documentary
Steven Eastwood
Most of us have very little knowledge of the process of life ending, physically and emotionally, until it comes suddenly into our own experience. Dying remains taboo. We don’t talk about dying, we don’t teach it in schools, and yet this event is as natural and everyday as birth. Having been one of the central subjects for art for a millennium or more, death has come to be one of the least broached. The images we have are medicalised or euphemistic. All of the beauty, grace and candour of death visible in classical painting is gone. So too is the representation of our very creatureliness, that Read more ...
Sarah Kent
She was “the most important war correspondent of her generation”, says Sean Ryan, her editor at The Sunday Times. And her colleague Paul Conroy describes her as “a complete and utter one-off – exceptionally driven, with a real sense of purpose”. These tributes are for Marie Colvin, who was killed by President Assad’s forces on February 22 2012.Conroy was on assignment with her when she died. He was badly wounded in the attack, but escaped from Syria to write the book which forms the basis for Under the Wire. Speaking directly to camera, he tells the gripping story of their illegal entry into Read more ...
Owen Richards
The most famous face in musical history, and perhaps the instigator of modern culture as we know it; he truly was the King. But for a documentary focused on such an icon, The King touches very little on Elvis Presley the man. This is not another biography on America’s first son, but a study on the persona, the myth and the brand that was created around him.Everyone has their own idea of who he was: the hip-swivelling rebel, the military hero, the irresistible leading man, the grotesque Vegas attraction. He was, in every complex and contradictory way, the living embodiment of the United States Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Grayson Perry is at it again. The Turner Prize winner, Reith lecturer, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, curator, writer, British Museum trustee, CBE, RA – plus Britain's and the art world’s favourite transvestite – is trying to find sense in things and events, or, as he has put it, invent meaning in a meaningless world.Channel 4 is devoting four hours to Perry’s investigations of rituals and ceremonies for our secular world, as well as those discovered from worlds rather less secular. We started with death at what might usually be taken as the end, after birth, coming of age and Read more ...
mark.kidel
Arcadia is the latest and the best of a series of films which draw on the archives of the BFI and the BBC, collages of often forgotten footage, designed to make the riches held by those venerable institutions come alive.Folllowing in the footsteps of Kim Longinotto’s Love Is All (2014) and Penny Woolcock’s From the Sea and Land Beyond (2012), good films in their own right, Paul Wright’s documentary, a poetic essay that explores the myths and realities connected with the British countryside, goes that little bit further, driven by a willingness to take creative risks with immensely varied Read more ...
Jasper Rees
They don’t make boxers like Freddie Mills any more. A granite lump of grinning charisma, he had a brow and jawline straight from a kids’ cartoon and, despite his humble origins and thuggish contours, a charmingly well-to-do voice. Mills was light heavyweight world champ for a time, then drifted into showbiz and, eventually, running a nightclub in Soho. Then he died in sudden and mysterious circumstances.His body was found in the back of his Citroen on the night of 24 July 1965. There was a single shot from air rifle through his right eye, from which dangled a lone blob of congealed blood. The Read more ...
David Nice
The meanderings and bickerings of an extraordinary mother and daughter as they roam or lounge around a semi-derelict house and overgrown garden on Long Island have become a cult since the 1975 release of Albert and David Maysles' documentary Grey Gardens. "The Big" - as singing "mother darling" calls herself here - and "Little" Edie Bouvier Beales have been much impersonated, not least by drag artists (Jinxx Monsoon on the ever-amazing RuPaul's Drag Race won the film legions of new gay fans). Is there more to tell about what already seemed a little bit too much of a good thing?Absolutely. Read more ...
graham.rickson
You come to Christopher Ian Smith’s New Town Utopia expecting a damning indictment of post-war British planning. But while there are melancholy moments, this is mostly an upbeat documentary. Smith manages, without the use of CGI, to make the much-maligned Essex new town of Basildon look uncommonly attractive. The spiritual home of Essex man, this solidly Conservative town isn’t what you’d expect.Basildon was born in the late 1940s, planned to accommodate the thousands of East Enders living in terraced slums. As one veteran resident puts it, “I just wanted a bathroom and a toilet.” It was (and Read more ...
David Kettle
Writer and director David Nicholas Wilkinson felt moved to make his reflective, rather melancholy documentary on the 48% who voted to remain in the EU, he says, because nobody else was making one. When it came to funding the project, not a single Brit would invest (though he has German and Irish backers) – potential supporters were apparently too nervous of their names getting out.Have the values of Remain already become so ignored and so – well, unacceptable? Possibly. Which, of course, makes it all the more crucial that Wilkinson has provided Remainers with this platform to present their Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was only a year ago that Nick Broomfield’s Whitney: Why Can’t I Be Me was released. Kevin Macdonald’s new documentary about the rise and hideous demise of one of pop’s greatest stars was made with the blessing of her family, but doesn’t shed significantly more light than the Broomfield version. In fact a couple of Broomfield’s interviewees who don’t appear here were more illuminating than some who do.It’s true that this time Whitney’s mother Cissy is interviewed, though she talks about the young Whitney (or Nippy, as she was always known within the family) with a great future ahead of her Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There’s undoubtedly a memorable film to be crafted from the life of guitar legend and grand old survivor Eric Clapton – for instance, Melvyn Bragg made a very good South Bank Show about him in 1987 – but the longer this one goes on, the less it has to say. Nor is it obvious why it has been made now.Director Lili Fini Zanuck, who used Clapton’s song “Tears in Heaven” in her 1991 movie Rush, has assembled the piece from a patchwork of archive material with interviewees (including Clapton) present only in voice-over, identified by captions. This seems to have become customary documentary Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Forty years on. You could have got attractive odds on Duran Duran still being here when, on a yacht carving the seas off Antigua, a cream-suited Simon Le Bon mimed “Rio” astride an unapologetically phallic bowsprit. “A ripple in a stagnant pool,” sniffed the NME upon first catching them live. But that was then and this is now and four of the original five, having spent many years as a three, are still at it, 14 albums down.Naturally, therefore, they were due a BBC Four homage, which came in the form of not one but two films: There’s Something You Should Know was a bog-standard soup-to-nuts Read more ...