documentary
Adam Sweeting
Series about fishing have become a durable mini-genre, including the likes of Deadliest Catch and Saltwater Heroes. However, this new six-parter on BBC Two brings us much closer to home than Alaska or Tasmania, and probes into the lives of the fishing families of the Cornish village of Mevagissey.Unlike many other British ports, Mevagissey is enjoying a comparative boom in its fishing business, with 74 active boats in its harbour, but that doesn’t mean that fishing the Cornish coastal waters is a licence to print money. Frequently, the fishermen are only one bad season from bankruptcy, and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
When Sight & Sound compiled its “Greatest Documentaries of All Time” list five years ago, Kazuo Hara’s The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On came in at number 23 – proof, some three decades on from its 1987 release, that this remarkable film had stayed in the minds of filmmakers and critics alike. Its rerelease now by Second Run in a new director-approved HD remaster offers the chance to reappraise a groundbreaking work, one whose powerful – and undeniably strange – impact has in no way diminished over the years: it continues to shine an unexpected light both on Japanese society and on the Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Liam Gallagher knows exactly how "fucking fantastic… and fucking shit I am", and proceeds to tell us so for 85 minutes. This 10-year documentary project came about as a result of director Charlie Lightening’s friendship with Gallagher, formed as Oasis came to a predictable halt. It seeks to be mildly critical, although the only person vaguely putting the boot in is current girlfriend/fiancée/soon-to-be-third-wife Debbie Gwyther – now also his manager – who describes him as "impulsive and a bit silly", and "like a toddler". Otherwise, it’s up to the other brother, Paul Gallagher, and ex- Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
Heston Blumenthal, of triple-cooked chips fame, is a mad food scientist. Well, that’s how we’re introduced to him in Heston’s Marvellous Menu. Tonight’s BBC Two programme had a rather theatrical premise: a chef recreating the complete dining experience (menu, team, decor, diners) from a pivotal year in their restaurant’s history. What’s unclear is if this show was intended as a one-off documentary or the first episode of a series. What’s certain? It was a wacky time capsule.The programme opened with Blumenthal and Giles Coren, The Times’ restaurant critic, choosing a year to recreate. The Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Putin and Mikhail Khodorkovsky are “strong”, a Russian journalist considers. “Everyone else – weak.” This is essentially Khodorkovsky’s opinion, too, after the former oil oligarch’s decade in a Siberian jail for suggesting the President was corrupt to his face on TV.Prolific documentarist Alex Gibney uses Khodorkovsky’s rise and fall to consider Russia’s Wild West, seven years in which seven oligarchs bought up half the economy, as below them chaotic new market forces shocked the nation with destitution and Sicilian levels of gangster mayhem, while Boris Yeltsin slumped zombie-like in the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The appalling fate of the allegedly unsinkable liner Titanic in 1912 has fuelled endless feature films and documentaries, not to mention a dismal drama series by Julian Fellowes (there was also a proposed Titanic II vessel which would have been built in China, but which remains mysteriously un-launched). However, it’s difficult to see why this film has appeared 107 and a half years after she sank.Part of an intermittent series called Great British Ships, it was presented by Rob Bell (pictured below), who ends every sentence with at least three imaginary exclamation marks. I lost count of how Read more ...
Graham Fuller
War crimes are war crimes, irrespective of the victims’ ages, gender, or ethnicities, and no one’s torture or murder is more abhorrent than anyone else’s. Yet because children are essentially innocent and incapable of defending themselves, and perhaps because they are barely equipped to process why governments, nations, and armed forces would want to eliminate them, their maiming and killing is an obscenity beyond compare.This is a way of saying that The Cave, the latest documentary directed by the Syrian filmmaker Feras Fayyad, maker of 2017’s Last Man in Aleppo, is as imperative a watch as Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“Restorative Justice Practitioner” sounds like a euphemism for a Mad Max-style lone avenger, but in director Anna Hall's devastating film for Channel 4, it was a woman called Kate whose job was to bring together conflicting parties and help find a resolution. Cameras and microphones eavesdropped with pitiless intimacy as Kate brokered a meeting between 30-something Kath and the man who’d raped and abused her when she was seven. The worst of it was that he was her older brother, Robert.Kath had guarded her secret from the rest of her family ever since, as it mercilessly eroded her sense of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s claimed that the current world tour of Tutankhamun’s extraordinary treasures will be the last, but they said that about Frank Sinatra too. Whatever, the boy-pharaoh’s life and legend will retain their unprecedented mystique, but no thanks to this first of three programmes fronted by pop-historian Dan Snow.Obviously Channel 5 doesn’t want to vanish down a black hole of academic obscurity, but cluttering up the scenery with three ill-matched presenters treading on each other’s feet while burbling inanities was not the perfect solution. Snow always has an invisible bubble over his head Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Ken Burns is the closest American television has to David Attenborough. They may swim in different seas, but they both have an old-school commitment to an ethos that will be missed when it’s gone – the idea that television is a place to communicate information with a sober sense of wonder. Burns’s field is American history in all its breadth and depth. Last time round it was a lapidary decalogue of documentaries about the Vietnam War. That had such an impact that, for his latest, BBC Four have promoted his name to the title to create a forgivable misnomer: Country Music by Ken Burns.The Read more ...
India Lewis
Gillian Wearing’s Arena documentary Everything is Connected (BBC Four) is a quietly innovative biography of an author whose works still resonate with their readers and the country within which she wrote. Wearing and George Eliot are a sympathetic match, both playing with a multiplicity of voices, delighting in the layman’s opinion as well as that of the expert. We see Eliot’s intellectuals, but also the modern version of her farmers, priests, and wayward sons. Wearing puts her words in their mouths, allowing them at times to slip into one another, blurring the boundaries between the speakers Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Who won the Cold War? Nobody, according to comedian Rich Hall in this 90-minute film for BBC Four. His theory is that after the symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall 30 years ago, Russia and America merely “flipped ideologies”. The US government now rules by lies and intimidation, while Russia embraced gangster-capitalism and became “a gas station with a bunch of rusty nukes out back.”Resembling an old outlaw who’d been dragged into town tied to the back of somebody’s horse, Hall cast a caustic eye over the neurotic decades after World War Two, as East and West stockpiled missiles and pushed the Read more ...