documentary

Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat review - jazz-themed documentary on the 1960s Congo Crisis

Sunday, 17 November 2024

The British writer and Africa specialist Michela Wrong recently wrote a whistle-stop summary of the upheavals that afflicted Congo in the early 1960s:“A botched independence swiftly followed by army mutinies and attempted secession by two renegade...

Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Disney+ review - the Boss grows older defiantly

Friday, 01 November 2024

Director Thom Zimny has become the audio-visual Boswell to Bruce Springsteen’s Samuel Johnson, having made documentaries about the making of Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, Springsteen On Broadway and several more. Road Diary takes as...

London Film Festival 2024 - a shaman and sham

Saturday, 26 October 2024

Justin Kurzel’s Australian film subjects are out on the malign edge, from Snowtown’s suburban serial killer and Nitram’s mass shooter to Ned Kelly. His debut documentary’s protagonist Warren Ellis is a contrastingly loving renegade, an escapee from...

London Film Festival 2024 - Angelina Jolie does Maria Callas

Thursday, 24 October 2024

MariaHow do you solve a problem like Maria? Pablo Larrain’s film picks up the daunting challenge of evoking the life but above all the myth of La Callas, one of a handful of opera legends who have broken the highbrow barrier to become truly...

Dahomey review - return of the king

Wednesday, 23 October 2024

Mati Diop’s “speculative documentary” reverses the transatlantic journey of her feature debut Atlantics’ ghost Senegalese migrants, as plundered Beninese artefacts are returned from France. Dahomey is about African displacement and despoilment, and...

Milisuthando review - exorcising apartheid

Tuesday, 22 October 2024

“The street I grew up in had no name and is in a country that no longer exists,” director Milisuthando Bongela begins her meditation about growing up in Transkei, a semi-fictional black nation which helped facilitate apartheid yet felt like a utopia...

Endurance review - the greatest escape, AI-assisted

Wednesday, 16 October 2024

Sir Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, which set out in 1914 only to be marooned until August 1916, was a failure but a “glorious failure”, in the words of one crew member, the meteorologist Leonard Hussey. It is also perhaps...

The Last of the Sea Women review - a moving tale of feisty traditional divers

Saturday, 12 October 2024

“The ocean is our home… Even in my next life I will dive again,” says Geum Ok, one of a band of female divers from Jeju, a volcanic island 60 miles south of the Korean peninsular.Sue Kim’s documentary follows these brave Haenyeos as they plunge into...

Blu-ray: Crumb

Sunday, 22 September 2024

Robert Crumb puts America’s racist, misogynist Id on paper with self-implicating obsession. Terry Zwigoff’s 1995 documentary on the underground cartoonist and his even further out family is reissued as the channels for such purging, pungent art have...

Notes from Sheepland review - her farm is her canvas

Friday, 20 September 2024

Orla Barry laughed when she was advised to take up sheep farming, and not just because she had no experience. “Orla with the sheep eyes,” she calls herself and, indeed, in a stylized self-portrait, she does seem to have the placid, watchful gaze of...

Kneecap review - Irish Republican rappers for real

Saturday, 24 August 2024

A few recent documentaries have challenged the definition of the genre through the cheerful and wholesale dramatic reconstruction of past events, key moments that weren’t captured by a camera at the time.This is unnerving to those of us brought up...

Hollywoodgate review - on tour with the Taliban

Thursday, 15 August 2024

Egyptian journalist Ibrahim Nash’at is either very brave or slightly unhinged. His debut full-length documentary is an account of a year he spent in Afghanistan with the Taliban, after they’d taken control of the country at the end of August 2021,...

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