Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

Stonehenge is an icon of prehistoric British culture, an enigma that has seduced archaeologists and tourists for centuries. Why is it here? What is its significance? And which forces inspired its creators? Now a group of international archaeologists led by the University of Birmingham and the Ludwig Boltzman Institute in Vienna believe that a new state-of-the-art approach is the key to unlocking Stonehenge's secrets. For four years the team have surveyed and mapped every monument, both visible and invisible, across ten square kilometres of the sacred landscape to create the most complete digital picture of Stonehenge and the surrounding area over millennia. Known monuments have yielded more data than ever before, revealing hidden structures within, and new finds are revolutionising the very timeline of Stonehenge. The film takes the viewer on a prehistoric journey from 8000 BC to 2500 BC as the scientists uncover the very origins of Stonehenge, learning why this landscape is sacred, preserved and has been revered by following generations. Evidence of war and conflict, as well as the cultivation of ideas and industry, is explored to reveal complex communities with international trade links as far-reaching as Spain and central Europe.

Reenactments drive this documentary investigating the mastermind behind a scam to sneak the kids of rich and famous families into top US universities. The film goes beyond the celebrity-driven headlines and dives into the methods used by Rick Singer, the man at the center of the shocking 2019 college admissions scandal, to persuade his wealthy clients to cheat an educational system already designed to benefit the privileged.

In a world where nothing seems to ever work out as you had hoped, The Rehearsal features Nathan Fielder helping ordinary people rehearse difficult conversations or life events through the use of sets and actors hired to recreate real situations. The situations can be trivial, like confessing to a lie about educational history, or more complex, like raising a child. Fielder commissions extravagant sets with every detail recreated. He hires actors to inhabit these sets and practice different dialogue trees with his clients dozens of times. Information used to train the actors and build the sets is often collected without the subjects' knowledge.
In the firs episode, Nathan Fielder helps Kor Skeete, a Brooklyn-based trivia aficionado who wants to confess to his bar trivia team that he lied about having a master's degree. Nathan reveals an elaborate method of rehearsals involving an actor (K. Todd Freeman) playing a 'fake Kor'. To help Kor rehearse the difficult conversation with his teammate Tricia to clean this long-held lie, Nathan creates simulations of trivia night with a fake Tricia in a full-scale replica of the Alligator Lounge, a Brooklyn bar. Kor overcomes his fears and makes his confession to the real Tricia.

Originally a Prisoner of War camp for Soviet soldiers, SS Commander Rudolf Hoss oversaw the transition of Auschwitz from a political camp to a place to murder thousands of people. In the Autumn of 1941,the Nazis were about to embark on the most crucial few months in the planning of what they called 'The Final Solution' - the extermination of the Jews.

In the third part of his journey into the history of Christianity, Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch charts Orthodoxy's extraordinary fight for survival. After its glory days in the eastern Roman Empire, it stood right in the path of Muslim expansion, suffered betrayal by crusading Catholics, was seized by the Russian tsars and faced near-extinction under Soviet communism. MacCulloch visits the greatest collection of early icons in the Sinai desert, a surviving relic of the iconoclastic crisis in Istanbul and Ivan the Terrible's cathedral in Moscow to discover the secret of Orthodoxy's endurance.

Blue Planet II explores parts of the ocean that nobody has ever visited, encountered extraordinary animals, and discovered new insights into life beneath the waves. In Our Blue Planet, Sir David Attenborough examines the impact of human life on life in the ocean. In this final episode, we uncover the impact that our modern lives are having on our best-loved characters from across the series, including devoted albatross parents unwittingly feeding their chicks discarded plastic and mother dolphins potentially exposing their new born calves to pollutants through their contaminated milk. Scientists have even discovered that increasing noise levels may stop baby clownfish finding their way home.