documentary
Beeban Kidron
While newspapers alternately praise and panic about the glittering world of the Internet, there is a generation of children who have grown up with 24/7 connectivity and a smart phone in their hand.Public discourse seems to revolve around "grooming" and "privacy", two issues that embody the fears and concerns of adults. What is less discussed is what it really means to always be on, never alone and increasingly bombarded by a world that has something to sell you and appears to know you better than yourself. A world that is so ubiquitous that it is the first and the last thing you see as you Read more ...
David Benedict
BBC Four’s new series Sound of Cinema: The Music that Made the Movies is shocking. The overwhelming majority of arts-based TV consists of programmes consigning specialist knowledge/presenters to the sidelines in favour of dumbed-down, easily digestible generalisations mouthed by all-purpose TV-friendly faces. But this three-part series is fronted by, gasp, a composer who uses insider knowledge to hook and hold the viewers.To be fair, film composer Neil Brand was onto a winner since TV, the home of show and tell, is an ideal place in which to examine and explain exactly how music works with Read more ...
Claudia Pritchard
Parents who separate make their children old before their time. The five young people in Olly Lambert’s spare and frank BBC2 documentary, Mum and Dad Are Splitting Up, certainly know more about dysfunctional adults than you would wish upon a child. Joining the pet rabbit and the little brothers and sisters at home have been alcohol, jealousy, non-communication, disillusionment and deception. The parents, now apart, were interviewed, for the most part, together, their wise child sitting in; they told the camera what you wish they had told Relate, or better still, each other, before the point Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It was only today I learned that, for copyright reasons, it is impossible to use Martin Luther King’s iconic “I Have A Dream” speech in its entirety without paying a hefty licensing fee to his estate. That knowledge made it easier to understand why a new documentary to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington seemed to gloss over its figurehead’s famous words.That those lines ring with familiarity half a century later is testament not only to King’s skills as an orator, but to the activists and civil rights leaders who pulled together what remains one of the largest, and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sandra, 14, has worked out what it will be like if she marries One Direction’s Harry Styles. “His morning voice would be amazing,” she says, thinking forward to when the first thing she hears each day is the croak with which he greets the morning and her. Pop groups with fans are nothing new, and with them come ranks of the obsessive. Crazy About One Direction's twist was to explore the fresh landscape of Twitter-aided, light-speed-connected fandom of girls and young women under the spell of One Direction, the world’s most popular boy band.The film wasn’t really about the X Factor-created Read more ...
Toby Saul
There was an unmistakable trend within Modernism to try and record absolutely everything about ordinary life. Think of Joyce and his attempt to set down all of Leopold Bloom’s thoughts, or the cubists and their use of even the tiniest scrap of newsprint in a collage. The Photographers’ Gallery has had the excellent idea of revisiting Mass Observation, the movement from the Thirties and Forties that wanted to document the mundane to an unprecedented degree. Formed in 1937 at the height of totalitarianism, Mass Observation sounds like it might have been a tool of the police state. Instead Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Stacey Dooley is a chirpy media personality from Luton who first created TV ripples in 2008 on a BBC Three show called Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts. She made an impression then as a high street fashion fan who bridled at the Third World labour involved in much cheap garment production.So far, so Wikipedia - I’d never heard of her and was nonplussed when she popped up like a ditsy, toothy holiday rep fronting a travelogue programme investigating Peru’s ascension to the forefront of global cocaine production. This hour-long show was the first of three Stacey Dooley Investigates specials about the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Buying a used car is not for the squeamish at the best of times, but the notion of buying one from something called the Essex Car Company freezes the blood. Yet the idea of making a slice-of-life, fly on the wall, reality-tv-style doc about the aforesaid jalopy-shifting outfit radiates an unmistakeable allure.The introductory voice-over laid out the floor plan: "Two hundred used motors, a team of fast-talking salesmen, and car-buying customers from all walks of life." Perfect. We were introduced to James, the most successful of the Essex boys when it comes to getting those lumps of car-flesh Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Oddly, there is quite a cinematic sub-genre starring killer whales. The killer’s first (and worst) lead role was opposite a hammy Richard Harris in Orca, a shameless attempt by Dino De Laurentiis to ape the success of Jaws. Then came Free Willy, which in three icky instalments repositioned killers as essentially cuddly. That image took a dent in Rust & Bone after Marion Cotillard’s whale trainer spent much of the film without any legs courtesy of a captive orca. And now there’s Blackfish, a documentary which lifts the lid on the theme parks where killer whales work as aquatic circus Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Last year I spent the summer reading A Life Too Short, a biography of former German national goalkeeper Robert Enke by his friend, the sports journalist Ronald Reng. It’s an incredibly emotive book that uses Enke's diary entries to tell the story of his playing career, his family life, his depression and, ultimately, his suicide in 2009 at the age of 32. It seems that although no end of campaigns try to break down the stigma of depression, or trot out statistics that one in four of us will ultimately suffer from it, in the end it’s usually the sufferers themselves left asking why something Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When television goes off exploring classical civilisation, you can hear those lines from The Life of Brian chiming in your head. “Apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?” Such has been the glut of Roman TV in recent times that no couch potato is in any further doubt. The Romans have kept the plebs royally entertained. But what of the Greeks?The ancient ones, that is. (Of their modern descendants we know quite enough from the financial pages.) What Read more ...
Nick Hasted
If the Nazis had remained in power, and the Holocaust been hushed up and excused, how might an SS officer feel in his autumn years about those slaughters in Belorussian clearings? What happens when the culture that demanded mass murder simply continues, and the murderers are treated as heroes, free to bask in their rewards for half a century?Such questions arise as, having been arrested whenever he tried to interview victims of Indonesia’s Sixties anti-Communist Terror (in which up to 2.5 million were killed with Western complicity), director Joshua Oppenheimer instead asked some of the Read more ...