documentary
David Kettle
What’s love all about anyway? That’s the almost certainly unanswerable question that Israeli-American director Alma Har’el sets out to tackle in her strange, feverish, at times downright hallucinatory documentary LoveTrue. The problem is, by the end of its alternately entertaining and disconcerting 80 minutes, you’ll almost certainly be none the wiser. And you may even have forgotten what the original question was anyway.Har’el’s previous documentary Bombay Beach, on a ruined ghost town in southern California, earned high praise for its fantastical visuals and its blurring of reality and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
From Jimmy Savile to the Rotherham scandal, child sexual abuse has become a recurring nightmare of our society, and thus is inevitably grist to the TV dramatist’s mill. It has been a crucial component in The Missing, National Treasure and Line of Duty, to name merely three recent examples.It gradually emerged again, like a monster from the deep, as the dominant theme of this second series of Unforgotten (★★★★) and writer Chris Lang had been skilful enough to thread it through the very different lives of his protagonists and deliver a finale that lived up to all that had Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Tom Lehrer famously declared satire dead when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Henry Kissinger not long after he'd bombed Cambodia back to the Middle Ages. Lehrer never wrote another song. Meanwhile other satirists battle on. Every day delivers fresh material to work with. This documentary supplied a little more by rummaging around on Donald Trump's family tree.Put succinctly, Meet the Trumps: From Immigrant to President reported that the rise and rise and rise of the Trump dynasty is a tale of brothel-keeping, horsemeat burgers and much rapacious trousering of federal Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s the ghastly scenario of a grim morality play. A man called Simon comes into hospital for the removal of a tumour in his oesophagus and the construction of a new food pipe. But there are not enough berths in the intensive therapy unit to ensure he can have post-operative care. Why? Because elsewhere in the country Janice has ruptured her aorta in a car accident. She is on her way to the London hospital which specialises in such cases. If she dies in the ambulance on the way, Simon can have his op. If not, he has to go home (for the second time). How does that make Simon feel? "Guilty, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s been 12 months since the news guy wept and told us: David Bowie, ever out in front, became the first to depart in the year of musical mortality 2016. After the initial lamentations, the memorial tributes have been a mixed bag. Best was the life story stitched together for Radio 4 from a vast back catalogue of audio interviews. Less impactfully there was also the well-meaning misfire at the Proms, plus a messy Dadaist meta-biog rushed out by Paul Morley. Broadcast on what would have been Bowie’s 70th birthday, The Last Five Years is the best attempt yet to contextualise late Bowie in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Not all racing drivers are created equal. New world champion Nico Rosberg is the son of a former F1 champion, grew up in Monaco, speaks five languages and turned down an offer to study aeronautical engineering at Imperial College, London.On the other hand, 1980s racer Tommy Byrne was a working-class chancer from Dundalk who was permanently skint and got nicked for stealing. Yet the evidence suggests he was one of the fastest natural drivers who ever sat in a racing car, and who even gave Ayrton Senna a run for his money when both of them drove for the Van Diemen team at the start of the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Gather round the fire, friends: no Santa down the chimney this Christmas Eve, but the curiously comforting Alan Bennett, with his sardonic and occasionally optimistic diaries. The latest published instalment has the slightly wry title Keeping On Keeping On; Bennett tells us the original title was to be Banging On Banging On.Bennett is 82 now, and lives much of the time in NW1 – the very street once home to the Lady in the Van, who parked in his front garden, in a neighbourhood memorialised in the Mark Boxer comic strip, Life and Times in NW1. Now much has gone: the real-life Mr and Mrs String Read more ...
graham.rickson
Werner Herzog isn’t visible in his documentary Lo and Behold but he’s a constant throughout, his sonorous, quizzical tones an ideal counterbalance to some of the more scary talking heads he encounters. In essence the film doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already suspect already: that the constantly evolving internet could either ruin us or offer salvation.Subtitled "Reveries of the Connected World" and organised in 10 short sections, the film’s title is explained in the first few minutes, an excitable academic breathlessly showing us the room in UCLA where one of the first attempts to Read more ...
Barney Harsent
In the late 1960s, photographer Nick Hedge travelled the country, documenting some truly horrific housing conditions and the people who were forced to live in them. He photographed entire families living in one room with no heating or access to running water – people who had almost literally nothing. These weren’t isolated people on the fringes of society, these were communities, for many of those involved, this was normal.I wouldn’t have bet big money on Channel 5 revisiting some of the children pictured in these slums with care and moving sensitivity, while also highlighting the plight of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This story drops down the rabbit-hole so fast, you doubt it’ll ever hit bottom. Kiwi TV presenter David Farrier’s human interest items of the That’s Life/One Show sort led him to feature “competitive tickling” videos. His interest drew disproportionate, homophobic legal wrath from their mysterious maker, and this crowd-funded documentary is Farrier and co-director Dylan Reeve’s stubborn response. If revelations aren’t quite on the level of Searching for Sugar Man or The Imposter, the layers of deceit it reveals are grippingly unexpected.The tickling leagues, like their maker’s loopy Read more ...
Barney Harsent
TV can be a powerful tool of redemption. Take Strictly Come Dancing – anything that can shift perception of Ann Widdecombe from poisonous homophobe to innocuous have-a-go hero is dark, dark magic indeed. Just this week, the Strictly dancefloor has finally bid goodbye to Ed Balls after housing him for almost as long as the role of Shadow Home Secretary, and society is opening its arms to him – a politician with a reputation as a ruthless bully. It's another example of TV-led Munchausen syndrome by proxy.In Channel 5’s fly-on-the-wall documentary, MPs Behind Closed Doors, redemption also seemed Read more ...
graham.rickson
What to do if you’re a despotic leader with an underperforming film industry? Hiring better directors and actors wasn’t an option for Kim Jong-il in the late 1970s, so he took drastic action: luring South Korea’s biggest female star Choi Eun-hee to Hong Kong on false pretences and having her abducted. Her ex-husband, the South’s leading filmmaker Shin Sang-ok, did the honourable thing and went in search of her, only to suffer the same fate. What happened next is the subject of Rob Cannan and Ross Adam’s engrossing documentary.Shin was a financially inept directorial maverick, whose production Read more ...