documentary
Marina Vaizey
David Hockney was continually rejuvenated by his transatlantic commuting. The painter, printmaker, draughtsman, photographer, and stage designer, was also a writer producing theories of seeing, and was fascinated by digital technology. Randall Wright's narration is set out in a series of short chapters in a montage-cum-collage of photographs, earlier films both amateur and professional, home video and recent interviews with the inhabitants of Hockney’s world today and in the past. We see a lot of septuagenarians and octogenarians, as well as film clips and photographs Read more ...
fisun.guner
It won’t come as much of a surprise to find that the staff at Tatler are a bit on the posh side – who’d have thought? – but I honestly doubt they’re that much posher than, say, those at The Times, or The Guardian, or that other esteemed people’s champion, the New Statesman. As for the “posh to common” ratio on theartsdesk – without doing an exact head count, I’m not sure we radically break the mould, either. Such is the way the world rock ’n’ rolls in class-ridden Britain. I have no doubt that the posh will always be with us. But, really, has their presence ever been more forcefully felt Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
In Concerning Violence Göran Hugo Olsson has created an almanac documentary drawing on material from Swedish television archives, filmed by a number of directors in Africa, largely in the 1970s. It’s fascinating footage, covering a number of perspectives on what was happening in the continent over that decade, from the frontline guerilla wars with the MPLA in Angola and FRELIMO in Mozambique, to industrial unrest in Liberia, and apparently matter-of-fact interviews with white settlers in Rhodesia and elsewhere.But Olsson’s masterstroke, which gives this diverse material a uniting context, is Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“Your law is too soft. Make it more strict.” An Albanian illegal immigrant suspected of handling stolen goods was unimpressed by the courtesy extended to him by Bedfordshire Police. Too many pleases and thank yous, he complained. In Tirana the rozzers probably don’t ask you if you have any food allergies.The thin blue line has launched Operation Charm Offensive. In September Channel 4 broadcast Cops and Robbers about how police in the West Midlands deal with serial petty offenders, and they came over as secular saints. Next year there’s a big BBC One series inside the Met, who are presumably Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
In keeping with his impressive body of work, acclaimed documentary filmmaker Steve James approaches the details of the life of film critic Roger Ebert with honesty and the utmost respect. James was granted unprecedented access to Ebert in the final stages of his life in December 2012, just after he had been admitted to hospital for a hip-bone fracture. Though James didn’t realise it at the time his celebration and documentation of the life of the Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic also marked the last few months of Ebert's life. It is a raw, moving and fitting tribute to a passionate Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Rock music excessively rewards its pretty young corpses. Edwyn Collins’ survival, like Wilko Johnson’s, is much more remarkable. Two massive strokes in 2005, when he was only 44, should really have finished the ex-Orange Juice singer. Edward Lovelace and James Hall’s film plunges us without preamble into the dramatised, subjective reality for Collins back then.The hits – “Rip It Up”, “A Girl Like You” – and the quick, sardonic wit of the old Edwyn on the pop promo circuit appear as ill-fitting fragments, of little practical use as we see waves crash against the Scottish coast, and the singer Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It is an extraordinary scene. John Maloof stands over box after box after box of the belongings of Vivian Maier. They contain photographic negatives, undeveloped film, address labels, receipts, tickets and even teeth. In all, there are around 100,000 negatives and 700 undeveloped rolls of film. Soon after acquiring this material, Maloof scanned some of the photos, put them on the internet and it took off. The formerly unknown Chicago-based nanny and housekeeper became a buzz photographer, compared with greats like Diane Arbus and Weegee.Subsequently, she has been exhibited, prints of her Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
David Attenborough’s characteristically soothing narration again described the unceasing struggle for survival in the animal world. In astonishing films from all over the world, we witnessed an enormous variety of tactics for finding homes that not only provided shelter, but protection. In nature, he told us, good homes are all too rare, and we were treated to some not-so-subtle allusions to our own housing crises.This episode, subtitled Home, opened by visiting a bushy glade in the huge Zambian plain where a dozen wild dog pups were guarded by an adult male babysitter, as the other Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Broadmoor is not a prison. It just looks like one, as reiterated by umpteen craning shots which prowled around the Victorian red-brick exterior, assessing its brute institutional heft from every angle. For the first time, and after five years of negotiation, cameras have been allowed to document what happens inside this mythologised sanctum. Is it really the chamber of horrors of popular imagination? Is this where society’s malignantly insane are locked away for our better safety?Broadmoor’s staff are complicit in preserving its secrets. Rather than admit to working there and then spend hours Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
How odd to recall that Michael Portillo was the Thatcherite brat they loved to hate, the man whose 1997 defeat at Enfield Southgate would have caused a Twitter meltdown had the 140-character phenomenon been invented in time. Today's repackaged Portillo has blossomed in all directions, from being a stalwart on The Moral Maze and Andrew Neil's This Week to documentaries about capital punishment and mental health. You could almost suspect he had something of the Lib-Dem about him these days, Euroscepticism aside of course. And then there's his ongoing infatuation with railways. After four Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
In The Overnighters documentarist Jesse Moss found his story and pursued it with remarkable empathy, all in the best traditions of the genre. He persuaded both sides in this tale of (quiet) confrontation to trust him, and they opened up completely. Then closing minute revelations that come as a total shock take his film to a different level, turning what would have been a strong film in itself into something that will stay in the memory for a very long time.It made us ponder that frequent question with the form: what persuades the subjects of a film to continue cooperation, when the subject Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There are moments in observational documentary that sometimes seem to rise to the drama of fictional cinema, and Ilian Metev’s Sofia’s Last Ambulance (Poslednata lineika na Sofia) has plenty such. They come when the viewer becomes in some way so engrossed in what is on screen that the standard distinctions of form seem to be lost.Given both its subject and origin in Bulgaria, the obvious feature counterpart to Metev’s film must be the Romanian ambulance drama The Death of Mr Lazarescu by Cristi Puii from 2005 (though viewers may find themselves recalling Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead, too Read more ...