documentary
Adam Sweeting
There’s no stopping Harry and Meghan. Logic, reason and facts can’t stand in the way of their “war on oppression and injustice” and determination to become “advocates of healing”. Even though their notorious interview with Oprah Winfrey was littered with demonstrable untruths, it seems their target audience buys into the notion of them telling “their” truth, surely the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card. The absurdity of preaching eco-awareness while travelling everywhere by private jet and motorcade never seems to prick their perma-bubble of blissful self-regard.Finally their Netflix Read more ...
Saskia Baron
We hear the projector whirr as the mute 16mm film flows through the sprockets and on to the screen. For three minutes and a little longer we watch children and adults spilling out of buildings, intrigued by the novelty of a camera on their streets.They smile, wave, and jostle each other. One or two of the kids pull faces. It could be any old amateur footage by a holidaymaker visiting a distant town where the locals are unused to cameras. But this is Poland in 1938 and what we are seeing is a community that was about to be destroyed. These precious few minutes of celluloid were found in Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“You’re filmin’ a movie or something – can you explain this?” the radio DJ turns to Neil Young, a laugh underpinning his question and setting the scene: light, jovial.“We’re just makin’ a film about…” Young pauses for a second. “I dunno, just the things we wanna film… I’m making it like I make an album, sort of… It’s like… I’m cutting it, instead of… so it’s personal, like an album.”“So some day someone’ll be able to go to a theatre and see it maybe?” the DJ asks.“Yeah, I hope so, maybe pretty soon,” comes the reply. This reasonably edited conversation occurs toward the closing act of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Wilko Johnson, who has died aged 75, enjoyed an astonishing afterlife while he was still alive. After Julien Temple’s Dr. Feelgood film Oil City Confidential (2009) restored his crucial former band's profile, a terminal cancer diagnosis in 2013 perversely flooded Wilko with the wonder of life, leaving this melancholy soul content for perhaps the first time.Renewed, surreal popularity climaxed when Wilko played Chuck Berry’s “Bye Bye Johnny” for surely the last, tear-soaked time at Camden Koko that March. And yet, a doctor's suspicion of his continued vitality revealed a less Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Can you make modern poetry come to life on a TV screen? The BBC has had two stabs recently at answering this question, as part of the centennary celebrations for TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, seen by many as the greatest poem of the 20th century. One programme works significantly better than the other. For her 80-minute documentary TS Eliot: Into The Waste Land (BBC Two, ★★★★), director Susanna White was significantly aided by the “buried treasure” element in the story of this famously elusive poem, long laboured over by critics and students. Sitting like a ticking time bomb in Princeton’s Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Watching Bowie for the only time in what turned out to be his last tour in 2003, I wanted glamour and mystique, Ziggy preserved. Instead here was ordinary bloke Dave, badly dressed in faded jeans and a mismatched top. The beautifully sung, committed performance largely passed me by, as I ached to love the absent, alien Bowie.Brett Morgan’s estate-sanctioned, IMAX-ready, sense-splattering film simulates the fiery trail of Bowie’s earlier, comet impact. Just as his official Stones doc Crossfire Hurricane extracted Jagger’s most revealing band narrative over a torrent of era-defining footage, so Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You react differently to Meeting Gorbachev knowing that the film’s subject was on occasions brought to its interviews from hospital by ambulance; his interlocutor, Werner Herzog, doesn’t mention that fact, of course, anywhere in the three encounters on which this documentary is based, but he has alluded to it elsewhere.It seems somehow out of place to express cavils that the tone of this encounter is supremely respectful, that Herzog does not press Gorbachev into commentary on events of history beyond those in which he was immediately involved. Though today’s Russians would hardly agree with Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Back in 1995, the name Brandon Lee made the headlines. Not the Brandon Lee as in son of Bruce, who’d recently met his death on the set of The Crow, but a schoolboy who’d chosen to use the same name. A strange hoax was uncovered. Lee was, in fact, Brian MacKinnon, and he was not 16 but 32, posing as a fifth-former at the august Bearsden Academy in Glasgow. He did, indeed, go back to his old school, where he was a pupil, first time around, in the 1970s. But why? Jono McLeod’s entertaining and original documentary – he was at Bearsden with Brandon/Brian – mixes Daria-style animation Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Over the past few weeks, countless columns have been written about Nick Kyrgios, who lost in the Wimbledon final to Novak Djokovic. Who knows if the Australian will watch this illuminating documentary about the original “bad boy of tennis” to see how his own career may pan out?Barney Douglas's film – essentially a long-form interview with John McEnroe, interspersed with generous archive footage, contributions from family and friends including Billie Jean King, home movies and moody shots of the player-turned-commentator walking the streets of Douglaston in Queens, the New York neighbourhood Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
At the beginning of this film, Mick Jagger says: “What most documentaries do is repeat the same thing over and over… all the mythology is repeated until it becomes true.” He’s right, as he so often is. This latest attempt to prise open the enigma of the Rolling Stones’ indefatigable frontman reveals nothing a reasonably observant Stones fan won’t already know.The film is the first of a quartet, the others being about Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and the sorely-missed drummer Charlie Watts. Watts aside, they do at least contain new interviews with their subjects, who are all reliably Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Director Alice Diop read an article by Pierre Bergounioux in which he described how he began writing to draw attention to his overlooked neck of the woods – Correze, in central France. It was a lightbulb moment for her: “My approach as a film-maker suddenly became clear to me, I realised I’d been making films about the suburbs in an obsessive way for the past 15 years… to conserve the existence of ordinary lives, which would have disappeared without trace if I hadn’t filmed them.”We is a celebration of some of those ordinary lives – people who live alongside the RER railway line to and from Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There’s a sharp observation, delivered in Alan Bennett’s soft tones, that sums up the reputation of the painter Eric Ravilious: “Because his paintings are so accessible, I don’t think he’s thought to be a great artist. It’s because of his charm. He’s so easy to like and things have to be hard, if they’re not hard, then they’re not great." Veteran arts documentary director Margy Kinmonth makes an excellent argument for elevating the status of watercolourist and etcher Eric Ravilious in this lovingly crafted biographical film. Her account begins with Ravilious’ dramatic end; an official war Read more ...