documentary
Demetrios Matheou
The Viennale is one of the best film festivals in the world and an indispensable part of Vienna’s cultural life. Yet this year’s edition was launched amid trying times. For one thing, whatever sanity-altering toxin is affecting voters the world over recently burst over the Austrian skies to leave that country with a likely coalition between right and far-right parties, not just bonded by anti-Islamic and anti-migration sentiment, but leaving anyone with an interest in cultural funding fearing the worst. More than that, the sudden death in July of the Viennale’s charismatic, fiercely Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
And so the mini-boom in motor racing movies continues, this time with a look back at the history of Ferrari and the intense on-track battles of the 1950s, a decade in which the Scuderia won four of its 15 Formula One World Drivers Championships. In particular, Race to Immortality zooms in on the unique partnership of the British drivers Mike Hawthorn and Peter Collins, who called each other “mon ami mate” and would split their race winnings equally between themselves. Their machiavellian boss Enzo Ferrari began to suspect that their great friendship was blunting their will to win races.The Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There was much more to Brendan J Byrne’s engrossing, even-handed documentary 66 Days (BBC Four) than its title might at first suggest. The timeline that led up to the death on 5 May 1981 of the IRA prisoner provided its immediate context – an increasingly dramatic one as the countdown of Sands’s hunger strike nears its inexorable conclusion. But the film’s interest was broader, not least in examining his role as a symbolic figure, both in the immediate context of the conflict in Northern Ireland, and across a much wider historical perspective.The drama of Sands’ life and death has already Read more ...
mark.kidel
The much-respected visual artist Isaac Julien made his name as one of the first great black British filmmakers, not least with Looking for Langston (1989) and Young Soul Rebels (1991). While Steve McQueen moved from gallery art and installations to big-budget fiction movies, Julien has gone the other way, leaving narrative behind and finding his vocation as an artist rather than a story-teller.His BFI film on Frantz Fanon, made in 1995, co-written and directed with Mark Nash, focuses on the story of the psychiatrist from Martinique who made his name as a vivid and penetrating theoretician of Read more ...
Owen Richards
Who is the real Grace Jones? This is the central question that drives Sophie Fiennes’s documentary, Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami. After 115 minutes, you might be less sure of the answer than when you go in. The title is Jamaican for a recording booth’s red light and bread, the substance of life. It’s appropriate for a film which juxtaposes the abstract visual feast of Jones’s live show with her modest upbringing in Jamaica. One minute we’re witnessing green lasers dance off her sparkled bowler hat, next she’s playing jacks in the small farmhouse next to where she grew up. The two Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Chris Packham, who devises and presents programmes about nature and animals, has described himself as "a little bit weird". This autobiographical documentary about himself explained what being on the autistic spectrum meant to him in particular in daily life and beyond.Autism is more and more discussed: more is known about its effects than its causes, and many high achievers have come out or are thought to be on the spectrum. The public hardly ever sees those who are so autistic that anything approaching a normal life is impossible, although a few brave families have made programmes about Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You might expect a posthumous 90-minute documentary – and that’s before you insert the ad breaks – about one of the biggest stars in British pop music over the last 30 years to shed some light on how said artist became so huge, but also how his career slowed to a crawl and his life came to such a depressing end. Freedom gives you some of the former but absolutely none of the latter. There’s a brief introduction to camera by Kate Moss (all pout and cheekbones) which mentions George’s death last Christmas and says that the film is “his final work”, but other than that Michael’s death might Read more ...
Owen Richards
Director Dan Sickles has known Dina her entire life. He knows her engaging personality, and he knows her tragic past. It’s the former which he and co-director Antonio Santini feel is worth celebrating in this Sundance award-winning documentary.Dina is a 48-year-old widow who views the world with childlike optimism. Her charm and openness are immediate – traits which have enamoured her fiancé Scott. Together they make a winning team, each growing from the other’s support, love and unconventional nature. Alongside a rolling cast of friends, family and unsuspecting strangers, we watch the couple Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The first thing to say about Lucy Worsley’s Nights at the Opera (BBC Two) is that it is laser-aimed at those who have not enjoyed many nights at the opera. Enjoyed in the sense of attended; also, probably, in the sense of enjoyed. Anyone who is a regular at the Garden, or keeps a plaid rug permanently pegged out by the Glyndebourne ha-ha, or is a life member of the Netrebko claque, approach if you dare, but with smelling salts to hand.Television occasionally feels it must demystify opera for the masses who subsidise it, strip away that elitist veneer and lay bare an elemental core. Harry Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s getting to that time of the century. A hundred years ago to the month, if not quite the day, the Winter Palace was stormed, and the Russian Revolution came to pass. To commemorate the communists’ accession, Russia 1917: Countdown to Revolution (BBC Two) pieced together the narrative for those who haven’t read all or indeed any of the books on the Bolsheviks.A battalion of historians answered the summons to give their version of events, the types whose titles are prominently displayed in airports and beyond. Indeed, if you lobbed a Molotov cocktail into the documentary's green room you’d Read more ...
Jasper Rees
One New Year’s Eve in the 1970s, hot young session musicians Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards were assured by Grace Jones that they could penetrate the inner sanctum of Studio 54 by dropping her name at the door. A doorman thought otherwise and invited them to "fuck off". Making alternative arrangements, they bought a couple of bottles of Dom Perignon – “rock’n’roll mouthwash”, in Rodgers’ phrase – and went home to jam.The doorman’s valediction kept running through their heads and came out in a rhythmic disco riff. “Fuck off. Fuck Studio 54.” The tune was more radio-friendly than the verbatim Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Michael Winterbottom has always been a mercurial director, moving swiftly between genres, fiction and documentary, keeping us on our toes. But with On the Road it’s time to mark the tiniest of trends.24 Hour Party People is one of the best films about the music industry ever made, a riotous fictionalisation of the revolution in Manchester in the Eighties and Nineties that revolved around Tony Wilson’s Factory Records and the bands Joy Division, New Order and The Happy Mondays. 9 Songs was a radical experiment, as the director presented a sequence of gigs as the backdrop of a sexually explicit Read more ...