This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Documentaries sometimes get a bad reputation for being slow-moving, but a good one can tell a story just as well as any fictional film can. According to our writers and editors, these are some of the best ones—seven documentaries that even the most documentary-averse can enjoy.The Queen of Versailles (available to rent on Prime Video and YouTube TV)If you would sooner turn on an episode of Vanderpump Rules than any PBS joint, may I recommend the 2012 documentary The Queen of Versailles? The queen in question is the multimillionaire Jackie Siegel, whose slightly hysterical mannerisms and boundless passion for shopping would make her a prime candidate for the Real Housewives franchise. Her castle is a 90,000-square-foot mansion in the humid reaches of central Florida, styled after the Palace of Versailles. (For context, that’s almost twice as large as the White House.) The twist? It’s never been finished. Although the director had intended to follow the construction through to the end, Siegel and her husband, the late time-share-resort mogul David Siegel, started running out of money during filming once the Great Recession hit. The Siegels, along with their eight children and four dogs, were left with a partially built estate on a treacherous piece of Florida swampland. It’s as good a metaphor as any for the hollowing-out of the American dream.— Sara Krolewski, deputy research chiefMinding the Gap (streaming on Hulu and Disney+)The title of Minding the Gap—a gap being anything you can jump, trick, or skate over—might lead you to think that this is a movie about just skateboarding, and it is, kind of. But Bing Liu, the Illinois-bred Chinese American director behind this astonishing Academy Award–nominated debut, has his eye on something far grander. The movie’s real priorities are so ambitious, and so personal to Liu and his hometown crew of skaters, that it’s almost better not to expose them here. First the film is one thing; then it’s another. The less you know going in, the better.— Will Gottsegen, staff writerMagnus (available to stream on Tubi and PlutoTV)Magnus’s arc is the stuff of fantasy novels: A young, isolated child has magical abilities and must learn to harness those powers to great ends. In this case, the child is Magnus Carlsen, and his destiny is to become perhaps the greatest chess player of all time. By age 13, he was a grandmaster; by age 22, he was world chess champion. The documentary, which is gripping in its narrative (think: The Queen’s Gambit), tracks Carlsen’s precocious early years, his struggles through adolescence, and how he trained to attain world domination. What it reveals are fascinating insights into the psychology, motivations, and stresses of a man considered, to this day, to be among the best in his class.— Matteo Wong, staff writerCave of Forgotten Dreams (available to stream on Philo)In 1994, Jean-Marie Chauvet and a small team of explorers made a discovery among the limestone cliffs of southeastern France: a cavern whose walls were adorned with horses and bison and mammoths. The images—hundreds of them, detailed and lifelike and cinematic—were painted roughly more than 30,000 years ago. The French government, having learned the lesson of Lascaux, promptly closed them off from public view. So it was something of a twist when, years later, the director Werner Herzog and a skeleton crew of filmmakers joined a research expedition to study Chauvet and its phantom menagerie. The result is a marvel: expansive (though the movie’s action is largely confined to the cave), propulsive (though it has no real plot), provocative, eerie, dreamy.Herzog serves as both a character in the proceedings—he and his Teutonic timbre narrate the film—and a would-be sleuth of age-old mysteries. Who made these paintings? What were they trying to say? And why do their efforts resonate so powerfully today? Met with stony silence, hearing only the echoing thrum of the human bodies around him, Herzog asks, “Is this their heartbeat, or ours?”— Megan Garber, staff writerJiro Dreams of Sushi (streaming on Prime Video, YouTube, and Tubi)Making sushi like Jiro Ono means committing to an almost fanatical pursuit of greatness—a threshold set by Ono, judged by Ono, and executed by Ono, day in, day out. Each step requires not only unfettered focus but also a belief in the work: You must find purpose in washing the rice again and again, in fanning the nori sheets over a charcoal grill, in slicing through the fish’s body with scalpel-like precision. Fans of The Bear might enjoy the simmering intensity of this 2011 documentary, filmed in Tokyo when the chef was 85 years old and a three-time Michelin-star winner (he’s now 100 and still working). In the kitchen, Ono is soft-spoken and single-minded. He does not sacrifice quality to appease something as fickle as people’s feelings—an apprentice famously made a dish more than 200 times before Ono finally approved of it. You might not come out of this movie wishing that Ono was your boss (or even your dad—he is no less strict with his sons), but you might better understand the obsessiveness that underpins brilliance: all that this work can add to the world, and all that it can cost.— Stephanie Bai, senior associate editorParis Is Burning (streaming on YouTube, Tubi, and HBO Max)More than three decades years after its release, Jennie Livingston’s iconic snapshot of the 1980s New York ballroom scene still feels as vibrant as ever. The documentary focuses on the primarily Latino and Black contestants who dance and perform in underground balls, competing for trophies against other “houses.” It is a love letter to a working-class culture that taught generations of queer people that putting on a wig and high heels while striking poses in front of a mirror could be accepted and even cherished—somewhere. Although their galas were soon shattered by the AIDS epidemic that ravaged the community, this film, in a way, is a tribute to all of the art that was cut short and all of the bedazzling gowns that they never wore again. Plus, you get to learn what reading really means.— Álex Maroño Porto, associate editorHoop Dreams (streaming on YouTube, PlutoTV, and HBO Max)When I think about the 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams, a line from the late critic Roger Ebert’s review always comes to mind: “If this were fiction, we would say it was unbelievable.” The events of Steve James’s film—two young athletes attempt to realize their dream of playing professional sports—have been replicated in countless films, books, and TV shows. But the miracle of this documentary is how much life it captures, as we watch William Gates and Arthur Agee, two Black teenagers from low-income neighborhoods, enroll in a prestigious program at a predominately white school in 1980s Chicago. The filmmakers followed their subjects for years, and what their cameras caught goes deeper than basketball; we see how real people manage to stay alive in a world intent on defeating them. Don’t think about the long run time—just turn it on and sink in.— Jeremy Gordon, senior editorHere are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:Is schoolwork optional now?Charlie Warzel: An incredibly weird time to be aliveHow the whole-grain trend went wrongThe Week AheadMother Mary, a drama thriller starring Anne Hathaway about a pop star reconnecting with her estranged best friend (in theaters Friday)Season 3 of Euphoria, following a group in their early 20s navigate drugs, love, social media, and money (out today on HBO Max)The Long Run, a book by Martin Dugard about the rise and popularity of marathons and running (out Tuesday)EssayEarly in his career, Dave Chappelle worked on a sitcom concept with Fox. (Kwaku Alston / Getty)Who Is Black Comedy For?By K. Austin CollinsEarly in his career, before he became a household name, Dave Chappelle attempted to get a series off the ground at Fox. It was 1998, and the network had already welcomed Black comedies such as Living Single, Martin, and In Living Color—shows that implied a vested interest in Black taste. Chappelle might have expected to find a receptive audience when he presented the pilot for Dave Chappelle, a sitcom based on his life as a young Black comedian. What he reportedly got instead was a roomful of white executives with a familiar set of complaints. There were not enough white people on his proposed show. It was not “universal” enough—meaning it was too Black. Swap out the Black female lead for a white one and add an additional white character, he was advised. All of this despite Fox being, as Chappelle put it at the time, a network that had “built itself on black viewers.” He refused to cooperate, remarking that the incident “tells every black artist no matter what you do, you need whites to succeed.”Read the full article.More in CultureThe most beautiful moment of the Artemis II missionThe NBA isn’t the same for everyone.Savannah Guthrie and the hard truth about true crimeWrestling’s newest star is massive, bearded, and ready to piledrive ICE.Scrubs has a sneakily radical vision of male friendship.Ghostwriting is good, actually.Catch Up on The Atlantic 1979 is the year that explains Donald Trump.Claude Mythos is everyone’s problem.How did Samuel Alito become this angry?Photo AlbumArtemis II crew members witness the moon eclipsing the sun on their return voyage to Earth. (NASA)On April 6, 2026, four NASA astronauts swung around the far side of the moon, traveling farther from the Earth than any humans had ever gone before.Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.Play our daily crossword.Explore all of our newsletters.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.