documentary
Adam Sweeting
The Eagles recorded their first two albums in London in the early Seventies, though they couldn't have imagined they'd be back 40 years later to present their new documentary, History of the Eagles Part One, at Sundance London. There is, as you may have surmised, also a Part Two, which is available in the DVD and Blu-ray package that goes on sale on Monday 29 April.The band now comprises Glen Frey, Don Henley, Timothy B Schmit and Joe Walsh. Former lead guitarist Don Felder, once a major stakeholder in the cash-spinning conglomerate that the Eagles became, has been cast into limbo following a Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It feels a little as if BBC journalists are getting themselves into trouble every other week at the moment. As news emerges that new BBC chief Tony Hall will appear before MPs to discuss why they allowed a Panorama journalist to use a university field trip as cover for an exposé on North Korea, it's little wonder that the broadcaster's flagship investigative journalism programme has stuck with a far easier target this week.Shari'a law, and the enforcement thereof, is a headline-writer's dream, playing as it does into our fears of the "other". Broadly meaning "the way", Shari'a is the body of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As a self-taught chemist, innovative industrialist, a businessman who exploited and developed new means of distribution and marketing, an anti-slavery campaigner and a man dealing with his own disability, the Staffordshire potter Josiah Wedgwood was an important 18th-century figure, a pioneer whose achievements still resonate. But a genius?The historian, biographer and author AN Wilson has no doubt about this. Presenting this perambulation through Wedgwood’s life and vessels, Wilson began in Burslem – “a muddy village in the middle of nowhere” – and climaxed in the royal palaces of Read more ...
terry.friel
Covering both sides of a conflict is never easy. Apart from the physical dangers, warring parties are wary of journalists who've reported on and established ties with the enemy. Afghanistan showed this as clearly as anywhere, when the US forces were suspicious of any journalists with Taliban contacts.British film-maker Olly Lambert’s Syria: Across the Lines strode confidently over that hurdle, giving a unique insight into the people on both sides of Syria's civil war as it continues to veer in and out of the headlines after two years of fighting and more than 70,000, mainly civilian, deaths. Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Ken Loach’s first solo documentary since The Flickering Flame, The Spirit of ‘45 is an indispensable agitprop movie that might have been subtitled Days of Hope, after Loach and Jim Allen’s 1975 drama serial about the political struggle of a socialist family between the Great War and the General Strike. Hope in 1945 resided not in the kind of militancy that emerged in Britain following the Russian Revolution, however, but in the idea that the people who had won World War II together could build the peace together.Constructed from archival footage and on-camera oral reminiscences of socialist Read more ...
terry.friel
The public rarely sees the human cost of journalists covering war. More rarely still does it see the real civilian cost. That makes Walking Wounded a frank and refreshing insight into the world at either end of the lens. Siobhan Sinnerton’s remarkable film followed British photographer Giles Duley as he returned to Afghanistan after losing both legs and his left arm in an IED explosion two years ago this month while embedded there with the US Army’s 75th Cavalry Regiment.His project - to photograph work in a Kabul hospital that specializes in restorative treatment for locals Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
At what stage will the trend among journalists and documentarians to regard anything relating to the internet with suspicion or, worse, ignorance come to an end? Although I recognise that my relationship with information technology has never been exactly typical, this stuff has been easy enough to access for more than half of my life now. And I’m not exactly young. Google and the World Brain, the first of this week’s two technology-themed instalments of BBC Four’s usually excellent Storyville international documentary strand, argued that attempts to preserve the entirety of human knowledge Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Television is a regular prison visitor. You can’t keep Louis Theroux out of the grimmest Stateside penitentiaries, the drama departments drop in now and then for a stretch inside – most recently in Prisoner’s Wives. And then there’s ITV. A couple of years ago it reported from Wormwood Scrubs to find out how the prison system was coping in Brown’s Britain. It wasn’t the prettiest sight. The channel turns its attention to Aylesbury, a young offender institution heaving with the sort of hoodies the Prime Minister may not after watching this first episode feel quite so inclined to hug.Aylesbury Read more ...
james.woodall
Ecology at the first full day of the Berlin film festival. An intriguing Matt Damon city-versus-country movie, Promised Land, puts fracking into the mainstream for the first time. Damon plays Steve Butler, an eager corporate buyer of leases in rural America to enable his New York employers Global to start deep drilling for massively lucrative natural gas.In a failing Pennsylvania small town Butler runs up against ancestral devotion to farming and an incomprehensible aversion to instant fortune, and into (of course) a pretty schoolteacher Alice (Rosemarie De Witt). In her inherited home she’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In the Sixties, self-appointed guardians of the nation’s morals were pretty steamed up about bingo. More so even than about Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Fyfe Robertson, the BBC’s bewhiskered roaming chronicler, said the game was “the most mindless ritual achieved in half a million years of evolution.” His own brainlessness mattered not a jot.The winner of £47,000 – and two shillings – declared: “I’m so excited I could do with a drink of whisky.” She wasn’t going to be swayed by finger-wagging and noses being looked down. This enthralling canter through the history, sociology and quirks of the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Five years ago James Marsh won an Academy Award for the documentary Man on Wire. It thrillingly told the story of Philippe Petit’s audacious walk on a tightrope between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. Marsh stayed on in the 1970s for Project Nim, a chilling documentary about a hubristic American scientist who as an experiment tried to bring up a chimpanzee as a human. Marsh is clearly attracted to stories about man’s vaulting ambition, because his next film featured the quest to bring about peace in Northern Ireland.Shadow Dancer, critically acclaimed on its release and now Read more ...
Jasper Rees
They muck one up, one’s ma and pa. Later this year, all being tickety-boo, a royal uterus will be delivered of the third in line to the throne. The media in all its considerable fatuity will ponder the best way to bring up such an infant in the era of, for instance, Twitter. Full marks go to the BBC’s history department for mischievously lobbing this cautionary little gem into the pot. Queen Victoria’s Children is a three-part manual in how not to raise a future monarch.Queen Victoria was of course a paragon of fecundity. Sadly, her womb was also a factory for discord, misery and, ultimately Read more ...