documentary
Adam Sweeting
The spoof “rockumentary” always sounds like a great idea, but it’s hard to pull off. Largely this is because rock stars are so divorced from reality that an element of self-parody is already built in, albeit unwittingly (“everybody’s so different, I haven’t changed” as Joe Walsh deadpanned in "Life's Been Good"). This Is Spinal Tap (the Rosetta Stone of the genre) worked because it didn’t try to invent its material so much as amass a load of real-life examples and compress them into 82 minutes.At least writer/director Rhy Thomas has some credibility in this area, having masterminded the droll Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
David France’s revelatory film may have been subtitled “The Gay Purge”, but from the start it was clear this wasn’t just another documentary from Russia charting the increasing pressure faced by that country’s queer community. Since “propaganda” of gay relationships was criminalised there in 2013, such anti-LGBTQ initiatives have become an ever-more convenient rallying point for a state seeking to manipulate its people in a socially conservative direction. (Look no further than the national referendum which concluded there yesterday – as well as achieving a two-term extension of Vladimir Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The nightmarishness of the M25 motorway is well known, especially if you get stuck on the Heathrow section on a wet Sunday night, but as she perambulated around the motorway’s circumference for this idiosyncratic BBC Four documentary, naturalist Helen Macdonald showed us how skilfully nature deals with man-made monstrosities. For instance, an international cast of aerial predators and exotic waterfowl has made itself at home in the rubbish-strewn Rainham marshes, while great tits have modulated their calls upwards to make them audible above the booming traffic.In this languid 90-minute film Read more ...
On the Record review - #MeToo turns its lens to the music industry, gives the mic to women of colour
Jill Chuah Masters
On the Record, the latest documentary from Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering (acclaimed directors of The Hunting Ground), dives into the sexual misconduct allegations against music mogul Russell Simmons, the so-called ‘Godfather of Hip Hop.’ It centres on interviews with Drew Dixon (pictured below), who — as a twentysomething music executive — launched Whitney Houston hits and scouted a young Kanye West. She left the industry after Simmons allegedly raped her.This is an elegant, stinging addition to the #MeToo dialogue, which gives due emphasis to black women and the music industry — a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Singing in a choir can be terrific therapy for anxiety, depression or loneliness, but one of the cruellest effects of the coronavirus is the way it has restricted normal human interaction. The notion of social distancing might have been designed to sabotage the proximity and togetherness which is so much a part of collective singing.However, choir supremo Gareth Malone (now sporting a shaggy lockdown hairstyle) doesn’t give up easily, so he’s made the best of what technology has to offer to create an online facsimile of the choir-singing experience. He’s the first to admit that hooking up a Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Picture an antiquarian book dealer. Typically, it’s all Harris Tweed, horn-rimmed specs, and a slight disdain for actual customers. At the beginning of D.W. Young’s new documentary we are guided around New York’s rare book dealerships, and witness how, in the age of the internet, this rare breed may be going the way of the Gutenberg press.Whilst the impact of Amazon (specifically the Kindle) as well as Barnes & Noble are mentioned, the heart of Young’s work focuses on the dozen or so booksellers who are trying against the odds to make a living trading in leather-bound books and literary Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Tut in colour, and he is! The new painstaking technique of colourising vintage black and white photographs and film was touchingly exploited in this documentary for BBC Four to narrate the most thrilling and best-known archaeological discovery ever made, that of the tomb of the boy king Tutankhamun in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings in 1922.The news went worldwide, a 5,000-year-old burial bringing some sunshine to a world traumatised by World War One and the Spanish flu. The newly-coloured images made the narrative of this awesome discovery feel stunningly immediate. The charming Oxford Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Echo in the Canyon is a lamentably thin documentary about the vibrant folk-rock music scene that flourished in the bohemian Los Angeles neighbourhood of Laurel Canyon from 1965 to 1967. Though it features priceless vintage footage of the Beach Boys, the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and the Mamas and the Papas and interviews with some surviving members, it weirdly comes across as a vehicle for Jakob Dylan.The singer-songwriter was born in 1969, the year in which Jacques Demy’s only American film Model Shop was released. Inspired by the mood of Demy’s semi-documentary love-letter to Los Angeles Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s too early for a definitive account of the Covid-19 pandemic, and this was very much a Sky News version of what we’ve been through so far. Although it seems the virus has peaked and we’re entering a tentative stage of partial de-lockdown, the message was relentlessly grim.The government’s catalogue of blunders was rehearsed once again, from the catastrophic decision to send hospital patients to care homes without being tested for the virus to the serial failures to establish comprehensive testing and tracing. As Sky’s reliably morbid political editor Beth Rigby outlined, the Johnson Read more ...
Owen Richards
Have you ever visited a destination you saw on film, only to realise it’s not quite how you imagined? Filled with tourists, the scars of mass visitation, and caught between its own culture and staying commercially attractive. The Thai city of Krabi is one such location, made famous by such films as The Beach and The Man with a Golden Gun. New release Krabi, 2562, from festival favourite directors Anocha Suwichakornpong and Ben Rivers, tackles these issues. But just like a visitation, it may cause you to think “this is not what I expected”.Presented as a docufiction, the film features a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
David Olusoga’s A House Through Time concept (BBC Two) has proved a popular hit, using a specific property as a keyhole through which to observe historical and social changes. After previously picking sites in Liverpool and Newcastle, this time he’s chosen Bristol, the city where he has lived for over 20 years.Among Olusoga’s particular interests as a historian are the British empire, race and slavery, so it was no great surprise to find him homing on on Bristol’s links with the slave trade. His chosen house was built in 1718 by Captain Edmund Saunders, who trafficked slaves from Guinea on Read more ...
Richard Macer
“That’s Marcelino Sambé, he’s wonderful,” said the artistic administrator of the Royal Ballet as I followed her down one of the many corridors that weave throughout the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. “He’s a newly promoted Principal, a very special talent indeed!” I looked over my shoulder at the figure disappearing through some doors. I had been at The Royal Ballet for over a week making a documentary for BBC Four about a golden generation of male stars but as yet had not met any dancers.Access documentaries to institutions such as this take months of negotiation and it’s not uncommon Read more ...