documentary
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 ...
Mark Kidel
First-person documentary must steer the uneasy path between embarrassing confessional, narcissistic self-obsession and work that will resonate beyond the merely parochial context of home movies. The dangers surrounding the genre are of course one of the sources of its potential strength. The intimacy that near-absolute subjectivity affords is a plus. And so is the thrill of perhaps getting a glimpse behind the personae of everyday life.The New Man chronicles close to a year in the life of film maker Josh Appignanesi and his wife, the writer and academic Devorah Baum. They are supposedly co- Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Could Jeremy Paxman explain the inexplicable, so that viewers could begin to understand the meaning of the astonishing theatre that is the 2016 American presidential election? We can hardly even grasp the plot, let alone the coming denouement and its repercussions.To those of us on this side of the pond, one candidate is a misogynist lying bullying businessman with a red face and badly dyed hair, who seems to have garnered enormous support among the white working class. Here was Republican Donald Trump, aged 70, aka The Donald, known in Scotland for controversial golf courses, in New York for Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Dont Look Back is the Ur-rockumentary, the template for hundreds of hand-held rock tour films, a source of inspiration as well as a model to aspire to.When director DA Pennebaker went on the road with Bob Dylan as he played a number of English gigs in 1965, he was intending to make a concert film. The backstage, limo and hotel room material was imagined as filler. But something unexpected happened: Dylan and his entourage, not least his constant companion road manager Bob Neuwirth, realised very soon that the performance didn’t end as the protest singer stepped out of the spotlight, high on Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Can Louis Theroux bring anything new to the Scientology party? If you’ve seen Going Clear, Alex Gibney’s detailed documentary based on Lawrence Wright’s book, or watched Tom Cruise acting weird on YouTube, you already know that the Church’s great secrets are not so secret any more. We’ve heard about the aliens and the galaxies, the E-meters and the Operating Thetans, the elite Sea Org and the hellish conditions in the Hole.No Scientology members are going to open up to Theroux, however charmingly open-minded he may be, and he doesn’t want to do another Going Clear, with disillusioned ex- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We’re all comfortable with the concept of actors presenting documentaries about endangered species. A famous name helps to bring an issue into the light. It was slightly different with A World Without Down’s Syndrome? Sally Phillips, the much-loved comic actress who plays sidekicks to Bridget Jones and Miranda Hart, has a son with Down’s Syndrome. Olly, as the opening sequence amply revealed, is a delightful boy at the heart of a loving family. “I was expecting tragedy," explained Phillips, "but I got comedy.”And yet people like Olly may be on the way out. This carefully researched, Read more ...
Bernadette McNulty
Trying to pip the release of Mat Whitecross’s documentary Supersonic to the post, this brief hack through the BBC’s archive throws together a galloping overview of Oasis’s rise and fall, narrated by their own interviews and quotes. Arguably Oasis built a career on the consistent entertainment value of their soundbites rather than the long-term quality of their songs, so this wasn’t exactly a hard search, nor does it throw up anything you hadn’t heard before. Throughout, the music plays second fiddle, barely named or dated, flaring up in the background like an ambulance alarm, creating a jive- Read more ...