldo. Making a rudder for his own back, Herzog drags a steamboat over a mountain – then must make a call on letting Indigenous people murder his ignoble-savage leading man, Klaus Kinski. The director’s much-memed “the birds are in misery” monologue counts as comic relief.

One for the cinephiles and the aestheticians. Dziga Vertov’s city-symphony set out to supply “a truly international language of cinema based on its absolute separation from the language of theatre and literature”. He’s as good as his word: Man With a Movie Camera overspills with slo-mo, double time, match cuts, split screen, rhythmical editing, stop-motion animation and, in the margins of his mosaic of Moscow, Odesa and Kyiv, self-reflexive shots of the creator himself. An ultra-cool pop-up book for the medium.

In many ways flawed in documentarian terms, this cataclysmic tribute to the murdered doctor Andrew Bagby, directed by his childhood friend Kurt Kuenne, is firmly in his camp. But if his accused killer, Bagby’s ex-girlfriend Shirley Turner, receives no shrift, the film’s partisan weakness is also its greatest strength. Kuenne demonstrates the force of love surrounding Bagby, which allowed his grieving parents to survive an unimaginable ordeal: co-parenting their grandson with Turner, then in turn having the infant’s death inflicted on them when he was killed by Turner in a murder-suicide.

Has there ever been a more jaw-dropping verite image than that homunculus impossibly upright in the void between the twin towers? Featuring in this film seven years after 9/11, it was horribly redolent of other visuals, such as the falling man. The inhuman scale speaks for itself, but behind it is the story of the French daredevil Philippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire act in New York City, told with heist-like relish by the director James Marsh.

Meted out in imposing blockbuster beats by the director Kevin Macdonald, Touching the Void is a moral litmus test and shocking survival saga wrapped up in one. Climbing in the Andes, Simon Yates must decide whether to break an alpinist taboo to save his own life and cut the rope on his partner, Joe Simpson. What would you do? Probably not crawl for three days over ice and glacial scree to reach safety, as Simpson did later.

The documentary that cracked Herzog open for mainstream audiences. The goldmine of footage of the failed actor turned bear-whisperer Timothy Treadwell hovers between depicting him as a camcorder-touting holy fool and a reckless transgressor – classic Herzogian ambivalence about the natural world, in other words. He deems the audio of Treadwell’s death too raw for our ears, but makes great play of listening to it himself.

At the head of the early 00s documentary revival, Andrew Jarecki navigates a slippery and disturbing domestic enigma here: whether the Long Island computer teacher Arnold Friedman and his son Jesse were violent child molesters or the victims of local paedophile-panic in which their middle-class neighbours were competing to be the biggest victims. Deceptively jocular in its portrayal of a clan, it proves that the biggest mystery of all can be one’s own family.

Everyone loves a conman flick – but Bart Layton’s masterly investigation is all the more transfixing for featuring a scam with no obvious reward or purpose, other than obscure psychopathological needs. After a Texas teenager, Nicholas Barclay, goes missing in 1994, he appears to resurface three years later in the southern Spanish city of Linares. The young man is in fact a French shyster, Frédéric Bourdin, with brown eyes unlike Nicholas’s blue ones – but he is welcomed into the family home all the same. Stranger than fiction is suddenly a revitalised cliche.

Knowing about the Holocaust isn’t the same as bearing witness. Maybe Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour Shoah gives greater psychological understanding, but Alain Resnais’s whistle-stop tour of atrocity is the devastating warning shot. In just over half an hour of images never to be unseen, it calmly lays out how mankind surrenders to its worst instincts – and finally reminds us that this could happen anywhere.

Joshua Oppenheimer’s audacious masterstroke takes a step forward from Resnais by daring to empathise with the perpetrators of violence and, in doing so, understand its root causes and ramifications. Investigating the 1960s Indonesian anti-communist genocide, Oppenheimer allows a pair of ageing death-squad hoodlums to re-enact their deeds in the cinematic idiom of their youth: film noir and sappy musicals.

Far more than an excavation of a buried chapter of Indonesia’s past, it’s a searing exposé of the reinforcing links between force, state power, moral self-justification, the authorship of history and culture. Ultimately, it’s a strange kind of therapy: just like in The Zone of Interest, our apparatchik antihero ends up dry-retching out his guilt.