documentary
Owen Richards
Have you ever visited a destination you saw on film, only to realise it’s not quite how you imagined? Filled with tourists, the scars of mass visitation, and caught between its own culture and staying commercially attractive. The Thai city of Krabi is one such location, made famous by such films as The Beach and The Man with a Golden Gun. New release Krabi, 2562, from festival favourite directors Anocha Suwichakornpong and Ben Rivers, tackles these issues. But just like a visitation, it may cause you to think “this is not what I expected”.Presented as a docufiction, the film features a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
David Olusoga’s A House Through Time concept (BBC Two) has proved a popular hit, using a specific property as a keyhole through which to observe historical and social changes. After previously picking sites in Liverpool and Newcastle, this time he’s chosen Bristol, the city where he has lived for over 20 years.Among Olusoga’s particular interests as a historian are the British empire, race and slavery, so it was no great surprise to find him homing on on Bristol’s links with the slave trade. His chosen house was built in 1718 by Captain Edmund Saunders, who trafficked slaves from Guinea on Read more ...
Richard Macer
“That’s Marcelino Sambé, he’s wonderful,” said the artistic administrator of the Royal Ballet as I followed her down one of the many corridors that weave throughout the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. “He’s a newly promoted Principal, a very special talent indeed!” I looked over my shoulder at the figure disappearing through some doors. I had been at The Royal Ballet for over a week making a documentary for BBC Four about a golden generation of male stars but as yet had not met any dancers.Access documentaries to institutions such as this take months of negotiation and it’s not uncommon Read more ...
Owen Richards
Don’t do drugs, kids. For the past 50 years, that’s been the consistent message. But how much of what we know about psychedelics is just fearmongering? Do you really want to jump out of a window? Will you permanently lose your mind? To find out the truth behind the campaigns, writer Donick Cary dives into the real-life trips of a gaggle of famous faces for this multicoloured Netflix documentary.When you think of rock stars on drugs, you might imagine tragic scenes of excess and overdose. It’s unlikely you picture Sting birthing a cow while tripping on Mexican peyote. But this farcical tableau Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
The second half of Mark Cousins’ documentary on films by women filmmakers starts with religion; it ends with song and dance. This is a second seven-hour journey through cinema. It reconfirms Women Make Film as a remarkable feat of excavation and curation, as its twenty chapters showcase overlooked, excellent work by far-flung filmmakers. Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi and Wang Ping, socialist China’s first female director, are featured alongside film-school favourites like Denis and Akerman.The actresses Thandie Newton (pictured below) and Debra Winger are lead narrators now. Their Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Equally ambitious in scope as his 900min ode to cinema The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Mark Cousins’ latest work, Women Make Film, is a fourteen-hour exploration of the work of female film directors down the decades.Cousins’ Irish brogue no longer narrates the action, having replaced himself with the likes of Tilda Swinton (who also produces the film), Jane Fonda, Adjoa Andoh, Sharmila Tagore and Kerry Fox (at least in the first 20 chapters that this review covers). They, and Cousins, guide us on a self-described ‘road movie’, that shifts from clip to clip, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ask any great sportsman or woman about greatness and they'll tell you it's as much achieved as made; natal talent isn't worth much if you don't practise, or are unfit, or don't have a hunger to win. But much of modern sport has become obsessed with statistics, performance levels and the crunching of numbers – many with dollar or pound signs in front.Gabe Polsky's film suggests that that approach is taking all the joy and individuality out of sport, and not just at the professional level because it has filtered down to schools. Polsky (who made Red Army) is helped to make his case by three Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
It’s fair to say that humanity’s relationship with nuclear energy over the last 50 years has had more highs and lows than a Spanish soap opera. From the Manhattan Project to Hinkley Point, it’s been a controversial technology that has promised both humanity’s salvation and damnation.Now, first-time director Vicki Lesley’s easy-going documentary explores the post-war history of nuclear power. Captured with an odd degree of lightness, she makes an otherwise heavy subject accessible. Lesley tells the history of the atom as if it were a romcom. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are swiftly brushed Read more ...
Owen Richards
Only those who really love you can deliver the hard truths, and for filmmaker Elizabeth Sankey, that one love is romantic comedies. Better known as one half of band Summer Camp, Sankey is a self-confessed romcom expert, having watched nearly every film from the 80s onwards. It was her happy place, but in this new visual essay on MUBI, she breaks down the huge number of problematic tropes that fill the genre.There are certain rules that nearly every romantic comedy abides by. There are the female-led films, with straight, middle-class, white women defined by their weight and career, until they Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Back in the day, the weekend started with Ready Steady Go. Now Friday evenings are once more essential viewing, and not just because we’re all locked down. While the endless ToTP reruns are often no more than bad-taste wallpaper, the music documentaries are consistently high quality.This week the camera, or perhaps the spotlight, fell on The Shadows, “the British guitar band that sparked a revolution” as Gina McKee’s voiceover to The Shadows at Sixty informed us with little or no exaggeration. Spoken of in the same breath as Cliff Richard, the original British rock idol whom they backed, The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Portmeirion, the Italianate village created by architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis on the River Dwyryd estuary, might have been designed to provide the perfect surreal setting for the 1967 TV series The Prisoner. But though it resembles an opium dream of doll’s houses and fairytale landscapes, Portmeirion has proved remarkably sturdy, and with its selection of hotels and self-catering cottages functions successfully as a holiday destination.This new series will chart a year in the village’s life, and this opening episode was like following the local postman round the houses, and being Read more ...
Florence Hallett
One year on the world is drastically altered, but footage of Notre Dame’s stricken spire collapsing in flames is no less shocking. That this event, endlessly replayed, has not paled against the new reality of daily death tolls is testament to the scale of the loss. As the rector of Notre Dame, Patrick Chauvet put it: “Notre Dame is not just Paris, it’s France and beyond France, it’s the world.”By the time a fire was discovered at 6.43pm, more than 30 minutes had elapsed since a sensor had detected smoke in the attic, and Notre Dame, one of the great monuments of Gothic architecture, was Read more ...