Best Documentary Movies of 2004

Attenborough's team travels the globe for up-close looks at polar bears, grizzlies, pandas and other fascinating bear species.

Each home has a built in pool or water tank that lies partly inside, partly outside its’ walls… A continuous stream of spring water is piped right into a basin, so freshwater is always available. People rinse out pots in the tank and clean their freshly picked vegetables. If they simply pour the food scraps back in the water, they risk polluting the whole village supply. However, carp can scour out even the greasy or burnt pans. They do the washing up in Satoyama villages. This traditional arrangement is called the riverside method. It’s used all over Japan. Cleaned up by the carp, the tank water eventually rejoins the channel.

Shot in three countries over a two year period, Boxers and Ballerinas explores the US-Cuba conflict through the eyes of four youths--a boxer and a ballerina in Havana and Santiago de Cuba and a boxer and a ballerina exiled in Miami.

About the Salem Witch trials

The life story of Aaliyah, a worldwide-famous singer, actress and model who first rose to stardom in the 90s at age 15 and was later killed in a plane crash in 2001.

In the world's most shark-infested waters, an extreme team of divers attempt to photograph massive great white sharks without the protection of a cage. The team, led by Andre Hartman, is marooned for 9 days off a remote island in Mexico.

The story behind the epic Queen single.

A documentary made for television that looks back on the development and rapid rise of Oasis from being a band practicing nightly in the Boardwalk to one the biggest British bands of the last thirty years. Building from the formation of the band (with Liam apparently just fed up waiting for other bands to release records and decides to do something himself), the film uses contributions from key people really well to tell the story in an engaging way.

The explosion at Chernobyl was ten times worse than the Hiroshima bomb and was due to a combination of human error and imperfect technology. An account of the sixty critical minutes prior to the explosion of the nuclear power plant on the night of April 26, 1986.