This Oscar Category Is Having Its Best Season in Years

As Oscar season ramps up, various outlets have begun looking at the contenders. Is it Christopher Nolan’s year again? How big an impact will La Bola Negra have with Netflix’s marketing arm behind it? But one of the more quietly outstanding slates right now belongs to Best Documentary Feature Film. In fact, looking at the early contenders, the category looks like it’s going to have its strongest lineup in years.

While Aaron Sorkin is taking his shot at Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Reckoning to an audience of shrugs, legendary documentarian Alex Gibney is taking an even bigger shot. At nearly four hours long, Musk has been received with thunderous applause from those who have seen it. This portrait of the world’s richest man is certainly intimidating in its length, but being that thorough in chronicling Elon Musk certainly seems to be worth it in the end.

Though less of a prominent target, Elizabeth Holmes’s “why would I deceive you?” from the trailer to You Can See Everything is already the stuff memes are made of. The film by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim (who’s having a standout 2026 with this and Primetime) is three hours long, but an extensive look at one of the world’s most famous liars and manipulators will hopefully reveal a few truths hidden in the lies.

In 1972, director William Greaves (whose TV show Black Journal remains a vital document of the late 60s) invited a large number of artists, poets, musicians, and all other creators from the Harlem Renaissance to Duke Ellington’s townhouse in Harlem. Greaves filmed throughout the gathering, and fifty years later, his son David assembled the footage into what is being released as Once Upon a Time in Harlem. This is the sort of film that will introduce audiences to a great number of black artists they’ve never heard of. Where William’s gathering and footage is an act of preservation of a time that had long since passed, David’s assemblage and release are another step in making sure that people know the names of these artists who deserve more recognition after all this time. 

The hot button doc of the year is NAZA, a film so powerful that an Israeli filmmaker has already created NAZA: The Real Story to try to counter its revelations. NAZA, from directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor (two of the four co-directors of No Other Land), is an in-depth look at the Israeli army and their tactics in Gaza, using soldiers’ own words to describe their work. At a time when public sentiment on the war in Gaza in the United States is shifting quickly, this will come as a necessary push to many still on the fence. 

In 2016, Ava DuVernay made waves with 13th, a look at the American prison system and the way that it serves as an extension of slavery that was outlawed in the titular Constitutional amendment. Ten years later, DuVernay is back with 14th, a look at the titular Constitutional amendment, which has come under fire from certain elements of the government. The post-Civil War amendments have long stood as attempts to make America the multi-racial society so many people try to see it as, but those amendments have been under fire since their ratification (see also, DuVernay’s previous film on the subject). DuVernay’s film feels vitally necessary at a time when the full force of the US government is being brought against the rights that fundamentally make Americans American.

Those are only five of the most prominent features in contention this year. Poh Si Teng’s American Doctor is a harrowing look into attempts to bring humanitarian aid into Gaza. Everest: The Other Side, from previous Oscar winners Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, is a non-political film full of tension as climbers try to make their way up and down one of the most dangerous mountain slopes in the world. Union Town sees Barbara Kopple revisiting the topics for which she’s already won two Oscars in Harlan County U.S.A. and American Dream. The Best Documentary Feature Film category is the most loaded it’s been in recent memory, and we shouldn’t sleep on this as one of the most exciting to watch this fall.

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