documentary
Adam Sweeting
From Monday 12 April, retro channel History is airing a 10-part series called WWII Lost Films. It will present the story of the Second World War from the viewpoints of 12 Americans involved in the war effort, using a newly restored stash of rare and unseen colour footage.Providing a real-life counterpoint to the fictional saga The Pacific (showing on Sky Movies Premiere), the series draws on more than 3,000 hours of film culled from private collections and archives around the globe. The footage has been restored to HD quality and refurbished with Dolby-enhanced audio, with voice-overs Read more ...
Matt Wolf
That fame, and the pursuit thereof, is hurtful to the soul is the unexceptional if, I suppose, ever invaluable message of Starsuckers, the Chris Atkins documentary given genuine ballast by the details it selects with which to argue its case. Though overlong for what it is, and often veering off on tangents worthy of separate movies in themselves, it makes you laugh and wince in equal measure. Anonymity has rarely seemed a healthier place to be.
It's also emphatically not the status wished for by a celebrity-mad society whose varying levels of rot are anatomised via Atkins's eclectic Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jazz enthusiast Clint Eastwood, who co-produced this film with the BBC's Arena, clearly harbours a particular regard for songwriter, singer, impresario and record company mogul Johnny Mercer. When Eastwood made his film of John Berendt's book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which was set in Mercer's home town of Savannah, Georgia and partly shot in Mercer House, built by Johnny's grandfather, the accompanying soundtrack was a newly recorded collection of some of Mercer's most celebrated songs.Happily, where Midnight in the Garden... was, even in the most rose-tinted view, a grotesque Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Alfred Hitchcock once claimed to have entered a Hitch look-alike contest and lost, characteristically making a joke out of a long-held private obsession. Doppelgängers, impersonators, imposters and victims of mistaken identity - innocent men wrongly presumed guilty - stalk his movies and television shows and now provide the inspiration for Double Take. Loosely based on a short story, August 25th, 1983 by Jorge Luis Borges, it starts with the idea of the Master locked in a murderous mano a mano with his own double. "Two of you is one too many," as he puts it.That alone would be a juicy premise Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Seven Ages of Britain began in the same week as A History of the World in 100 Objects on Radio 4. You wait a prodigiously long time for a massive cultural overview and then two come along at once. Do they think in a joined-up way about these things at the BBC? Or has this double helping been a sign of a wider moral and structural chaos that characterises the new world disorder? Last night David Dimbleby concluded his tour of two millennia of British art. It has, inevitably, been a bit of a sprint. In this final episode, the horror of the trenches was wrapped up in less screen time than Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Cuban boxers have always punched above their weight in the world arena: the little island has clocked up no fewer than 63 Olympic medals - 32 of them gold - in the last 40 years. Enjoying extraordinary access to the mysteries of the Havana Boxing Academy, this emotional documentary follows the fortunes of three ten-year-old lads over eight months as they submit to a punishing regimen of training for the National Boxing Championship. But, as with the best sports films, Sons of Cuba is about more than winning or losing. It's about more, even, than boxing itself.The day starts at 4am for Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Imagine if Rory Bremner had been banned from British television for the past 20 years, and Gordon Brown had put pressure on the BBC to get rid of Question Time because it had been critical of him. In the Italy of Silvio Berlusconi these things happen. The country’s top satirist, Beppe Grillo, has effectively been denied access to the airwaves since Berlusconi became prime minister in 1994, while just this week allegations emerged that Berlusconi had tried to block transmission of a state television talk show, Annozero, that had discussed the alleged mafia ties of members of his government. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The only time I've ever been to Detroit was in 2004, in pursuit of assorted rock stars on the Vote for Change tour. Reader, it was weird. The atmosphere in the deserted streets was deathly, as if an invading army had swarmed into town, committed hideous atrocities and then moved on. The decaying architecture from America's golden industrial age looked unsettlingly like the set for The Omega Man, in which Charlton Heston fought a solitary war against an army of nocturnal psychopaths.These feelings returned vividly as I watched Julien Temple's stupendous Requiem for Detroit?, a thrilling piece Read more ...
Jasper Rees
OK, let’s flop it out into the open. Let’s show the cards I was dealt way back when. Those boaters you saw at the start of Cutting Edge's Too Poor for Posh School? I may well, in another lifetime, blameless aeons in the netherworld of one’s past, have been seen wandering along a high street on a hill north-west of London underneath one of those. The tailcoats worn by pews full of adolescents on Sundays? Yep. Once upon a time that was oneself. (Thank God they didn’t show the top hats we had to wear as monitors.) My name is Jasper and I am an Old Harrovian. Thought I’d better get that out the Read more ...
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.
gerard.gilbert
There must have been gnashing of teeth and the rending of heavily discounted garments in the marketing departments of Marks & Spencer, House of Fraser et al, when they realised that their commercial rival had been granted a three-hour advertisement on the BBC, but then there has always been something about John Lewis that seems to elevate it above the ruck and maul of the high street. What that something was – and whether or not it was purely mythical – was the subject of Liz Allen’s ultimately interesting documentary foray behind the façade of Middle England’s favourite department store Read more ...
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 ...