documentary
Adam Sweeting
When the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany was liberated by the British 11th Armoured Division on 15 April 1945, the BBC’s reporter Richard Dimbleby was there to record the occasion. It was Dimbleby’s report for BBC radio, describing how he’d been plunged “into the world of a nightmare”, that alerted the wider world to the scale of the horrors which the Nazis had been perpetrating in the camps. The BBC producers in London were so appalled by Dimbleby’s account that they were proposing not to broadcast it, until he threatened to resign if they didn’t.There were Read more ...
Owen Richards
The UK-wide lockdown has thrown the cinematic release schedule into chaos. Some films are postponed indefinitely, while others have opted for direct digital releases. It’s not ideal for anyone, but in a strange way it may play to The Whalebone Box’s favour. Specialist arthouse streaming service MUBI has secured the exclusive rights, and their captive subscribers are the ideal audience for such a strange, hypnotic piece.Experimental artist and filmmaker Andrew Kötting has built a reputation for idiosyncratic documentaries, and The Whalebone Box is true to form. Essentially, the plot follows Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Zed Nelson brings enormous humanity to this portrait of the changing identity of Hackney’s Hoxton Street as gentrification impinges on its long-established community. Shops that have been there for decades vanish overnight, fancy new pavement cafes spring up, and Nelson listens, patiently, to all who will talk to him, with a striking sense of their being able to speak in their own time, unprompted, unhurried. A Hackney resident most of his life, he worked on The Street over four years and the trust he obviously earned speaks to the best traditions of social documentary.A couple of miles from Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Coming in at around four hours, in two parts, this 2015 documentary is ostensibly about Ol’ Blue Eyes, Frank Sinatra, but really, via the prism of his existence, it’s as much about America’s journey through the first two thirds of the 20th century. What other life intersects so neatly with such a scattershot selection of key names – Franklin D Roosevelt, Elvis Presley, Lucky Luciano, Mia Farrow, Louis B Mayer, Edgar J Hoover, Louis Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, Martin Luther King, Eli Wallach, and on and on. It’s a compulsive biography that, like the man it covers, never slows, and never grows Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Director Nick Green’s new three-parter follows on the heels of his A Dangerous Dynasty: House of Assad and comparisons are sure to be made between his two subjects. Though the finer degrees of political power-play – and the sheer quantity of attendant blood-letting – may vary, both investigate how the two autocratic regimes concerned came into being and how they have managed to enjoy such almost total power for so long (and look likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future).The two stories share a central paradox, too, namely the personalities of their leaders. When Syria’s Bashar Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This patchwork of interviews and comments from male journalists and politicians interspersed with clips from television news and films, from The Godfather to The Avengers, was a zig-zag narrative of Dominic Cummings’s unique career as a political strategist. Complete with portentous throbbing music, this BBC Two film was also a Hamlet without the Prince. Cummings was seen in moments from broadcast programmes or filmed addressing his troops, like a kaleidoscope reflected in the opinions of others.Presenter Emily Maitlis elicited a variety of comments: he is fearless in his views (but what are Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
When the Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison died last year, it was a chance to celebrate the remarkable life of a storyteller who shook the literary establishment. Her work, including her debut novel The Bluest Eye, broke radical new ground in depicting African American life. Now her life is the subject of a new documentary directed by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.This is a documentary that brims with love and admiration for Morrison’s work and life. All the critical biographical details are correct and present. Still, Greenfield-Sanders’ film is much more than a tick box Read more ...
David Nice
Spectacular success couldn't have happened to a more interesting person, or a better writer. The pithy but imaginative prose in the third and final instalment of Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, which as you may just have heard was published this week, flies off the page in readings by Ben Miles, Nathaniel Parker and Lydia Leonard of the RSC's Wolf Hall adaptation and Shiloh Coke (Lady Anne Clifford in Emilia at Shakespeare's Globe). There are commentaries by three men very well acquainted with Mantel's progress - you'd like at least one woman - but the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The 2020 Formula 1 season will commence in Melbourne next weekend... unless the race is cancelled because of the mounting coronavirus panic. Everyone will have to self-isolate and watch Netflix instead, so how fortunate that the ‘flix has delivered this second series of Drive to Survive in the nick of time.The first series last year was impressive, but this one seems to have taken a quantum leap upwards. Across the 10 episodes, it picks and probes at all the salient issues of F1, exploiting an amazing degree of backstage access and brilliant high-def action photography to reach back and forth Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In this aptly-titled series (BBC One), four British 20-somethings visit the USA to investigate the inner workings of the beauty industry. Perhaps not surprisingly, they discover that it’s a hotbed of greed and exploitation.Their first stop was the Beautycon exhibition in Los Angeles, a must-see gathering of 30,000 “beauty fans” and (ghastly neologism alert) online “influencers”. The latter included the glittering Kenneth Senegal, who can earn $14,000 by mentioning a cosmetic product in one of his videos. Chloe (a Belfast-based beauty blogger) and Casey (a fastidiously made-up gay man from Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan have been taking their bickering TV trips for a decade, beginning in the north of England in 2010 before working their way around Italy, Spain and now Greece (on Sky 1). They say this will be the last time, but believe that at your peril.Coogan has estimated that the characters they play in The Trip are about 30 per cent real and 70 per cent fictionalised, and part of the show’s allure is trying to spot the join between the two. No doubt this was the plan when director Michael Winterbottom (who has helmed all four series) originally sold it to them, perhaps not Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“It’s cool to see a car crash or a gunshot wound, it’s exciting.” Emergency medical technician Juan Ochoa, 17, loves his work, which is just as well because he doesn’t always get paid.Luke Lorentzen’s award-winning documentary (he directed, produced, shot and edited it) about the Ochoa family’s private ambulance in Mexico City is an extraordinary rollercoaster ride into the chaos of a metropolis where there are only 45 emergency ambulances for a population of 9 million. Private ambulances like the Ochoas’ take up the slack, and it’s a cutthroat business, with vehicles racing to be first at Read more ...