Muhammad Ali in "When We Were Kings." Polygram Some of the greatest moments in cinematic history are scenes of non-fiction.
From a profile of boxing legend Muhammad Ali to a portrait of a renowned sushi chef, the best documentaries capture real-life phenomena in a memorable and artful fashion.
To find out which documentary films have received the most critical acclaim over time, we turned to the reviews aggregator Rotten Tomatoes for its ranking of the top documentaries in history.
The site ranked the films by a weighted critic score that accounts for variation in the number of reviews each film received.
Here are the 50 best documentaries of all time, according to critics: