documentary
Adam Sweeting
Horses, Liz Mermin's "intensely strange" but bewitching documentary about a year in the life of a trio of Irish "horse athletes", has already been seen at the Sheffield Doc/Fest and at the ICA in London. Now, recut and retitled Race Horses, it comes to BBC Four's Storyville tonight (March 11) at 9pm. Read theartsdesk's interview with Liz Mermin here, and take a gallop with Joncol, Cuan na Grai and Ardalan.
Veronica Lee
“The Mob made Vegas,” says its mayor since 1999, Oscar B Goodman. And he should know, having defended plenty of mobsters in his time when - he and I are equally quick to point out - he was a defence attorney and didn’t know what they were really up to. What a trick presenter Alan Yentob missed here; he could have simply chatted to this wrinkly, wily New Yorker transplanted to the Nevada desert and The Lure of Las Vegas (shown as part of BBC Two’s Vegas night), produced and directed by Janet Lee, would have been a whole lot more entertaining.What we got, this being an Alan Yentob documentary, Read more ...
sheila.johnston
If Michael Moore's new film were a person, it would be diagnosed with a severe case of Attention Deficit Disorder. His Cook's Tour through the ills of capitalism spans, inter alia: forced repossessions; worker lock-ins; the breadline salaries of airline pilots, some of whom sell blood or use food stamps to pay the bills; a scam, perpetrated by a judge in collusion with a private company, to make money by sending harmless youngsters to a correctional facility; Hurricane Katrina; the election of President Obama; cats flushing toilets - in short, everything but the kitchen sink.Any one of these Read more ...
Jasper Rees
For a number of years I used to live opposite Abu Hamza. You didn’t see him much. I remember a Mercedes spilling devoutly robed football fans who had come to watch the game round his place when Iran played the USA in the 1998 World Cup. After 9/11, the street would occasionally fill with swooping fleets of police vehicles. Once they decanted a squad of space-suited forensics looking, presumably, for incendiary devices. His family is still there, living next door to John Hutton, until the other day the Minister of Defence. Try putting that into a script.Britain has a bit of history in the Read more ...
sheila.johnston
To accompany Anne Billson's review of Océans, the new documentary from the men behind Winged Migration, we present a line-up of fishy customers from the film, including the two directors, the Jacques Cluzaud and Perrin. Real or fake, verité or Photoshop? Click on the images below to enlarge them and draw your own conclusions.[bg|/THEATRE/Sheila_Johnston/Oceans] 1. Aurelia jellyfish 2. Green turtle 3. Ball of mackerel 4. The co-directors of Océans, Jacques Cluzaud (left) and Jacques Perrin 5. Bottle-nosed dolphin 6. Adelie penguin 7. Walruses 8. California sea lion 9. Weddell seals Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Whoever first made the observation - some say Winston Churchill, others Ronald Reagan - there is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man, and a woman. On stage these noble beasts have inspired some highly successful plays, including Peter Schaffer's Equus, recently revived with Daniel Radcliffe, and War Horse, still living up to its name in the West End after over two years (panto horses probably don't count). In cinema, the legacy is more mixed; but not for nothing is the Western, arguably the greatest of film genres, also known as the horse opera. Horses Read more ...
sheila.johnston
He thought he owned his property - he had the title deeds to it, after all - but suddenly the ground shifted under his feet and there came an aggressive bid to snatch his home away. His savings became worthless in the economic chaos; the social order was crumbling. The nightmare has become all too familiar over the last 18 months. But in Mike Campbell's case there was a further cruel turn of the screw: he lived in Zimbabwe. Recently named Best British Documentary of 2009 and shortlisted for an Oscar, this film tells the remarkable story of how Campbell singlehandedly took Robert Mugabe to an Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It always used to be said that boarding school prepares you for every hardship. Whether that includes prison in one of the most impenitent dictatorships in Africa is not a question that was put to Simon Mann in last night’s edition of Storyville. Mann, still incarcerated when the BBC caught up with him, was awaiting a pardon from President Teodoro Obiang, the very potentate he had attempted to topple five years earlier. Never mind that they like to keep a battery and electrodes handy for interrogations, Mann wasn’t about to slag off the great man’s excellent hospitality. Goodness, Eton really Read more ...
Joe Muggs
In a pirate television (pirate television!) broadcast from 1992, a large group of Russian youths in flat top haircuts and leather jackets discuss Depeche Mode's appeal. “It's romantic style,” suggests one with absolute assurance, “it's music for the lonely.” It is just one touching, funny moment in a film packed with them, but it also sums up what The Posters Came From The Walls is about. This “music for the lonely” by a band of awkward blokes from Basildon has brought this group of young people together, as it has all the legions of devoted lovers of the band that we see throughout the 58 Read more ...
aleks.sierz
At first glance, verbatim theatre is a total bore. This form of drama, which collects the words spoken by real individuals and puts them into the mouths of actors, has been a central plank of the rebirth of political theatre since 9/11, but its pleasures tend to be cerebral rather than visceral, moral rather than physical. Attending a verbatim theatre event - such as Out Of Joint's latest show, Mixed Up North - usually makes you feel good as a citizen rather than as a person. You feel worthy, but don’t usually have much fun.Written by Robin Soans, Mixed Up North (which finishes its nationwide Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Upon emerging from Sheffield railway station, one of the first things you clap eyes on is Andrew Motion’s 2007 poem What If? unfurling down the side of one of the university tower blocks and gleaming faintly in the last of the autumn sun. With its exhortation to “greet and understand what lies ahead... The lives which wait as yet unseen, unread,” it’s not a bad incidental epigram for a festival of documentary film-making whose trailer was inspired by the city’s cosmopolitan identity. Doc/Fest opened on Wednesday with Mat Whitecross’s Moving to Mars (pictured below), about a family of Burmese Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you’d invested a thousand dollars with Warren Buffett in 1965, your stake would have grown to more than than five million bucks today. If the UK had followed one of Buffett’s golden rules of investment – Don’t Get Into Debt – our clapped-out rust-bucket of a nation might now feel like a very different place. Buffett's take on debt is that "if you're smart you don't need it, and if you're dumb you've got no business using it," which Gordon Brown should have etched on the inside of his glass eye.On the other hand, if everybody copied Warren Buffett’s diet, which consists of T-bone steaks, Read more ...