documentary
Chris Packham: 7.7 Billion People and Counting, BBC Two review - is it too late to get population growth under control?Wednesday, 22 January 2020
We hear plenty of debate about climate change and its disastrous potential, but the ballooning growth of the world’s population may be the most critical issue facing humankind. Chris Packham thinks so (“it’s undeniably the elephant in the room,” he... Read more... |
This Is Our Family, Sky Atlantic review - can Emma and Tony live happily ever after?Wednesday, 15 January 2020
Sky Atlantic is usually where you go for big-hitting dramas, so this quartet of observational documentaries is an unexpected development. Each film follows a single family over three years, and each family faces particular challenges.In this opener... Read more... |
How to Steal Pigs and Influence People, Channel 4 review - the arcane world of the online vegan influencersWednesday, 15 January 2020
Filmmaker Tom Costello’s opening question in this quixotic but fascinating documentary for Channel 4 deftly skewered the journey he was about to take us on. Was making change or finding fame more important? he asked, and by the end of the story it... Read more... |
Cornwall: This Fishing Life, BBC Two review - a precarious trade on the ocean waveWednesday, 08 January 2020
Series about fishing have become a durable mini-genre, including the likes of Deadliest Catch and Saltwater Heroes. However, this new six-parter on BBC Two brings us much closer to home than Alaska or Tasmania, and probes into the lives of the... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: The Emperor's Naked Army Marches OnTuesday, 07 January 2020
When Sight & Sound compiled its “Greatest Documentaries of All Time” list five years ago, Kazuo Hara’s The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On came in at number 23 – proof, some three decades on from its 1987 release, that this remarkable film had... Read more... |
Liam Gallagher: As It Was, BBC Two review - no expletives deleted in exhausting rock-docMonday, 30 December 2019
Liam Gallagher knows exactly how "fucking fantastic… and fucking shit I am", and proceeds to tell us so for 85 minutes. This 10-year documentary project came about as a result of director Charlie Lightening’s friendship with Gallagher, formed... Read more... |
Heston's Marvellous Menu: Back to the Noughties, BBC Two review - ghost of food trends pastFriday, 20 December 2019
Heston Blumenthal, of triple-cooked chips fame, is a mad food scientist. Well, that’s how we’re introduced to him in Heston’s Marvellous Menu. Tonight’s BBC Two programme had a rather theatrical premise: a chef recreating the complete dining... Read more... |
Citizen K review - real power in RussiaSaturday, 14 December 2019
Putin and Mikhail Khodorkovsky are “strong”, a Russian journalist considers. “Everyone else – weak.” This is essentially Khodorkovsky’s opinion, too, after the former oil oligarch’s decade in a Siberian jail for suggesting the President was corrupt... Read more... |
How They Built the Titanic, Channel 5 review - the great liner revisited again, but why now?Wednesday, 11 December 2019
The appalling fate of the allegedly unsinkable liner Titanic in 1912 has fuelled endless feature films and documentaries, not to mention a dismal drama series by Julian Fellowes (there was also a proposed Titanic II vessel which would have been... Read more... |
The Cave review - heroic Syrian hospital workersMonday, 09 December 2019
War crimes are war crimes, irrespective of the victims’ ages, gender, or ethnicities, and no one’s torture or murder is more abhorrent than anyone else’s. Yet because children are essentially innocent and incapable of defending themselves, and... Read more... |
The Family Secret, Channel 4 review - lives destroyed by historic sexual abuseWednesday, 04 December 2019
“Restorative Justice Practitioner” sounds like a euphemism for a Mad Max-style lone avenger, but in director Anna Hall's devastating film for Channel 4, it was a woman called Kate whose job was to bring together conflicting parties and help find a... Read more... |
Tutankhamun with Dan Snow, Channel 5 review - too many presenters spoil Egyptian boy-king docWednesday, 27 November 2019
It’s claimed that the current world tour of Tutankhamun’s extraordinary treasures will be the last, but they said that about Frank Sinatra too. Whatever, the boy-pharaoh’s life and legend will retain their unprecedented mystique, but no thanks to... Read more... |
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