Film

Navalny

A real-time political thriller that happens to be true: Alexei Navalny wakes from a nerve-agent poisoning to help investigators identify his own would-be assassins, then flies back into the country that tried to kill him. Tense, darkly funny in places, and shot with the urgency of a spy film — for anyone who wants to watch courage look genuinely terrifying up close.

TMDb rating7.3

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Icarus2017

Bryan Fogel's Oscar-winning doc turns a personal doping stunt into an accidental exposé of Russian state corruption, complete with a whistleblower fleeing for his life — the same cocktail of paranoia, evidence-gathering and dark humour that makes Navalny sing.

But It's about sports doping first, geopolitics second, so if you want state-poisoning intrigue you'll wait a while for it to arrive.

Icarus poster

Collective2019

A Romanian newsroom drama that plays like a heist film, following journalists as they unravel a healthcare-fraud scandal after a nightclub fire — the same slow-building dread of watching brave people find out how rotten the system really is.

But The tragedy at its centre is real and horrific, and the film doesn't soften it — tough viewing if you want a hero's happy ending.

Collective poster

The Dissident2020no page yet

Bryan Fogel again, this time reconstructing the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi with the same forensic patience — phone records, audio, digital breadcrumbs — used to expose exactly who ordered a killing and why.

But There's no survivor here, no triumphant return home — just the full weight of what happens when the story doesn't end well.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Flee2021

Both hinge on a person marked by a state, forced to choose between fleeing and staying — Flee tells that story through animation and private memory instead of hidden cameras and public defiance.

An Afghan refugee's escape from a collapsing regime, told entirely through animation because the truth was too dangerous and too painful to film any other way — intimate where Navalny is public, but just as urgent.

But Animation as a documentary tool can feel like an odd fit if you want raw footage and hard evidence rather than reconstructed memory.

Flee poster
More like this (8)

Citizenfour2014

Laura Poitras films Edward Snowden in a Hong Kong hotel room in real time, the paranoia and stakes rising minute by minute — a masterclass in how to make a documentary feel like it might get someone killed.

But It's talkier and more claustrophobic than Navalny, mostly one room and a laptop — gripping if you love procedure, slow if you don't.

Citizenfour poster

Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World2018no page yet

Meet the open-source investigators — Christo Grozev's outfit — before they cracked the Navalny case, tracking war crimes and disinformation from laptops with nothing but flight records, phone data and relentless patience.

But It's more procedural than personal, closer to a tech deep-dive than a character study — less warmth, more spreadsheets.

Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom2015

Ukraine's Maidan uprising told through on-the-ground footage of ordinary people staring down riot police for ninety-three days — the same raw courage and improvised resistance, just multiplied by thousands of people instead of one.

But Chaotic by design, with no single central figure to follow — more crowd than character, which can be disorienting.

Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom poster

All the President's Men1976

The gold standard of journalism thrillers — Woodward and Bernstein chasing a paper trail all the way to the White House, proving that patient, boring-looking work can bring down the most powerful man in the country.

But It's a dramatized fiction from 1976, unhurried and talky by modern standards — no nerve agents, just phone calls and index cards.

All the President's Men poster

Chernobyl2019

HBO's miniseries dramatizes another Soviet-style catastrophe and cover-up, where the lie is more dangerous than the disaster itself — gripping, meticulous, and a reminder that this machinery of denial has a very long history.

But It's a five-hour dramatization, not documentary, and its horror is slower and more diffuse than one man's poisoning.

Chernobyl poster

The Great Hack2019

Cambridge Analytica, weaponised data and the quiet erosion of democratic consent — a different kind of poison, delivered through your phone instead of your tea, but aimed at the same target.

But No single hero to root for here, and its argument is more abstract — dread about systems, not one man's survival.

The Great Hack poster

The Death of Stalin2017

Same bureaucratic machinery of fear that Navalny documents in deadly earnest — the paranoia, the loyalty tests, the absurd choreography of power — except here it's played entirely for laughs, which somehow makes it land harder, not softer.

A pitch-black farce about the scramble for power after Stalin's death, where terrified men bicker over protocol while bodies are still being dragged away — the absurdity underneath authoritarian menace, played for its darkest laughs.

But If the idea of laughing at totalitarian terror feels wrong to you, this isn't going to change your mind — it's comedy, but comedy with teeth.

The Death of Stalin poster

The Battle of Chile: Part I1975

Guzmán filmed the collapse of Chilean democracy as it happened, embedding with the people trying to stop it — the same instinct to document power's crimes in real time that drives Navalny's own footage of his poisoning and its aftermath, just forty-five years earlier and with far less polish.

Shot on the ground during Pinochet's coup with cameras rolling as tanks arrived, this three-part documentary is the raw, unedited ancestor of everything Navalny is doing with modern footage and forensic hindsight — resistance filmed as it happens, not reconstructed after.

But It's nearly five hours across three parts, grainy 1970s film stock, and demands patience that a slicker modern documentary doesn't ask for.

The Battle of Chile: Part I poster

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