Also, it's an interesting list but apparently the documentary format was only invented in 1988.

There are some fantastic documentaries on that list, and some I want to go back and watch again as it has been over a decade (I'm looking at you Brother's Keeper!). But I do have an issue with some of the things on there. I don't feel that Michael Moore opened the door for documentarians. They are editorials. Moore doesn't approach a subject with an open mind, looking for information that turns into a picture to be presented. He goes in and already knows his question and his particular answer. From there he goes specifically looking for information that supports his theory. His work is just too biased for me.

Amazing, isn't it?

I know that Roger & Me opened a lot of doors for documentarians, but come on...

"Top 50 Documentaries that are Available on Netflix."

Perhaps Current TV takes it moniker a bit too literally, as there are no docs on the roster earlier than 1988. That leaves no room for 1922′s groundbreaking Nanook of the North, Alain Resnais’s brilliant Night and Fog from 1955, Leni Riefenstahl’s controversial Triumph of the Will (1935), or Dziga Vertov’s 1933 proto-study in cinematography, Man with a Movie Camera.

The narrow date range of the documentaries selected also fails to pay credit to the people who shaped the form. Emile de Antonio (Point of Order, In the Year of the Pig) is missing entirely. And the Maysles’ brothers’, whose “Direct Cinema” style heavily influenced Brother’s Keeper (#34), are nowhere to be found. Where is Grey Gardens? Salesman? Gimme Shelter? That rock doc is one of a slew of music-related documentaries that were buried under the blush-inducing bravado of Madonna in Truth or Dare (#49). Where are 1970′s Woodstock, Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, Dylan doc Don’t Look Back, Talking Heads film Stop Making Sense, and Buena Vista Social Club?

Naturally, modern documentarians Werner Herzog and Michael Moore figure prominently, but of the other fine auteurs of our time are conspicuously missing. Where is Ken Burns? Or Spike Lee, who took on Civil Rights in Oscar-nominated 4 Little Girls and Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath in If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise. Where is Michael Apted, who began his Up series about British schoolchildren in 1965 and is taking it into its sixth decade of cinematic anthropology next year?

March of the Penguins makes the list (#38), but its Morgan Freeman-less — and visually superior — counterpart Winged Migration didn’t make the cut. Nor does The Cove. Other omissions include 1984′s The Times of Harvey Milk, 2004′s Born into Brothels, and last year’s exploration of soldiers’ lives in Afghanistan, Restrepo.