Documentary

Perfect Vagina

Channel 4, Sun 17 Aug, 10pm

14 Aug 2008

Get set to cross your legs and grit your teeth as Lisa Rogers fronts a very different kind of scrapheap challenge as part of Channel 4’s The G-Spot strand. We’ve all read the headlines and overheard the news that women are literally queuing up round the…

Joy Division

24 Apr 2008

DOCUMENTARY (15) 96mins After last year’s Control, Anton Corbijn’s considered and stylish dramatisation of Ian Curtis’ life, it would be easy to think that everything you need to know about the legend and legacy of English post-punk outfit Joy…

The Not Dead

1 Nov 2007

DOCUMENTARY Channel 4, Mon 12 Nov, 9pm There’s always a danger that with the constant barrage of rolling news coverage, dramas and documentaries that we may become immune to the horrors of the world, particularly the terror of warfare. But while…

The 9/11 Faker

Channel 4, Thu 11 Sep, 9pm

4 Sep 2008

And so let's roll with the annual grief-fest which marks the day when planes smashed into the heart of New York's business sector and flattened any notions of US impregnability. In the years which followed, tales of heroism and sacrifice emerged from…

In the Hands of the Gods

6 Sep 2007

Forget the ‘Brand Beckham’ circus bringing ‘soccer’ to the States. This journey of five working-class football freestylers who pitch up in New York to busk their way to their idol (the devious genius Diego Maradona, in Argentina) captures the genuine…

Sculpture Diaries

21 Aug 2008

DOCUMENTARY Dead Ringers once made a big impersonating deal of the rivalry between TV historians Simon Schama and David Starkey. Maybe one day we’ll see small screen art guys Waldemar Januszczak and Matthew Collings doing some doppelganger bitching…

Let's Get Lost

5 Jun 2008

DOCUMENTARY (15) 109min One of the girlfriends of the late legend of the cool school of jazz once observed, ‘Chet Baker sure knew how to get lost.’ Aside from knowing how to get lost in his music (being a brilliantly intuitive trumpet player), Baker…

Remote Control: Documentary Reviews

13 Dec 2007

Brian Donaldson uncovers some fine documentaries about daredevils, dancers and daggers There’s a special poignancy about Richard Hammond Meets Evel Knievel (BBC2, Sun 23 Dec, 9pm) now that we know the subject of the show has since died. The Top Gear…

The Seven Sins of England

Channel 4, Tue 8 May, 10pm

23 Apr 2007

SOCIAL DOCUMENTARY Before anyone gets on their high horse, let’s admit straight off the bat that the Scots might claim to have a largely pacifist Tartan Army, but the seven sins of our Anglo Saxon brethren could be matched and probably surpassed by…

Black, White + Gray

4 Sep 2008

James Crump’s documentary revisits the contentious work, life and times of seminal 80s photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. The artist’s legacy is re-examined through a close study of the life of his partner and patron, the curator and collector, Sam…

Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman

7 Aug 2008

DOCUMENTARY BBC4, Wed 13 Aug, 10pm Wouldn’t we all love to be handed a camera, go off wandering across the globe on the flimsiest of motives and stick our lens into people’s lives? But most people would at least try to capture some of the fun bits…

Make Me A Christian

7 Aug 2008

DOCUMENTARY Channel 4, Sun 10 Aug, 7pm While the UK may have been founded on the rock of Christian values, its modern citizens would rather play Pro Evolution Soccer, get paralytically drunk or fritter a week’s earnings away on footwear. But would a…

Man On Wire

31 Jul 2008

DOCUMENTARY (12A) 94min Meet Philippe Petit – French artist, performer and high wire walker. On the afternoon of 6 August 1974, Petit and six accomplices set off for the World Trade Centre in an unmarked van. With forged ID passes and dressed as…

Tovarisch, I Am Not Dead

22 May 2008

DOCUMENTARY (15) 83 min Back in 1980, a Polish-born Jewish doctor Garri Urban published an autobiographical account Tovarisch, I Am Not Dead of his remarkable experiences in Eastern Europe during World War Two. Having fled the Nazis, who massacred…

Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession

6 Sep 2007

Simultaneously a dream and a nightmare for film buffs everywhere, Alexandra Cassavetes’s film melds together various different strands into a fascinating portrait of the power of cinema. The Z Channel was an LA-based cable TV station dedicated to the…

Sketches of Frank Gehry

2 Jul 2007

DOCUMENTARY Two minutes into this documentary about Frank Gehry, America’s most famous living architect, the director Sydney Pollack (Tootsie, The Interpreter) admits that the documentary was Gehry’s idea. When the architect suggested it to him…

Child Genius

Channel 4, Thu 8 Feb, 9pm

29 Jan 2007

DOCUMENTARY Most of us would like to have a few more brain cells than we currently have at our disposal. But who would really want an IQ of 170, putting us into the top 0.002% of the population? And what if we had that mental ability and were around…

John Pilger - Documentaries That Changed the World

John Pilger - Documentaries That Changed the World

2 Oct 2006

POLITICAL DOCUMENTARY It’s hard not to feel ambivalence towards anyone who insists on partisanship. John Pilger is a case in point. A genuinely crusading print and TV journalist, Pilger has been fighting for the rights of the poor, the put-upon and…

Jesus Camp

4 Sep 2008

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s fly-on-the-wall documentary might easily be classified as a kind of real life horror film. In it we follow one Pastor Becky as she gears up to, and runs a summer camp for born again Christian children and their families.

