Historical Documentary Movies

In 1975, as America faced social and political upheaval, filmmakers turned chaos into art.

Former corporate whiz kid Robert McNamara was the controversial Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, during the height of...

What happened after Einstein fled Nazi Germany? Using archival footage and his own words, this docudrama dives into the mind of a tortured genius.

Working from the text of James Baldwin’s unfinished final novel, director Raoul Peck creates a meditation on what it means to be Black in the...

This comedic retrospective mixes archival footage and scripted sketches as it revisits all the dread — and occasional delight — that 2021...

Director Claude Lanzmann spent 11 years on this sprawling documentary about the Holocaust, conducting his own interviews and refusing to use a single...

Archival film maestro Göran Hugo Olsson has assembled—from a vast catalogue of footage in the vaults of Sweden’s national television...

The location of the sanctuary of Artemis at Amarynthos has long remained one of the last great archaeological enigmas of Ancient Greece. This vast...

This documentary delves into the mysteries surrounding the Neanderthals and what their fossil record tells us about their lives and disappearance.

On snow-covered fields in the small village of Napue in Ostrobothnia, a terribly one-sided battle is being fought in the bitter February cold. The...

September 3rd, 1939. Britain and France declare war on Nazi Germany, only two days after the Wehrmacht invades Poland. This day, the sad date when...

A showcase of German chancellor and Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler at the 1934 Nuremberg Rally.

Egyptian archaeologists dig into history, discovering tombs and artifacts over 4,000 years old as they search for a buried pyramid in this...

The story of Nisar Ahmed Khan, told through his children and the people he served, a spiritual guide whose followers still visit his tomb on his...

Thirty years after the release of his film JFK (1991), filmmaker Oliver Stone reviews recently declassified evidence related to the assassination of...

Tells the story of the greatest natural disaster of the ancient world, an event that experts believe inspired the legend of Atlantis.

In one of those wonderful coincidences of history, lumière, the French word for “light,” was also the last name of brothers...

A film about the gold panning adventures of Hans Söderström, an indigenous Swede. The story stretches from Scandinavia to Africa, via Asia...

Marijuana is the most controversial drug of the 20th century. Smoked by generations to little discernible ill effect, it continues to be reviled by...

The world's greatest pin-up model and cult icon, Bettie Page, recounts the true story of how her free expression overcame government witch-hunts to...