documentary
Saskia Baron
It’s good timing for the release of Flee in UK cinemas. The Danish movie has just made Oscar history by being nominated in three categories – Animated Feature, Documentary, and International Feature and is bound to win in at least one of them. Flee's director Jonas Pohar Rasmussen tells the story of an old school friend, who was smuggled into Denmark in his teens when he was a desperate Afghani refugee. In order to protect his friend, who had a long, traumatic journey and is now a high-achieving academic, Rasmussen has changed his name to Amin, but we’re assured that this is a true story Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There has been no shortage of documentaries about king Beach Boy Brian Wilson, not to mention the 2014 bio-drama Love & Mercy, so the purpose of this new effort by director Brent Wilson (no relation) isn’t altogether clear. Certainly Wilson (the director) leaves no stone unturned in his mission to emphasise once again the ineffable genius of the former symphonist of surf, but surely nobody with an interest in pop history needs any reminding.As such eminent talking heads as Bruce Springsteen, Don Was and Elton John are wheeled out to testify to Brian’s brilliance, a sceptic might detect Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In 2019, Russell Howard was all set to celebrate his 20th year in comedy by going on a world tour. Covid put paid to that, so it was with some genuine celebration that he was able to return to the stage with Lubricant, his second Netflix special, recorded at the Eventim Apollo in late 2021.He was able to use some of the material of that anniversary show, Respite – about finding the pleasure rather than the pain in life and describing a world spinning out of control. Little did he know. In Lubricant he has skilfully updated Respite – written “when Corona was a beer and Harry was a prince” – Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A caption tells us that while filming the Beatles at Twickenham Film Studios in January 1969 for a planned TV broadcast, director Michael Lindsay-Hogg and his crew amassed 60 hours of film and 150 hours of audio recordings. Some of it was seen in the 1970 film Let It Be, but the bulk of it has remained locked in the vaults ever since. Until now. Sometimes, watching Peter Jackson’s vast three-part documentary series Get Back, it feels like we’re having to sit through every second of all of it.Jackson (of Lord of the Rings fame) spent four years editing and restoring the footage, and could only Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Todd Haynes’ documentary about the Velvet Underground has to be one of the better uses of time by a film-maker during the Covid pandemic. He spent lockdown putting the film together with a team of archivists and editors working remotely. It’s a beautifully shot and ingeniously collaged portrait of the decadent New York band which weaves together an extraordinary wealth of archive footage and some choice and apposite interviews. Unlike recent music documentaries which have had a tendency to corral extraneous talking heads singing the praises of their subjects a little too loudly (The Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s well worth tracking down one of the September 29 special cinema screenings of Ric Burns' lovingly made documentary portrait of the writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks, or seeking it out online. Famous for his vivid, insightful descriptions of people living with disabling conditions (Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, An Anthropologist on Mars), Sacks was born into a brilliant Jewish family of doctors in north-west London in 1933, but after studying medicine at Oxford, spent most of his working life in America. Burns had the luxury of making the film with full co- Read more ...
Harriet Thompson
Born in 1840, Thomas Hardy lived a life of in-betweens. Modern yet traditional, the son of a builder who went on to become a famous novelist, he belonged both to Dorset and London. When he died, his ashes were interred at Westminster Abbey, but his heart was buried separately alongside his first wife in the village of Stinsford in Dorset.In a lifetime that spanned the early Victorian period and the aftermath of the First World War, Hardy witnessed huge changes: the mechanisation of farming, the rapid growth of cities, the transformation of transport and communications. Claire Tomalin Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It has become so hard to find funding for non-fiction films that many documentary makers now feel compelled to sell their stories as racy detective yarns, larded with dramatic scores and sneakily obfuscating narratives. There’s a piece of deception at the heart of Sam Hobkinson’s Misha and the Wolves which in this age of Holocaust denial, is distressingly slippery.The film starts out as a portrait of a little Jewish girl, Misha Defonseca, who was hidden with a Belgian family during WWII. Decades later, living in America she tells her synagogue an incredible, heart-rending story of Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A young film director writes a script based on his father’s life story and invites his dad to play the part. It’s an interesting gambit, given that the son, Jorge Thielen Armand left Venezuela with his mother at the age of 15 and has not returned since. His father stayed behind, so their relationship has stalled. Can it be reignited?Mo Scarpelli’s documentary follows Armand’s attempts to make the film and, in the process, rebuild his relationship with his father. Jorge Roque Thielen agrees to play himself despite not having seen the script; but the project is fraught with difficulty since, Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“My worst fear? What am I scared of?” Amy Winehouse ponders. She pauses thoughtfully: “Myself.”Ten years to the day since she died, Reclaiming Amy, Marina Parker’s documentary, remembers and celebrates the singer, revealing the truth as her parents see it of her short life and tragic death. The world has heard a lot from Mitch, her father (pictured below), but nothing really from her mother, Janis, speaking now because she knows MS will ultimately deprive her of her memories.“Truth” is subjective of course, and we all inevitably forget the inconvenient truths. But there was a real sense that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The extraordinary story of motor industry executive Carlos Ghosn is a heady combination of power, money, corruption and international politics, with a Mission: Impossible-style ending that carries it over the finishing tape in dramatic style. It might be considered a cautionary tale, except that Ghosn’s experiences and personality were so unique that a repeat performance could never happen.Nick Green’s Storyville film tells Ghosn’s story with the pace and punch of a thriller, illustrated with interviews with various key participants and observers, its disturbing atmosphere enhanced by eerie Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Last year, Netflix released Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, a four-part documentary about the notorious financier and convicted sex offender. Now, here’s a Ghislaine Maxwell: Epstein’s Shadow (Sky Documentaries), a three-parter about the woman accused by Epstein’s victims of helping him entrap them in his sordid pit of vice. She faces charges of complicity with Epstein in the sexual abuse and trafficking of under-age girls, and is due to be tried this autumn. Her name is pronounced “Gillane”, apparently.The story exerts a sickly fascination, its toxic allure intensified by the conspiracy Read more ...