documentary
graham.rickson
Bill Morrison’s film, mostly edited together from archive material, serves as an elegy to Britain's recent industrial past. The older footage has been handsomely restored, and often it’s only the clothes that give a sense of period. It focuses on the Durham coalfields, where the last mine closed in the early 1990s. There’s little left to show for it – the film is framed by aerial sequences where we search in vain for any trace of the industry. Collieries have been replaced by retail parks, artificial ski slopes and football stadia. We still use coal for a third of our energy needs, but it’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The argument in Terry Pratchett's BBC Two documentary Choosing to Die boiled down to the sanctity of life versus the quality of life. Pratchett's own reasoning, that he has Alzheimer's disease and would prefer to choose the manner and timing of his own death before he becomes incapable of making that decision, is eminently logical.The subjects of his film, multiple sclerosis sufferer Andrew Colgan and Peter Smedley, who has motor neuron disease, had opted to end their lives at the Dignitas clinic in Zurich rather than endure the inevitable progression of their illnesses. You might not have Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A teenage boy howls casually at the full moon; elephants in a river take a midnight dip, glossy with water and moonlight; a drunk on a park bench can’t hold back the laughter as he listens to an iPod. What were you doing on 24 July, 2010? It’s a question that executive producer Ridley Scott and director Kevin MacDonald, with the mighty aid of YouTube, asked people across the globe. Demanding footage of everything from the daily rituals of eating, washing and travelling to moments of heightened or unusual significance, the film-makers’ only stipulation was that the material be filmed within a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The identity of British independent film, and its future directions, has always been a matter of some contention – and with the ongoing transfer of authority on funding issues from the now-defunct UK Film Council to the British Film Institute, it’s a question that isn’t going to go away. For Ron Peck, whose most recent film Cross-Channel has been released on DVD, coinciding with the re-release of his Empire State, it's a question close to the heart, as director of what has been called Britain’s first openly gay film, Nighthawks, and the much-acclaimed boxing documentary Fighters.Peck is most Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Verbatim theatre has been the flavour of political theatre for the past two decades, and no theatre has done more to promote this style of public witnessing than the Tricycle in Kilburn, north London. Its artistic director, Nicolas Kent, has created a special style of verbatim drama called tribunal theatre, where the results of long-running public inquiries or trials are edited into an evening’s viewing. His latest venture, Tactical Questioning: Scenes from the Baha Mousa Inquiry, which opened last night, illustrates the pros and cons of this type of infotainment.First the facts: at the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Notwithstanding legends of earlier generations such as Fangio or Jim Clark, it's Ayrton Senna whose name commands the most mystique in the annals of Formula One motor racing. Nor is his reputation limited merely to so-called "petrolheads". Away from the track, he became a kind of deity in his native Brazil, both for his racing feats and his charitable endeavours now continued by the Instituto Ayrton Senna.But he was a complex character, spiritual, deeply religious, yet brutally pragmatic. While he's viewed as a supernatural phenomenon by many, there was a dark and ruthless side to his Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Not long after the Good Friday Agreement, BBC Northern Ireland broadcast a charming drama featuring a tale of two drums. An Ulster Protestant was too wedded to the marching season to join his wife on holiday in Donegal, so she wrought her revenge by destroying his bass drum and replacing it with its Catholic antithesis, a bodhrán. If last night’s The Men Who Won’t Stop Marching is any indication, that won’t be happening on the Shankill Road any time soon. The drum, still clattered with percussive insistence by Protestant bandsmen, remains a powerful conduit for loyalty to Queen and crown. Read more ...
Mark Kidel
When Alfred Brendel first mentioned Kit Armstrong to me, in early 2008, I knew there was a film there. He was brimming with excitement: Kit had come to him with an interpretation of a Chopin Nocturne that displayed a command and maturity that was baffling considering Kit was 13 at the time of the recording. Alfred led me into his inner sanctum, a practice room filled to bursting with two Steinways, a large carved idol from New Guinea, Liszt’s death mask and a rich and varied collection of paintings and images, some of them revealing the pianist’s wicked Dadaist sense of humour. He slipped the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Despite selling 300 million albums, being memorialised in stage musicals and computer games and with a feature film about their early career in the works, Queen are still moaning about the press. It's a theme that simmered steadily through this two-part history, with drummer Roger Taylor especially splenetic about the cruel and unusual treatment doled out to his band by first the music papers ("the evil empire"), then later the tabloids.It's true that, in Britain, they did get regular kickings in print (though it's difficult to believe that any rational adult could get seriously upset about Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
There have been stunning films about surfing, like Riding Giants, and also at least one masterpiece about the slums of Rio - City of God. This documentary combines both. It focuses on the lives of two teenage boys, Fabio and Naama, and their dream of escaping the violence of Rio’s slums by carving out a career as surf pros. The only obvious alternative is a life of crime in the pay of drug gangs in the favelas, where the statistics say 15,000 are killed by guns in Brazil every year. The boys are, the film implies, surfing to save their lives.Rio Breaks, directed by Justin Mitchell, captures Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Once upon a time, "easy listening" was a term of abuse and contempt, intended to evoke everything uncool, unhip and musically middle-aged. It meant pipe, cardigan, golf and Bing Crosby, and it was the last thing you'd hear before you were felled by your thickened arteries and under-exercised heart.Things have changed, as Bob Dylan sang, some years before he reached 70. As The Joy of Easy Listening pointed out, now that the passing decades have narrowed the great divide that used to exist between the cutting edge of rock'n'roll and the puréed strings of James Last or Bert Kaempfert, it may Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Paul Merton started his three-part series on the origins of the American film industry with a deliberately clichéd shot, greeting us while standing with the Hollywood sign in view. But he quickly whizzed over to New York City, the true location of the birth of movies - or American ones at least - for it was on the East Coast that Thomas Edison, after inventing the phonograph, developed the Kinetoscope, a basic viewing device for moving pictures. The Kinetoscope was a raw instrument indeed, as the pictures could be seen through a peephole by one viewer at a time. It was the French Lumière Read more ...