documentary
Louis Theroux: By Reason of Insanity, BBC TwoMonday, 30 March 2015
Louis Theroux just wants to make good television. This may seem an obvious thing to say of a programme-maker, but many programme-makers concerned with the kind of human interest story that Theroux has made his own, often want to do more than this.... Read more... |
Hillary Clinton: The Power of Women, BBC TwoThursday, 26 March 2015
If the mark of a good documentary is that it teaches you something new, then the awkwardly titled Hillary Clinton: The Power of Women was a very good documentary indeed. For instance, before watching it I had no idea that the famous “women’s rights... Read more... |
Dior and IWednesday, 25 March 2015
If anyone thinks high fashion is an airy-fairy world populated by flibbertigibbets preoccupied with frills and furbelows, Frédéric Tcheng’s feature-length documentary Dior and I, a behind-the-scenes account of the race to prepare the 2012 Christian... Read more... |
Storyville: Masterspy of Moscow - George Blake, BBC FourTuesday, 24 March 2015
“The righteous traitor” must be as provocative a subtitle as any when the subject is espionage. Director George Carey nevertheless used it in this highly revealing film about George Blake, the “spy who got away”, which proved as much about the... Read more... |
Stop Cutting Our Girls: a Comic Relief Special, BBC ThreeThursday, 12 March 2015
Earlier tonight, I read - on Twitter, so I’m not vouching for its accuracy - that more people have now signed a petition to reinstate Jeremy Clarkson at the BBC than to take stronger action against female genital mutilation (FGM) in the UK. FGM, as... Read more... |
Sex, Lies and Love Bites: The Agony Aunt Story, BBC FourTuesday, 10 March 2015
Philippa Perry, 20 years a psychotherapist, was the dashing narrator of this history of 300 years of agony aunts (or uncles). Wearing a bright orange coat, she cycled between libraries, universities, newspaper and magazine offices, looking at... Read more... |
DVD: Pictures of the Old WorldFriday, 06 March 2015
Slovak director Dušan Hanák's 1972 documentary Pictures of the Old World (Obrazy starého sveta) is a real rediscovery, another in the remarkable haul that distributor Second Run has brought us from the Eastern European film archives which that... Read more... |
DreamcatcherThursday, 05 March 2015
We get the big city views of Chicago, the bright lights and the skyscrapers, a few times in Kim Longinotto’s Dreamcatcher, but for the most part we’re planted firmly down at street level, in areas of town probably you wouldn’t want to go to, a fair... Read more... |
Super-Powered Owls: Natural World, BBC TwoTuesday, 03 March 2015
The owl – symbol of wisdom, harbinger of death – is a powerful if disparate symbol in human mythology worldwide. But this outstanding visual essay provided a riveting array of astonishing facts to make of the bird something even more remarkable... Read more... |
The Romanians Are Coming, Channel 4Wednesday, 18 February 2015
The Romanians Are Coming was the immigration story from the other side. Bustling along with the wry, sometimes desperate comedy (and themed music) of a Balkan film, its characters said things about themselves that others would hardly get away with... Read more... |
UKIP: The First 100 Days, Channel 4Tuesday, 17 February 2015
As worst-case scenarios go, the prospect of a UKIP government in a little under three months’ time is a frightening but unlikely one – isn’t it? That they have only two MPs, and leader Nigel Farage is yet to find a seat, has done nothing to stop... Read more... |
MaidanTuesday, 17 February 2015
I went into watching Sergei Loznitsa’s documentary Maidan with the highest hopes, and came out, more than two hours later, cold. For a film about a successful national liberation movement, that’s something of a paradox.It’s titled, of course, after... Read more... |
