documentary
Three Identical Strangers review - an extraordinary true storyThursday, 29 November 2018
The privileges of writing reviews are very few (it’s certainly no way to make a living these days) but one that remains is the possibility of seeing a film before reading about it. Sometimes it doesn’t matter knowing in advance how a story will play... Read more... |
Tim Wardle: 'A documentary director has huge power over the interview subject'Wednesday, 28 November 2018
(Warning: spoilers ahead) For a brief 15 minutes, this was the biggest story in America: three boys, identical in looks, discovering each other at the age of 19. Edward “Eddie” Galland, David Kellman and Robert “Bobby” Shafran were all adopted from... Read more... |
Louis Theroux's Altered States: Choosing Death, BBC Two review - profound and movingMonday, 19 November 2018
The toughest subject you can imagine: when, and how, would you choose death over life? This riveting film examined that excruciating dilemma within the legal frameworks on offer to some of the terminally ill in the United States. Louis Theroux,... Read more... |
They Shall Not Grow Old, BBC Two review - Peter Jackson's Great War finaleMonday, 12 November 2018
Peter Jackson has form when it comes to re-examining cinema history. In 1995 he made Forgotten Silver, a documentary about Colin McKenzie, a New Zealand filmmaker who not only made the first sound recordings but also invented the tracking shot and... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Hitler's HollywoodFriday, 09 November 2018
Apart from Leni Riefenstahl’s insidiously seductive celebrations of Nazism and the propaganda excesses of Veit Harlan’s Jud Süß (1940), the films that were made in Germany during the Hitler period have been air-brushed out of cinema history, almost... Read more... |
WW1: The Last Tommies, BBC Four review - Great War storiesThursday, 08 November 2018
“Why should I go out and kill somebody I never knew? There was no reason at all in it in my way of thinking.” Britain’s very last Tommy was Harry Patch, born in 1898, conscripted in 1916 and still alive on his 111th birthday in 2009. He was one of... Read more... |
The Yukon Assignment review - two men in a boat test father-son bondWednesday, 31 October 2018
The Yukon Assignment tracks a 500-mile canoe journey along a remote river in Canada taken by a British adventurer and his father. The feature-length documentary is a gentle, unpretentious love-letter to untamed nature and its ability to bring two... Read more... |
Imagine... Tracey Emin: Where Do You Draw the Line, BBC One review - entertaining but deferentialWednesday, 24 October 2018
It’s been a whirlwind year for Tracey Emin, CBE, RA. Her pink neon sign, “I want my time with you”, greets passengers at St Pancras station, she’s installed bronze birds all over Sydney city centre, she’s making a derelict print works in Margate... Read more... |
Donkeyote review - a quiet revelationTuesday, 23 October 2018
It’s an undeniably quirky set-up: an elderly Spanish farmer who takes it upon himself to travel to America and walk – alone – the epic, 2,200-mile Trail of Tears, following the westward route taken by the Cherokee fleeing white settlers. Alone, that... Read more... |
Science Fair review - big on ambition, light on rigourFriday, 19 October 2018
More than 1,700 teenage finalists representing 78 countries take part in the annual International Science and Engineering Fair, virtually the Oscars for exceptional young biologists, physicists, chemists, mathematicians, computer scientists, doctors... Read more... |
DVD: Generation WealthFriday, 19 October 2018
“Psychopathologies come and go but they always tell us about the historical time period in which they’re produced.” So says the journalist and academic Chris Hedges in Lauren Greenfield’s documentary Generation Wealth. The idea the film plays with... Read more... |
Kusama - Infinity review - amazing tale of survival against the oddsThursday, 04 October 2018
Wearing a red dress covered in black polka dots and a bright red wig, Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama sits drawing, a look of intense concentration on her face. It takes her three days, she says, to finish one of these huge repeating patterns (main... Read more... |
