Best True Crime Documentaries on Streaming (October 2023) – Armessa Movie News
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These documentaries will keep you on the edge of your seat.
Image by Annamaria Ward
In the past ten years, it’s become hard to deny that the true crime documentary is one of the fastest-growing genres, with new hits coming every year. Before the streaming age, finding any consistent documentary fanatics would be hard. Now the true and horrifying stories of corruption, lies, and murder have made practically every movie fan a documentary connoisseur. Its popularity has turned average viewers into amateur detectives and resulted in fundamental changes in laws and culture. Though most audiences were drawn to the genre because of its scandal and thrills at every corner, it has proven to be one that dives into the darkest corners of the human psyche and asks the tough questions no other TV show or movie could. To save you hours of scrolling through the most popular streaming services, here’s a list of the most captivating and entertaining true crime documentaries streaming.
Editor’s note: This article was updated October 2023 to include Savior Complex.
Diving deep into the NXIVM cult and its former leader, Keith Raniere, The Vow is a fascinating two-season documentary that gives insight into their methodology and insidious indoctrination tactics used to blackmail and isolate its members. Directors Jehane Noujaim (The Great Hack) and Karim Amer (The Lincoln Project) investigate by interviewing former members and showcasing texts, archival footage, and police reports to paint the full story of the cult’s inception and spread throughout the Canadian and American entertainment industries, ultimately leading to human trafficking, racketeering, and human branding.
After reading a National Public Radio article, documentary filmmaker Jackie Jesko was captured by the tale of Renee Bach, an untrained doctor whose medical work in her Christian non-profit organization led to the deaths of 105 children. In the miniseries, Jesko leaves no stone unturned in her attempts to find the nuance in this whirlwind of a story. Brilliantly complex, the miniseries ebbs and flows between the damning and the sympathetic, making it much more investigatory than a simple exploration of Renee Bach’s journey. A heavy discussion of the power of pride and how high one person can fall, Savior Complex is a gripping documentary miniseries. – Jake Hodges
McMillions is the story of corporate scandal, fraud, and organized crime, all revolving around one of the world’s largest fast food chains. The six-episode docuseries recounts the FBI investigation into a scam that involved selling the most valuable pieces in the now-defunct McDonald’s Monopoly game that spiraled out into a million-dollar fraud case. Directors James Lee Hernandez and Brian Lazarte utilize interviews with FBI agents and amazing reenactments to move audiences through the complicated web of deceit surrounding the controversial promotion that led desperate people to ruin.
Don’t F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer (2019)
One of the few true crime documentary series that also interrogates the role of the viewer, Don’t F**k with Cats puts true crime culture on trial. The series centers on amateur internet sleuths who came across a video of kittens being killed. As they put it, the internet may be like a kind of Wild West where no rules apply, but the only thing everyone on the internet agrees with and enforces is you don’t mess with cats. From then on, a search to find this fame-hungry sadist begins and accelerates when he releases another video, this time with a person.
Making a Murderer may have been the series that turned every average viewer into a true crime obsessive. Filmed over the course of ten years, this series follows one of a not-so-innocent man’s strangest and darkest cases. Steven Avery, a working-class man from Wisconsin, was convicted of the sexual assault and attempted murder of Penny Beernsten in 1985 and served 18 years for the crime. When DNA evidence exonerates him, this criminal is proven innocent until he becomes the suspect in another murder case. An indictment of the criminal justice system, this docuseries shows there are more prominent criminals than the ones in jail.
Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (2008)
Image via MSNBC Films
Have your tissues out and ready if you choose to watch this tearjerker. Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father is one of the most heartbreaking films you will ever see, and the director’s personal attachment to its subject makes it all the more powerful. The film tells the story of director Kurt Kuenne’s childhood friend Andrew Bagby, a charismatic young doctor who entered into a relationship with a mentally ill woman, had a child with her, and was killed by her. The film serves as a letter from Kuenne to his dear friend’s son to tell him how great his father was and the truth about who his mother is.
It’s a tale as old as time. The rich kid in town gets into trouble, and nothing happens because his family pays someone off. The Murdaugh family in South Carolina takes this cliché to a new level. Netflix’s Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal details a tragic boat crash that killed popular teenager Mallory Beach and how the drunk and abusive driver, Paul Murdaugh, faced no criminal consequences. Suddenly, this singular tragedy becomes part of a web of deceit and injustice, all orchestrated by the sociopathic family patriarch Alex Murdaugh.
The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst (2015)
Image Via HBO
Creator: Andrew Jarecki, Marc Smerling & Zac Stuart-Pontier
The poor little rich boy was never as camera-friendly as in The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst. Though director Andrew Jarecki had already tried to tell the story of Robert Durst on screen in the 2010 narrative feature, All Good Things starring Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst, he was finally able to gain a large audience and critical acclaim when he decided to tell that story without a script, without movie stars, and with the man himself, Robert Durst. This docuseries hinges on long-form interviews with Durst as he tells his life story and professes his innocence in three unsolved disappeared disappearances even when the evidence seems to be against him.
Tickled proves that no matter how innocent something seems, there is always a dark underbelly with unknowable secrets and shadowy villains. When New Zealand journalist David Farrier came across a video of young men in an endurance tickling competition, he thought it would make a quirky and hilarious story. But when the company that ran the competition, Jane O’Brien Media, emailed him back, threatening to sue, he found that this story was much darker. In an enormous feat of investigative journalism, Farrier found a company built on secrecy, blackmail, and fear.
