documentary
Leah Hazard: Hard Pushed review - a midwife's talesSunday, 05 May 2019
This layered medical memoir by practicing midwife Leah Hazard unpacks riveting tales of all kinds of deliveries and is underpinned by distress at the parlous nature of the understaffed and overworked NHS.Medical tales (including Adam Kay’s This is... Read more... |
Director Jason Barker: ‘Trans lives are often portrayed so bleakly’Thursday, 04 April 2019
When Jason and Tracey were trying for a baby, the worst happened. Tracey was diagnosed with breast cancer, and although she eventually recovered, was unable to carry a child. For Jason, the answer was clear - as a trans man, he would become pregnant... Read more... |
The Beatles: Made on Merseyside, BBC Four review - when the Fab Four were fiveSaturday, 30 March 2019
Documentaries about the 20th century’s most fabled quartet keep coming. There’s no special call for The Beatles: Made on Merseyside (BBC Four), which looked at the group’s Liverpool beginnings, though at a stretch it could be argued that in the 50th... Read more... |
Minding the Gap review – profound musings on lifeFriday, 22 March 2019
Where would you go for a devastating study on the human condition? The home movies of teenage skaters would be very low down on that list. But most of those movies aren’t filmed, compiled and analysed by Bing Liu, the director of Minding the Gap.... Read more... |
Sleeping with Extremists: The Far Right, Channel 4 review - insightful but flawed documentaryFriday, 22 February 2019
It’s always interesting to see how presenters make their presence known in documentaries. Louis Theroux hovers on the sidelines like an ethereal presence, Stacey Dooley connects immediately on an emotional level, and one-time host Keith Allen... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Dawson City - Frozen TimeThursday, 21 February 2019
Bill Morrison’s Dawson City: Frozen Time is an intoxicating cinematic collage-compilation that embraces social history – in microcosm, via its story of the titular Canadian mining town – as well as the history of film itself. But it goes further,... Read more... |
Don McCullin: Looking for England, BBC Four review - a hard look at homeTuesday, 05 February 2019
A picture is worth more than a thousand words, never more so than with the photographs of Don McCullin. The octogenarian photographer’s black-and-white imagery made the Sunday Times colour supplement the talk of international media in the 1970s.... Read more... |
The Last Survivors, BBC Two review - living onMonday, 28 January 2019
When they were children the interviewees in this film – the last survivors – were taken away in incomprehensible circumstances, on their way to be murdered for who they were, in Germany and places further east. A handful of the few thousands who... Read more... |
On Her Shoulders review - half-life of a campaignerFriday, 25 January 2019
In September 2014, after three months of captivity, Nadia Murad escaped ISIS control in Mosul, Iraq. Since then, she has dedicated her life to travelling the world and telling everyone who will listen about the plight suffered by her Yazidi people,... Read more... |
Director Alexandria Bombach: 'I feel like a completely different person'Wednesday, 23 January 2019
Nadia Murad caught the world’s attention when she spoke at the United Nations Security Council. She spoke of living under ISIS, daily assaults, escaping, and the current plight of the Yazidi people, in refugee camps and still under ISIS control. It... Read more... |
Imagine... James Graham, BBC One review - deft analysis of a working lifeTuesday, 22 January 2019
How does an unassuming 36-year-old with a terrifyingly sensible haircut and a mildly flamboyant taste in jumpers become the political playwright par excellence of his generation? That’s the question that Alan Yentob sought to dissect in this first... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: The RiderTuesday, 08 January 2019
A cannily crafted biographical docudrama about the Lakota Sioux broncobuster and horse trainer Brady Jandreau – playing himself as Brady Blackburn – The Rider will resonate with anyone whose dreams have gone up in smoke. Jandreau was 20 when, on... Read more... |
