documentary
Liz Thomson
“My worst fear? What am I scared of?” Amy Winehouse ponders. She pauses thoughtfully: “Myself.”Ten years to the day since she died, Reclaiming Amy, Marina Parker’s documentary, remembers and celebrates the singer, revealing the truth as her parents see it of her short life and tragic death. The world has heard a lot from Mitch, her father (pictured below), but nothing really from her mother, Janis, speaking now because she knows MS will ultimately deprive her of her memories.“Truth” is subjective of course, and we all inevitably forget the inconvenient truths. But there was a real sense that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The extraordinary story of motor industry executive Carlos Ghosn is a heady combination of power, money, corruption and international politics, with a Mission: Impossible-style ending that carries it over the finishing tape in dramatic style. It might be considered a cautionary tale, except that Ghosn’s experiences and personality were so unique that a repeat performance could never happen.Nick Green’s Storyville film tells Ghosn’s story with the pace and punch of a thriller, illustrated with interviews with various key participants and observers, its disturbing atmosphere enhanced by eerie Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Last year, Netflix released Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, a four-part documentary about the notorious financier and convicted sex offender. Now, here’s a Ghislaine Maxwell: Epstein’s Shadow (Sky Documentaries), a three-parter about the woman accused by Epstein’s victims of helping him entrap them in his sordid pit of vice. She faces charges of complicity with Epstein in the sexual abuse and trafficking of under-age girls, and is due to be tried this autumn. Her name is pronounced “Gillane”, apparently.The story exerts a sickly fascination, its toxic allure intensified by the conspiracy Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Back in 2017, a non-speaking autistic teen, Naoki Higashida wrote and published The Reason I Jump. He hoped it would offer some insight into the minds of people with autism. The book was subsequently translated by Keiko Yoshida and her husband, Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell. The book was a publishing sensation featured on US talk shows, and seemed to herald a new day for how we understand neurodiversity. In the simplest terms it argues that, trapped beneath an autistic exterior, lies a rich, emotionally complex interior that can be unlocked. As much as it drew praise, the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In the UK, we usually get a peek inside The Villages in Florida every four years, when intrepid reporters take to their golf carts in the retirement community to test the water in presidential elections among its 132,000 residents. Their views provide a useful guide as to where the silver-haired vote stands.And on first sight, this “Disneyland for retirees” may seem like Nirvana, especially as one of the first people featured in Lance Oppenheim's quietly poetic and touching film says: “You come here to live, not to die” and another posits: “It's like going to college. Everybody can be who Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Kindred literary spirits who overlapped in any number of ways make for riveting stuff in Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation. Filmmaker Lisa Immordino Vreeland folds archival footage of the legendary writers together with recitations from their life and art spoken by Jim Parsons and Zachary Quinto. Throw in footage of film adaptations of their work, ranging from A Streetcar Named Desire to Breakfast at Tiffany's and much more, and you have a riveting mosaic of two men marginalised by society who came to occupy pride of place in the cultural zeitgeist. It's not only Read more ...
Owen Richards
From deep within the bowels of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop came the sounds of the future. Strange howls and beeps, unnatural yet recognisably human-made. And while this was the dawning of a new epoch for music, it was also the frontier of a larger societal shift. A space where women could invent, compose and lead.Sisters with Transistors is a documentary that celebrates these pioneers, framing electronic music at the heart of the feminist movement. The Second World War, for all its horrors, brought with it great technological advances and wider employment opportunities for women. By the time Read more ...
Florence Hallett
It’s no surprise that 30 years on, the individuals most closely connected to the world’s biggest art heist are showing their age. Anne Hawley was a young woman just months into her directorship of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston when thieves made off with 13 works of art, including a Chinese vase and drawings by Degas, a Vermeer and Rembrandt’s only seascape.Speaking to the press soon afterwards, Hawley (main picture) was visibly shellshocked, desperation and disbelief mingled painfully in her comment that “I have to operate under the assumption that we are going to get these Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Director of the Courtauld Institute, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures and a particular expert on the art of Poussin, Sir Anthony Blunt spent decades at the epicentre of the royal family and the British Establishment. He was, as the so-called “Fourth Man” of the Cambridge espionage ring, also a spy for the Russians who handed over countless documents and nuggets of top secret information during and after World War Two, including super-sensitive details about the D-Day landings.The Blunt story, in all its murky fascination, has long gripped writers, historians, documentary-makers and The Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It’s a dog’s life, this lockdown; if only I could meet my friends whenever I want to and roam around freely without obeying these annoying restrictions! Stray is a documentary about the street dogs of Turkey in which film-maker Elizabeth Lo plays with our preconceptions about the relative merits of life as a dog and a person, especially now that our freedoms are being curtailed and our lives controlled more than ever.Shot mainly in Istanbul, her pavement-level view of the city suggests, in fact, that feral dogs may have something to teach us about freedom, choice and independence. For Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Nick Broomfield made his first film 50 years ago, and his career over those five decades (and some three dozen works) has been as distinctive, and distinguished as that of any British documentary maker. It has ranged from early films on British social themes, through overseas journeys, often around America and more extreme subjects such as penal incarceration (1982’s Tattooed Tears, his first work outside England, and his studies of serial killer Aileen Wuornos on death row) but also his including his remarkable 1991 The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife about the white South African Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The 2020 Formula One season was all set to start in Australia last March when it was derailed by the Covid emergency. The F1 organisers insisted that they’d get the racing back on track somehow, and what sounded like foolhardy bravado was justified when they successfully staged a 17-race championship between July and December.It proved to be a surprisingly exciting and often emotional season, with all kinds of human and political dramas woven through the action, and Netflix’s ubiquitous Drive to Survive crew was there to catch all the nuances. F1 had an advantage over most other sports Read more ...