Gimme Shelter

14 Aug 2008

DOCUMENTARY (E) 91min (Warner Home Video DVD retail) The second Maysles brothers documentary to be given a new lease of life on DVD in so many months, Gimme Shelter is by far their most contentious film, and arguably the most tragic film ever made…

High Emergency

31 Jul 2008

DOCUMENTARY Five, Tue 5 Aug, 7.30pm One of the last places you’d want to find yourself stranded in the British Isles is up in the Highlands. If you thought any different you’ll change your mind after watching the first instalment of this documentary…

Peter Kosminksy

5 Jun 2008

DOCUMENTARY/DRAMA SEASON More4, Sat 14–Sun 20 Jun In the era of Play for Today, the rabblerousing TV dramatist lurked in every nook and cranny of the BBC, cropping up on primetime slots to frighten the horses. Now though, the nation’s broadcasting…

Che Guevara As You Have Never Seen Him Before

4 Jan 2008

DOCUMENTARY (E) 50min (Network retail) There’s a certain duplicity to the title of this Cuban effort from Manuel Perez Paredes. The story it tells of the life of the great Argentinean revolutionary, who was given Cuban nationality for his immense…

My New Home

Channel 4, Mon 13 Aug, 9pm

9 Aug 2007

SOCIAL DOCUMENTARY Stung by the claims of racism which dogged them over the Celebrity Big Bigot scandal, Channel 4 must be glad they can still make programmes like this one. My New Home catches up with three immigrant children who they first featured…

Date set for Kurt Cobain documentary release

27 Jul 2007

A documentary about Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain is set to be released in the US in October. The AJ Schnack movie Kurt Cobain: About a Son premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival last month. According to Schnack’s blog, the documentary will…

Science is Fiction

DVD

21 May 2007

DOCUMENTARY There’s just space to mention this fascinating film about one of the great pioneers of science films, Jean Painlevé (1902-1989). Painlevé was a poet in every sense of the word and there was nothing he liked to do more than film fish, foul…

DVD - General Idi Amin Dada: Autoportrait

7 May 2007

DOCUMENTARY

Avenge But One of My Two Eyes - DVD review

Avenge But One of My Two Eyes

29 Jan 2007

DOCUMENTARY Avi Mograbi’s tough-minded documentary on the horrors of today’s Israeli-Palestine conflict looks at events not from the point of view of Palestinian fanaticism and Israeli brutality, but chiefly from the long established fanaticism…

Day the Country Died, The - DVD review

The Day the Country Died

3 Jan 2007

DOCUMENTARY Subtitled ‘A History of Anarcho Punk’ this is actually a visual retelling of Ian Glasper’s excellent book of the same name. Exploring in minute detail the obscure, esoteric, UK anarcho-punk scene of the early 80s, this absolutely…

Her Name is Sabine

21 Aug 2008

DOCUMENTARY As an actress, Sandrine Bonnaire has worked with some illustrious French filmmakers including Maurice Pialat, Agnes Varda, Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol. Her Name is Sabine, her own impressive directorial debut, is an intimate and…

Esther B Robinson - A Walk Into the Sea

14 Aug 2008

In July 1966, Esther B Robinson’s uncle Danny Williams drove home to Massachusetts, with a shaving kit full of drugs, and took his own life. Thirty-four years later, Esther’s grandmother Nadia came to visit her granddaughter’s workplace at the Warhol…

Salesman

14 Aug 2008

DOCUMENTARY (E) 91min (Eureka DVD retail) The first of two recent DVD debuts for seminal documentaries made by the Maysles brothers, Salesman is the non-narrated account of four Boston door-to-door bible sellers. Made in 1968 and shot in black and…

Car Bomb

31 Jul 2008

DOCUMENTARY Channel 4, Sun 3 Aug, 7pm The scary question posed at the end of this two-part documentary is ‘will we ever see an end to the car bomb?’ The answer is a resounding ‘no’, not unless we ditch our motors for good and walk everywhere. Even…

Standard Operating Procedure

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

(Errol Morris, USA) 116min The great documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War) turns his investigative eye towards the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. The coup of the film is that Morris interviews some of the soldiers who…

A Complete History of My Sexual Failures

19 Jun 2008

DOCUMENTARY (18) 93min Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned – most people would regard this maxim as pretty true. Documentary filmmaker Chris Waitt, however, flies in the face of danger. After finding himself on the receiving end of a string of…

13 Kids and Wanting More

22 May 2008

DOCUMENTARY Channel 4, Thu 22 May, 9pm When is enough really quite enough? The subjects of this film clearly don’t believe in the concept, as they churn out child after baby after offspring, some for reasons of faith, others simply because they love…

Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?

