documentary
Thomas H. Green
There’s long been a fascination with the death of busty, blonde, Marilyn-alike Hollywood star Jayne Mansfield. The fact that it supposedly resulted from a curse by the occult showman and head of the Church of Satan, Anton LaVey, builds in an element of preposterousness that’s proved irresistible to generations of conspiracy theorists. The first thing to note, then, for connoisseurs of golden age high trash, is that Mansfield 66/67 in no way gives definitive answers, selling itself as “A true story based on rumour and hearsay”. It does, however, prove an entertaining gumbo of fact, supposition Read more ...
David Kettle
Raqqa was once a prosperous if little-known town in northern Syria. Since 2014, however, it has served as the de facto capital of ISIS’s self-styled caliphate, and as such has been physically decimated, its population subjected to increasingly horrific subjugation.Despite its title, however, it’s not the city itself that’s the subject of Matthew Heineman’s quietly masterful film. This revealing and at times harrowing documentary focuses instead on "Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently" (RBSS), a collective of citizen journalists that has existed since 2014 to chart the facts of Raqqa’s barely Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You need to be of a certain age to recall the sheer ubiquity of Studio 54. For a few years in the late 1970s, even the sterner British newspapers were routinely stuffed with stories of who was there and what went on within the hallowed citadel (if not who went down, and on whom). As for the New York prints, publicists were on a bonus scheme incentivising them to get the hottest discotheque onto front pages.As explained in a new documentary, for a couple of years after the US pulled out of Vietnam Studio 54 was a watering hole which attracted not wildebeest, zebras and antelopes but exotic Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Lee Alexander McQueen said that he pulled the horrors out of his soul and put them on the catwalk. Eight years after his death, and three years after the record-breaking Savage Beauty retrospectives at the Metropolitan Museum and the V&A, his extraordinary story remains as powerful as ever. This moving documentary by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui (son of late designer Joseph Ettedgui) provides a glimpse into that soul.Full of archive footage, it’s a chance to see those stunning catwalk shows as well as new interviews with assistants, friends, models and family, some of whom haven't Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
BBC Four is the TV music equivalent of those oldsters music mags like Q and Mojo. Have there been five, or is it six, documentaries about Queen on the channel? You can sense the commissioners feeling with this new series they have now done their bit for African music for the next few years. In general, the BBC, unlike counterparts in places like France, have been ridiculously Anglocentric in their music coverage – like having a cooking channel that leaves out Indian, Chinese and Japanese food.The main difficulty, in the first episode, is that the idea of “doing” Nigerian music in an hour Read more ...
Owen Richards
Comprehensively charting hip hop’s rise from the underground to the mainstream is no mean feat, but that’s exactly what Canadian MC Shad aims to do over four hour-long episodes. Originally shown in the US in 2016, and available in full on Netflix, Hip Hop Evolution has finally reached the British box via Sky Arts. Created with genuine passion, authenticity, and a dream list of guests, this documentary series proves to be essential viewing.Shad, an established rapper in his own right, became obsessed with hip hop in the 90s, but wants to go back to where it all began: the Bronx, hip hop ground Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“I thought she maybe had superpowers to go that high.” Emilia Senior, 12, watched her sister Eve, 15, thrown into the air by the force of the explosion. When Eve came to earth her own perception had tilted on its axis: “I saw my legs on fire,” she remembered, “and then I was unconscious.” Short of targeting a kindergarten, a terrorist could not have chosen to decimate a more blameless demographic than teen fans of Ariana Grande. It was the details that broke the heart as some of these thousands of girls remembered the aftermath of the terrorist attack a year ago at the Manchester Arena. ( Read more ...
Saskia Baron
What would have happened to Leon Vitali if as a schoolboy he had gone to see that other 1968 hit sci-fi movie, Barbarella rather than Kubrick’s 2001? It’s impossible to imagine that a life devoted to the oeuvre of Roger Vadim would have merited a documentary. Luckily it was Stanley Kubrick who inspired total dedication. Filmworker is fascinating not just for Stanley Kubrick dévotees, but for anyone interested in the craft of filmmaking or the psychology of obsessive artists. Leon Vitali was a young British actor in the early '70s, just starting out on his career. He looked a bit like the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Director James Erskine found a fascinating subject in the life of ice-skating legend John Curry and has fashioned it into an absolutely compelling 90-minute documentary. Curry was only 45 when he died of AIDS in 1994, but his professional career, in which he moved from ice-skating as competitive sport to performing and choreographing it as dance, was intense: Erskine describes him, in the short Q&A that appears as an extra on this DVD release, as “an artist more than an athlete,” and you end up agreeing resoundingly.The Ice King makes clear the struggles that Curry went through to reach Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This was not a film that left you with much respect for the wisdom of politicians, but perhaps its truest line came from John Kerry, when he called the ongoing – seven years, and counting – Syrian conflict “an insult to the humanity of this planet”. Lyse Doucet has covered it as a reporter for the BBC since its beginning back in March 2011, and Michael Rudin's two-part (the second comes tonight) documentary Syria: The World’s War saw her revisiting some of its darkest moments, sometimes recapping how she had reported them at the time. That was combined with the perspective of today, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If only there were more: that's a first response to Nothing Like a Dame, Roger Michell's affectionate yet clear-eyed portrait of four of Britain's finest actresses, all now in their 80s. As the camera circles around Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright, and Eileen Atkins in conversation, it's impossible not to be swept up in a collective portrait of these remarkable careers alongside their shared awareness of the advancing years. Small wonder the one classic role they pause to debate at length is Cleopatra. Age really cannot wither this quartet's infinite variety. Due to be Read more ...
graham.rickson
Ealing Studios veteran Basil Dearden may have directed it, but 1944’s They Came to a City is mostly a JB Priestley film, an engaging blend of the mundane and the metaphysical. The work’s stage origins are clear; apart from the newly-written prologue and epilogue, this is predominantly a solemn, talky affair, shot mostly on a studio lot. Though we begin with an exterior shot of a sergeant and a WAAF sat on a hillside overlooking an industrial town, discussing what post-war British society might look like. Priestley himself strolls past and asks for a match, before joining in with the couple’s Read more ...