documentary
Adam Sweeting
As Ozzy Osbourne puts it, “He’s just Lemmy. You just take him or you fucking don’t, and he doesn’t give a flying shit whether you do or not.” It’s this irreducible Lemmyness of Lemmy which lies at the core of the gnarled heavy metaller’s mystique. Beyond fashion, as ageless as a rock’n’roll Flying Dutchman and with a constitution seemingly forged from buffalo hide and wrought iron, Ian Fraser “Lemmy” Kilmister is surrounded by his own private myth-bubble wherever he goes.Greg Olliver and Wes Orshoski spent three years shooting this documentary. Though it sometimes meanders shaggily, it Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The title could have used a bit more work, I'd have thought. No, Peter Mandelson was never "the real PM", and won't be now. As for the real Peter Mandelson, there is no evidence that any such mythical beast exists. And why hadn't Lord Mandelson become prime minister, film-maker Hannah Rothschild asked him in one of her deferential voices-off moments? Because Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had entered parliament in 1983, Peter explained with exaggerated patience, while he himself had only got there in 1992. He was stuck at the back of the queue and had to wait his turn. This being the Labour Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This bit was at the end, but it might as well have been at the beginning. Or, really, just bannered across the bottom of the screen all the way through: "I am a performer. That is my life. That is what I am. That's it."Thus Joan Rivers explained her continuing compulsion to keep finding stages to perform on at the age of 75, whether it was a dingy club in the Bronx at 4.30 in the afternoon, the Comedy Central Roast where she was pelted with "hilarious" insults by fellow comics, a gig for the Betty Ford clinic in Palm Springs, or somewhere in frozen Wisconsin reachable only by the kind of Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
An English teacher in a brand-new Hertfordshire secondary school is about to lose his rag. “You said ‘relaxed, like,’” he storms at a boy. “Why like? Like what? Why do you use that expression? What does it mean?” This is 1962. It’s a scene from Our School, sponsored by the National Union of Teachers, one of four documentaries made between 1953 and 1964 by John Krish in the BFI’s Boom Britain: Documenting the Nation’s Life on Film, a project that celebrates the neglected heritage of the post-war documentary.It’s usually Humphrey Jennings’s work for the Crown Film Unit in the 1940s, with its Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
This first feature from Swedish writer-director Ruben Östlund arrives heavy with awards, the seasoned and decorated product of film festivals across Europe. Brutal, quirky and elegantly self-conscious, it does little to challenge the trends that have recently made Swedish cinema (Let The Right One In, The Millennium Trilogy) such hot property. The title serves as agent provocateur for the action that follows: a fractured and wilful deconstruction of group dynamics, of the pressures and “victims” of the social collective.Two barely teenage girls (Linnea Cart-Lamy, Sara Eriksson) pose and pout Read more ...
howard.male
The recurrent image in this somewhat staid documentary is a monochrome photograph of Poe’s moon of a face with its panda-like eye sockets. Occasionally the camera moves in for a close-up on those eyes - perhaps hoping they’ll reveal something that mere biographical detail doesn’t - but appropriately enough the grim Gothic writer’s eyes are more black holes than windows on the soul, and they give nothing away. The horrors, scandals and tragedies of Poe’s life had to be exhumed from his words, and the words of those who came into his orbit.With Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” throbbing away in Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Action-movie season ain't over quite yet, folks. Sure. OK. Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow isn't exactly your conventional salute to Armageddon. No guns, no baddies, no hot babes, no long-haired hunks. The pace is slow. The dialogue's pretty non-existent - and mostly European. The setting is pastoral. The soundtrack is Ligeti. It is, in fact, mostly pure, unadulterated arthouse. But still Sophie Fiennes's documentary portrait of artist Anselm Kiefer, I would contend, could also be seen as one of the finest action movies ever made. Certainly, it's got to be the only one to feature a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Nowadays it’s not so easy to find a doc you can trust. Since talent shows started supplying back stories as part of an all-in-one narrative package, it’s as if everyone has learnt how to behave when there’s a camera crew around. Meanwhile, in the cutting room film-makers can be quite as manipulative as colleagues who nakedly trade in fiction. But there are some things you can’t fake. A young male troupe of cheerleaders from rough working-class south Leeds? That’s one of them.
This was a delightful film which began where it ended, with groups of pretty little girls in gingham or glittery Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is the antidote to Martin Scorsese’s 2008 documentary Shine a Light, which, for all its technical excellence, depicted the increasingly senior rock band sounding pretty crap. Ladies & Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones was shot at four concerts in Texas on the Stones’s 1972 American tour, hot on the heels of the release of Exile on Main Street. While its pre-digital quality and all-round primitiveness is a little bit startling, that’s all part of the way that it transports us back to a time when rock’n’roll was still barely housetrained and vaguely lawless. It didn’t exist just to provide Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The most surreal scene in this searing, adrenaline rush of a documentary about a US platoon in Afghanistan is the sight of three soldiers dancing madly in their bunker to "Touch Me, I Want to Feel Your Body" on an iPod. Stationed in the Korengal Valley, part of the mountainous range of the Hindu Kush, they’ve named their remote hilltop 15-man outpost Restrepo after their medic, Juan Restrepo, who was killed in action (you see him at the beginning of the film, drunk, on a little video he made on a train in Italy before deployment: “We’re loving life and getting ready to go to war,” he says, Read more ...
mark.cousins
A documentary film I made recently, The First Movie, won the Prix Italia. Wim Wenders sent an email which said, “I loved it.” When I showed it at the prestigious Telluride Film Festival last month, nearly 1000 people turned up to see it, and many were in tears. How did all this happen? I’m not sure that I know. But, looking back, I can see a chain of decisions about the making of the film and the impulses behind it. Don’t all artworks have such a chain?
The first link was, perhaps, watching Dennis Hopper’s great film The Last Movie, which is about a Hollywood film crew intruding in the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
They always say that women over a certain age are, in televisual terms, extinct. Well, it seems that science is going to have to get back to the drawing board. Palaeontological reports are coming in from last night of strange terrestrial sightings - sightings of creatures whose skeletal remains were long since thought to be fossilising in the Jurassic substrata known as US cable. And not just one. People caught fleeting glimpses of the Trinnysaurus and the Susannadactyl while others say they saw a Nigellatops chomping greedily in her own pastures. But they can't quite be sure.Yes, plummy Read more ...