When religious fervor turns into cultish fanaticism, a dangerous world of oppression and violence is born. Keep Sweet: Pray & Obey centers on a breakaway cult of the Church of Latter-Day Saints and its leader Warren Jeffs. Taking its name from the motto coined by its previous leader Rulon Jeffs,which was used as a lesson to the sect’s women, the documentary focuses on the cult’s abuses against women, particularly the child brides that became prisoners in their own marriage. Though most of the men responsible have been brought to justice, the horrors of the cult’s heyday remain haunting.
One of the most critical pieces in the #MeToo Era, Leaving Neverland, shows how the rich and powerful can get away with unspeakable crimes in a culture that rewards celebrities. The documentary feels almost like a long-form deposition from two victims of sexual abuse by the King of Pop himself, Michael Jackson. Though Jackson’s long history of allegations has been public knowledge for years, this is the first platform that centers the victim’s stories and allows them to recount their experiences in their own words.
This seemed to be the only show that could distract people from the political, social, or health crises of 2020. Tiger King is a larger-than-life show that has captivated audiences and spawned a narrative spinoff. The series centers around Joe Exotic, a zoo owner and tiger enthusiast who spirals out of control when he begins feuding with Carole Baskin, the CEO of Big Cat Rescue, which culminates in his hiring someone to kill her. The story takes such wild turns that it even reaches a comical level. Apart from its wild characters and strange setting, Tiger King remains compelling for its continued effect on pop culture, whether through memes or a Dancing with the Stars appearance.
There is no bigger or more haunting scandal to come out of the Olympics than the case of the terrifying Dr. Larry Nasser. In 2018, the world discovered that some of the US’s most prominent heroes and strongest Olympic athletes, like Simone Biles and Aly Raisman, had faced abuse from one of the most respected sports doctors. Athlete A dives into the story of the women who stood up, the journalists who defied the odds, and the institutions that allowed evil to linger. The film is triumphant and devastating in articulating the emotional comebacks of the many victims and how, for many in US Gymnastics, gold was worth more than anything.
This is one true crime documentary that feels illegal even to watch. Capturing the Friedmans follows a typical Long Island family who has been a pillar of his community for years. Their idyllic life is abruptly challenged when the father, Arnold, and one of his sons, Jesse, have been charged with child sexual abuse. Built around home video footage from Arnold’s son David who decided to film the family’s implosion, the film allows audience members to be a fly on the wall during this traumatic time. Accompanied by interviews with the victims, Capturing the Friedmans delves into abuse, memory, and family like no other film could.
With the recent release of HBO’s Sydney Sweeney vehicle, Reality, the story of an NSA whistleblower, now is the perfect time to revisit Citizenfour. Directed by one of the best documentarians of our time Laura Poitras who was recently nominated for her work on All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Citizenfour offers a forest hand account of what it was like to reveal one of the biggest government secrets in recent memory. Set in a hotel room in Hong Kong, Poitras documents her first meeting and interviews with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. It’s a movie whose historical worth makes it more meaningful and lasting than any other.
It’s a fairytale ending to a long nightmare. Years after their son disappeared, the Barclay family is overjoyed to hear that he has been found somewhere in Europe. But something is off when they are finally reunited with their long-lost child. He looks different, talks differently, and acts differently. Ultimately, they find he is not their son but a French con man looking to make a getaway. The Imposter is a chilling stranger than fiction story that not only offers a glimpse at what it was like for family and friends to lose, find, and lose someone again but also gives in-depth interviews with the imposter himself, Frederic Bourdin.
Kids have heard and told some version of the Boogeyman story in every country, town, and street. The story of an evil wild creature who feasts on young children is the go-to urban legend to make kids understand the importance of a curfew. But for the kids of Staten Island, this urban legend turned out to be true. Directed by Staten Island natives Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio, Cropsey details the legend of a crazed man who lives in the woods behind the abandoned insane asylum and takes children and how in the 1980s, a man named Andre Rand turned that fear into a reality. It’s a haunting examination of why we create scary stories and how the real world can be scarier than fiction.
Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and Best International Feature, Collective is a monumental feat of investigative journalism. The movie centers around a tragic fire in a nightclub in Romania that left 64 dead and 146 injured and the subsequent public health scandal in which the survivors had to contend with unsafe hospital conditions and health officials more interested in turning a profit than saving lives. The film’s first half focuses on the investigative journalists who helped uncover this web of deceit, and the second half follows the new Minister of Health, Vlad Voiculescu, as he tries to battle corruption and change the system. Attacking all angles of the scandal, this Romanian documentary dissects how big state corruption can be.
Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer (2021)
Image via Netflix
Creator: Tiller Russell & James Carroll
In 1980s Los Angeles, only one name stoked fear in any resident’s heart. Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer details how two dedicated detectives caught one of the most ruthless killers in history, Richard Ramirez. The miniseries remains a thrilling mystery even if we know how the story ends. Additionally, its examination of serial killer infamy and celebrity is a biting commentary on how America prizes celebrity over anything else.
Most audiences are familiar with the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandals thanks to movies like Spotlight or Primal Fear. Still, nothing compares to this tale of systematic abuse and murder in the Baltimore Archdiocese. The Keepers centers around the unsolved murder of nun Catherine Cesnik and the events leading up to her disappearance. The series uncovers how a powerful priest’s pattern of abuse led to a series of criminal cover-ups. This miniseries shows the dangers of unlimited power and the nature of memory.
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