documentary
WeinerSaturday, 09 July 2016
Weiner is the story of a rapid ride from comeback to meltdown. It’s an enthralling journey to witness, even if you sometimes feel like averting your eyes. What can be more inexorable than a political life – not to mention a private one – imploding... Read more... |
Notes on BlindnessSaturday, 02 July 2016
Notes on Blindness is an extraordinary film that wears its original genius lightly. The debut full-length documentary from directors Peter Middleton and James Spinney, it may seem complicated in its assembly, but has a final impact that is... Read more... |
The South Bank Show: Joyce DiDonato, Sky ArtsThursday, 23 June 2016
Take Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti, and add Handel and Mozart and the Frenchman Massenet, and you have the composers whose operas the Kansas-born mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato has made her own. She's one of the few who has become a classic opera... Read more... |
DVD: Heart of a DogFriday, 10 June 2016
The language of documentary is shot through with conventions. Rare is the occasion when a film-maker breaks the rules and throws the genre wide open. It takes a versatile artist like Laurie Anderson to free the medium from genre and invent a whole... Read more... |
Where to Invade NextThursday, 09 June 2016
There are a lot of cheerful people in the world, most of them outside the United States. That's the startling conclusion of Michael Moore's pointed comic jeremiad Where to Invade Next, in which American cinema's premier schlub decamps overseas to... Read more... |
Versus: The Life and Films of Ken LoachThursday, 02 June 2016
The release of Louise Osmond’s biographical film about the director Ken Loach, who turns 80 on 17 June, has been timed to perfection. Twelve days ago, Loach’s I, Daniel Blake won him his second Palme d’Or. He came out of retirement to make it after... Read more... |
Antonia Bird: 'I get lumped together with Ken Loach'Sunday, 22 May 2016
Antonia Bird died in 2013 at the age of 62. The last television drama with her name on it was the first series of The Village, but the career which is celebrated in the BBC Four documentary Antonia Bird: From EastEnders to Hollywood were from a... Read more... |
Louis Theroux: Drinking to Oblivion, BBC TwoMonday, 25 April 2016
Every few months we get a new Project Fear campaign by "experts" announcing that a small glass of Bristol Cream twice a week now qualifies as "binge drinking", and guarantees certain death. However, none of the interviewees in Louis Theroux's latest... Read more... |
Arena: All the World's a Screen – Shakespeare on Film, BBC FourMonday, 25 April 2016
In the last century, when the BBC took arts documentaries seriously, Arena was one of the highlights of the week. Nowadays its appearance is as rare as that of a Midwich cuckoo. Money, or rather the lack of it, is the problem. In our grave... Read more... |
DVD: Mysterious Object at NoonTuesday, 19 April 2016
“By their beginnings, you shall know them” is a useful motto for cinematic rediscovery. Rather than predicting how a director’s creative path may develop in the future, you go in the opposite direction to see which way, starting from his or her... Read more... |
Normal for Norfolk, BBC TwoThursday, 14 April 2016
In 2014 the Channel 4 series Confessions looked at the changing face of the old professions. In the programme about doctors, one GP remembered the standard practice of deploying acronyms on patient notes that looked like arcane medical terminology... Read more... |
DVD: Culloden / The War GameTuesday, 05 April 2016
The most radical of the directors who forged a “cinema of resistance” at the BBC in the 1960s, Peter Watkins completed two groundbreaking docudramas there – Culloden (1964) and The War Game (1965) – before the suppression of the second prompted his... Read more... |
