documentary
mark.kidel
The language of documentary is shot through with conventions. Rare is the occasion when a film-maker breaks the rules and throws the genre wide open. It takes a versatile artist like Laurie Anderson to free the medium from genre and invent a whole new way of doing things.Heart of a Dog is a resolutely personal, emotionally charged and often witty exploration of the passing of Anderson’s rat terrier Lolabelle, but the film is also a meditation on dreams, death and love. Without ever seeming gimmicky, pretentious or over-intellectual, Anderson manages to seamlessly draw together reflections on Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There are a lot of cheerful people in the world, most of them outside the United States. That's the startling conclusion of Michael Moore's pointed comic jeremiad Where to Invade Next, in which American cinema's premier schlub decamps overseas to encounter numerous life- and work-related lessons that our ketchup-loving conqueror wants to take back home.What surprises isn't Moore's view of present-day America, which is unexceptional in its assessment of a hard-scrabble country ruled by multiple iniquities – not least the overriding potency of money, and a signal inability to face up to the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The release of Louise Osmond’s biographical film about the director Ken Loach, who turns 80 on 17 June, has been timed to perfection. Twelve days ago, Loach’s I, Daniel Blake won him his second Palme d’Or. He came out of retirement to make it after the Conservatives won the General Election last year. “Bastards,” he calls them, with a schoolboy-ish smile, at the beginning and end of the documentary.Except in the first half of the Thatcher ’80s, Tory policies have specialised in eliciting Loach’s fiercely oppositional cinema – so have anti-socialist Labour policies. For 53 years, he has been Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Antonia Bird died in 2013 at the age of 62. The last television drama with her name on it was the first series of The Village, but the career which is celebrated in the BBC Four documentary Antonia Bird: From EastEnders to Hollywood were from a golden age of single drama. You always knew you were watching a film by Bird. She made a name with single-issue films with single-syllable titles.First off was Safe (1993) tackling homelessness, then Priest (1994), Jimmy McGovern’s portrait of the modern Catholic church. Next up was Face (1997) about gangsters with a conscience. In Care (2000) a man Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Every few months we get a new Project Fear campaign by "experts" announcing that a small glass of Bristol Cream twice a week now qualifies as "binge drinking", and guarantees certain death. However, none of the interviewees in Louis Theroux's latest documentary had paid any attention to these warnings. They were patients at the specialist liver centre at King's College Hospital in south London, and each of them was fighting a different kind of battle with alcohol.There was Stuart the antiques dealer, suffering from cirrhosis and with perhaps only months to live, though this information was Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
In the last century, when the BBC took arts documentaries seriously, Arena was one of the highlights of the week. Nowadays its appearance is as rare as that of a Midwich cuckoo. Money, or rather the lack of it, is the problem. In our grave new world a single promo for EastEnders can cost more than a 60-minute film.Three cheers then for Arena: All the World’s a Screen – Shakespeare on Film, a cavalcade of clips that show the Bard really is all things to all men. None of the talking heads belongs to a woman. None of the interviews is original, but David Thompson and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“By their beginnings, you shall know them” is a useful motto for cinematic rediscovery. Rather than predicting how a director’s creative path may develop in the future, you go in the opposite direction to see which way, starting from his or her earliest works, the web has been spun.“Spinning a web” is a phrase appropriate for Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2000 debut feature Mysterious Object at Noon (Dokfa nai meuman), as ingenious an exercise in playful narrative development as can be imagined. Beginning with that classic storytelling trope, “Once upon a time…”, it develops in an Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In 2014 the Channel 4 series Confessions looked at the changing face of the old professions. In the programme about doctors, one GP remembered the standard practice of deploying acronyms on patient notes that looked like arcane medical terminology but were in fact nothing of the sort. One of them was NFN, which meant Normal for Norfolk.It’s not quite clear why a new docusoap of that name has adopted it. East Anglian safe spacers may be triggered into a sense of mortal offence followed by noisy excommunication for BBC Two. The title is more harmless than it looks. This is yet another Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The most radical of the directors who forged a “cinema of resistance” at the BBC in the 1960s, Peter Watkins completed two groundbreaking docudramas there – Culloden (1964) and The War Game (1965) – before the suppression of the second prompted his eventual exile to countries more receptive to his internationalist films and his anti-capitalistic approach to financing and making them.Half a century hasn’t dimmed the seismic power of this pacifist diptych, now handsomely restored and packed with supplements by the British Film Institute for its release in a dual format edition. The antithesis Read more ...
graham.rickson
The earliest film collected here, 1963’s Elgar, stands up incredibly well. Some of its quirks were imposed from above: fledgling director Ken Russell was initially employed by the BBC’s Talks Department and was discouraged from using actors in his documentaries. So Elgar is packed full of reconstructions of scenes from the composer’s life, though the actors never speak and there are no close ups.All of which adds to the realism, aided by Huw Wheldon’s sonorous narration of Russell’s script. The images are glorious: the recurring scenes of Elgar traversing the Malvern Hills accompanied by his Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The trio of Sixties television documentaries assembled here are prototypical examples of Ken Russell’s oeuvre: hyper-real, and often frenzied, depictions of the lives of their subjects. Each not-quite or more-than documentary was made for the BBC in an era when boundaries were pushed and the corporation allowed directors to follow their artistic sensibilities. Although there is little immediate link with the Ken Loach of 1966’s Cathy Come Home, both he and Russell thrived in the fertile environment of a BBC which took chances.The Great Passions collects Always on Sunday (1965), a portrayal of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It’s a fair bet that when Lewis Hamilton and his Formula One colleagues are driving to practice sessions they don’t have to queue for 90 minutes at a military checkpoint. This was just one illuminating vignette of the daily grind shown in Amber Fares’ interesting documentary about a group of Palestinian female car-racers, the first all-women team in the Arab world.This incident happened to team captain Maysoon, who marshals Marah, Noor, Mona and Betty, four very likeable women who love racing cars. Fares tells their stories through interviews with the women and their families, interspersed Read more ...