documentary
Helen Hawkins
This five-parter by Rebecca Miller is essential viewing for any Martin Scorsese fan – and for anybody who wants to understand the process of movie-making, full stop. Miller has interviewed all the key figures from the director’s life, not just film luminaries but his family, his childhood friends, an ex-wife, the priest who inspired him.With no trace of sycophancy (her husband of 30 years is Scorsese collaborator Daniel Day-Lewis, who contributes astute insights to the mix), Miller moves through the phases of his career chronologically, with a keen eye for using exactly the right footage to Read more ...
Justine Elias
Another day, another shooting: this is Florida, USA, where the "Stand Your Ground" self-defence law allows people to use lethal force when they perceive a threat to their lives. The idea may be shocking to Britons, but such laws have become prevalent in America, even though they may be providing cover for straight-up murder.In The Perfect Neighbor, which won the top documentary prize for director Geeta Gandhir at the Sundance Film Festival this year, a minor dispute turns deadly. The film unfolds through found footage, mostly through police body cam video and courtroom coverage, but this isn' Read more ...
graham.rickson
British audiences of a certain age will note Finis Terrae’s similarity to Finisterre, one of the 31 sea areas listed in the BBC’s Shipping Forecast. Or previously listed – it was renamed Fitzroy in 2002 to avoid confusion with another Finisterre off the coast of Spain.This title translates as "End of the Earth", an apt one for a silent film which depicts a community and way of life largely untouched by the industrial revolution. Director Jean Epstein had recently completed an acclaimed but troubled 1928 adaptation of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. Feeling exhausted and burnt-out, he Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
If you saw it blind, with no information about its origins, Eight Postcards from Utopia might look like 70 minutes of outtakes from lost Fast Show recordings, the bits where they lampooned the TV they had watched on foreign holidays and the spoof ads they concocted.There are no commercials for Cheezy Peaz in this documentary, a mad montage of Romanian commercials from the 1990s, after the socialist regime and its autocratic leader had been despatched, but there are ads for almost every other category of goods you can think of, from high finance to laxatives. The fun is watching what the Read more ...
mark.kidel
Brian Clarke died on 1 July 2025, after a long illness. He was one of the most original British artists of our time – wide-ranging, ground-breaking and influential. His painting was first-class, but it was in the field of architectural stained glass, which he approached as a fine artist, and in a radically innovative manner, that he truly made a name for himself. I first met Brian, when I was making a series for BBC Two, “The Architecture of the Imagination” (1994). It was bravely commissioned by Clare Paterson and Alan Yentob, at a time when such off-piste arts explorations were Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
In 2019, French-Tunisian journalist and documentary filmmaker Hind Meddeb flew to Sudan after the overthrow of hated dictator Omar al-Bashir, hoping to chronicle the dream of an Arab country shaken up by a feminist revolution. The young pro-democracy activists, mostly women, she met at a sit-in protest outside army headquarters in Khartoum became the focus of Sudan, Remember Us, which she filmed over the next four years.However, this sad and lyrical movie didn’t turn out quite the way she’d imagined. The revolution was hijacked by a violent military crackdown and civil war that have now left Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Director Ben Rivers is primarily an artist, and it shows. Every frame of Bogancloch is treated as a work of art and the viewer is given ample time to relish the beauty of the framing, lighting and composition. Many of the shots fall into traditional categories such as still life, landscape and portraiture and would work equally well as photographs.In fact, the whole film is structured as a series of episodes that are more like animated stills than narrative sequences. And it produces the sense of being in the continuous present – as in a painting or a photograph. It’s a perfect match for the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“It is so disgraceful, what happened there,” says Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, in a comment that is the understatement of the century. She is referring to the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis in concentration camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was held prisoner.Six million Jews were murdered in the camps, but Lasker-Wallfisch survived because she was a musician. She describes the “welcoming” ceremony in which arrivals were “stripped of every vestige of human dignity”. Stark naked, they had their heads shaved and a number tattooed on their arms.But the woman conducting this identity- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The success of Netflix’s Drive to Survive not only provoked a viewer-stampede towards the world’s most expensive sport, but also triggered a chain reaction of similar behind-the-scenes sports documentaries. Suddenly we had Break Point (tennis), Full Swing (golf) and Tour de France: Unchained (cycling, obviously), hotly pursued by series on rugby, soccer and American Indiecar racing.Thus, a series about Formula E, the electrically-powered baby sibling of Formula One, was a no-brainer (indeed, Formula E previously aired its own show, Formula E Unplugged, on its YouTube channel). Since the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As well as generating a ceaseless stream of albums, whether live, studio or culled from his copious archives, Neil Young has also amassed a fairly hefty body of film work, either as director, star or both. Like his music, his movies are created with a kind of confrontational spontaneity, grabbed on the run with rough edges and non-sequiturs still intact. His directorial debut, 1973’s only fleetingly coherent Journey Through the Past, gave early warning of what to expect.In the case of Coastal, there’s a directorial hand behind the camera, belonging to Young’s wife Daryl Hannah. She also Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Are we really in “a new era of male anger, societal discontent and rage”? This is what Royal Court artistic director David Byrne claims in the programme of Manhunt, Robert Icke’s new documentary play about Raoul Moat. Weak thought, because surely there has never been a decade in which toxic masculinity was not a problem.Still, the current success of Jack Thorne’s Adolescence on Netflix certainly shows that we are more than ever fascinated by its roots in boyhood, but male rage has a very long backstory. All you have to do is read the Bible. Or scan the myths of ancient Greece (Icke’s Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
When Twiggy burst on to the scene in 1966, she was a beacon of hope for all flat-chested, short-haired, skinny girls. Of course we couldn’t look as fabulous as she did, with her enormous eyes and high forehead and long legs, but we could try.Before Twiggy, models were posh. They went to the Lucie Clayton Charm Academy in Bond Street and learned how to curtsey, pivot round an umbrella and get out of a car gracefully. In director Sadie Frost’s lively, likeable film, featuring many celeb talking heads including Paul McCartney and Dustin Hoffman, an alumnus, namely Joanna Lumley, looks back. “A Read more ...