documentary
Lisa-Marie Ferla
According to US television anchor Stephen Colbert, there are only three ways to end your career as a rock star: overdose, overstay your welcome or write Spiderman: The Musical. Rockers, he says, during a televised interview with LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy, don’t get to walk away - certainly not at the peak of their careers, when every album they release is still greeted with critical adulation and they’re capable of selling out Madison Square Garden.And yet, in April 2011, that’s exactly what the then 41-year-old New York performer and DJ chose to do. The Colbert interview, clips Read more ...
emma.simmonds
For all that’s been said about Orson Welles – usually focusing on his towering genius and sizable ego - he was above all a great contrarian. In interviews he was often genial and self-effacing and of course a scintillating raconteur. During his later years he could be avuncular, entertainingly unpredictable and very funny, like a mischievous lecturer. His The Lady From Shanghai (1947) is so loaded with eccentricity it’s positively cock-eyed and Welles was of course an outcast in Hollywood, that is until he cast himself out. So while those familiar with the legend alone might find F for Fake ( Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
In 1994, a boy vanishes from Texas. Over three years later, he is found by Interpol alive in Spain and shipped back to his family in San Antonio. As improbable as this is in itself, it marks the beginning of an even more incredible story revealed in gobsmacking glory by writer/director Bart Layton. This documentary proves not only that truth is stranger than fiction, but that sometimes truth is so strange it makes even the wildest imagination cower in the corner.The Imposter, which opens on Friday in the UK, has done the rounds of film festivals and has earned plaudits for its story and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Britain’s New Towns – constructed to address post-World War II housing shortages – were meant to be places of dreams. Modern amenities abounded. The clean lines of post-Le Corbusier architecture screamed “this is the future”. Yet there was no sense of community, more a sense of alienation for residents. That wasn’t an issue for on-message government agency the Central Office of Information, whose 1974 film New Towns painted them as places of wonder. Retitled A Dark Social Template, this ad for the miracles of concrete, bathrooms and a bank on your doorstep has been recast with a new Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
What do you do after nine series celebrating the cooking and eating of food? You make another, charting the effort to lose some of the weight gained. This time out, the bike-riding Si King and David Myers are still eating and travelling, but trying to adjust what they put in their mouths, to make it less calorie-tastic. Some exercise was on the menu too. As was selling copies of the tie-in book.King and Myers are agreeable enough in small doses – and ought to know how to be after their careers in TV and film production which preceded their transformation into the Hairy Bikers. Their banter is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If he isn't careful, Daniel Barenboim is going to find himself on a plinth in Trafalgar Square. He was feted at the Olympic opening ceremony as a great humanitarian, and his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is being held up as a model for how music can bridge political and ethnic divides, with particular reference to the Middle East. The orchestra's performances of the nine Beethoven symphonies at the Proms have been an event, even if Barenboim's conducting priorities have provoked some critical pursed lips and the hiss of vitriol hitting keyboard.In this hefty documentary, Michael Waldman Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What a dicey subject for debate Michael Johnson opened here, one that has scuppered the career of academics and social commentators alike, and which will have made many of his audience feeling deeply troubled. Johnson, now 44, competed at three Olympic Games between 1992 and 2000, won four Olympic gold medals at 200 metres and 400 metres, and still holds the world record for the latter.The starting point was his realisation that, at the Beijing Games in 2008, the eight sprinters who lined up for the men's 100m final, who hailed from four countries, were all descended from West Africans Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Sex Pistols played their final live show on 14 January 1978 in San Francisco. According to the third and final programme in the Punk Britannia series, “for many, it would be the end of punk”. It certainly was for ex-Pistol John Lydon, who'd form Public Image Ltd. Taking on the task of tracing what happened next was a challenge. Nothing was neat. Loose ends, new strands and evolution of the existing meant it couldn’t be. If this programme succeeded, it was in portraying the turmoil that came in punk’s wake.Bringing order where there is chaos is always difficult. As an overview of the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Of the rash of Olympic-themed films lining up on the startline, there is a double entry from Chariots of Fire, digitally remastered on film and freshly rebooted for the stage, as well as a forthcoming feelgood drama about young women in a relay squad – a sort of Round the Bend with Beckham – called Fast Girls. But for sheer drama, sport often leaves fiction trailing a distant second, which is the thought running through the head of Personal Best as it waits for the gun.Filmed by Sam Blair over four years, it follows the journey of four British athletes as they prepare for competition. No need Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Did Magda Goebbels do her children a favour by murdering all six of them in the bunker? Her rationale, as reported in the film Downfall, was the impossibility of imagining a life after Hitler for anyone called Goebbels.Most descendants of the Nazi top brass were not afforded this ghastly reprieve, and survived into a conflicted adulthood. Not long ago a son of Reinhard Heydrich offered to fund the restoration of the Prague castle, now ruined, from which his father terrorised the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The city government was suspicious of his motives. It was his childhood home, Read more ...
Fiona Sturges
Ooh look, she’s at it again. Fresh from hurling insults at David Starkey (well, he started it) and provoking the ire of historian Alison Light - who presumably didn’t make it through BBC casting - for daring to try on a bonnet on the box and thus “cheapening history”, Dr Lucy Worsley is back on our screens, doing ninja kicks in Puritan dress, trying Restoration gowns for size and shamelessly discussing Samuel Pepys’s “emissions”.Worsley, who is Chief Curator at the Historic Royal Palaces, is one of a number of increasingly visible female academics (see also Amanda Vickery, Bettany Hughes and Read more ...
Fiona Sturges
“It’s like Big Ben. It’s like the Houses of Parliament. It’s like St Paul’s,” observed Susan Hampshire, reflecting on the iconic properties of Television Centre, the BBC’s 52-year-old nerve centre. Steady on, Susan, you thought, let’s not overdo it. But that was before we’d seen some of its most long-serving and frankly terrifying employees, Paxman, Attenborough and Bakewell among them, getting all misty-eyed over this unprepossessing lump of concrete and glass, and mourning its imminent demise.The much-loved doughnut-shaped “TV factory” that gave us Morecambe and Wise, The Two Ronnies, The Read more ...