8 May 2008

DOCUMENTARY (12A) 89min Having successfully supersized his career by eating way too many Big Macs, Morgan Spurlock has let fame go to his head or maybe he’s just contracted a bout of mad cow disease. His new documentary sees the campaigner try to do…

Shine a Light

10 Apr 2008

DOCUMENTARY/CONCERT (12A) 122min It was customary in early Greek and Roman books to have the portrait of the author on the opening page. Martin Scorsese brings this tradition to his Rolling Stones concert movie. The opening exchanges depict the…

Back To Normandy

13 Mar 2008

DOCUMENTARY (12A) 113min For this quietly compelling, multilayered documentary, French filmmaker Nicholas Philibert (Etre et Avoir) returned to the same Normandy agricultural community where, some 30 years earlier, he had served as an assistant…

TV: Iraq Season

13 Mar 2008

BBC/Channel 4 With the fifth anniversary of the West’s illegal invasion and errant desecration of Iraq upon us, the networks have seen no reason to halt the stream of related documentaries and dramas which have been filling the schedules on the…

We Are Together

13 Mar 2008

DOCUMENTARY (PG) 86min Whether the tragedy is personal or universal, filmmaker Paul Taylor manages to extract an upbeat film out of harrowing and difficult lives in this moving documentary. Concentrating on the Agape Orphanage in South Africa, Taylor…

The London Nobody Knows/The Bicyclettes De Belsize

28 Feb 2008

DOCUMENTARY (PG) 73min (Optimum DVD retail) The London Nobody Knows is a genuine curio. James Mason takes his brolly and bowler for a stroll around the seedier parts of the big smoke in the late 1960s, bemoaning ruined buildings such as Camden’s…

Baby Bible Bashers

14 Feb 2008

DOCUMENTARY Channel 4, Thu 14 Feb, 9pm; repeated Tue 19 Feb, 11.05pm It never fails to chill the blood to see people who claim to be working on behalf of the little baby Jesus with banners denouncing everyone from liars to homosexuals and adulterers…

A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash

29 Nov 2007

DOCUMENTARY (PG) 83min With The Guardian recently offering the front page headline ‘World economy shakes as oil nears $100 a barrel’, A Crude Awakening is nothing if not pertinent, giving credence to the film’s thesis that it isn’t money that…

In the Shadow of the Moon

15 Nov 2007

This exhilarating British-made documentary about the American lunar programme of the 1960s and 70s serves to remind us just how stirring the best efforts of mankind can be. Assembled under the guidance of director David Sington from a wealth of…

Sicko

18 Oct 2007

DOCUMENTARY (12A) 123min The best and worst of Michael Moore are on display as he sets about attacking the way that healthcare is managed in America. The first line of attack exemplifies Moore at his maverick best. Instead of basing a documentary…

Manufacturing Dissent: Unconvering Michael Moore

23 Aug 2007

Is Michael Moore a self-regarding political liability who also screws with journalistic codes of conduct, or a wayward truth seeker who has no truck with compromise as he pursues fairness and justice? We probably didn’t need Deborah Melnyk and Rick…

Thomas Telford: The Man who Built Britain

BBC2, Mon 6 Aug, 9pm

1 Aug 2007

Jeremy Clarkson will no doubt be livid if he ever watches this. The man who backed Isambard Kingdom Brunel to second place behind Churchill during the 100 Greatest Britons series in 2002 will be aghast to hear that some experts believe Scotsman Thomas…

Brits Get Rich in China

22 May 2007

BUSINESS DOCUMENTARY Paul Merton recently recalled with some anxiety how he forced down a portion of cooked donkey penis in the name of travel shows. And in this documentary, a marginally traumatised businessman dines briefly on the same delicacy.

Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten

21 May 2007

DOCUMENTARY Joe Strummer was man of contradictions, some he could deal with, others he couldn’t. Director Julien Temple was a part of the London punk scene and experienced many of Joe’s magnificent contradictions first hand. Temple has a patchy…

A Bridge Too Far

7 May 2007

A Bridge Too Far

DVD - Bridging The Gap: Lies

Bridging The Gap: Lies

11 Apr 2007

DOCUMENTARY SHORTS This collection of short documentaries from the all too often undervalued and under funded Scottish Documentary Institute serves as a welcome taster for the excellent work executed by this organisation. The best of the films here…

Into Great Silence

(U) 169min

12 Feb 2007

DOCUMENTARY Shakespeare’s comment that ‘The silence of pure innocence persuades when speaking fails’ pervades German documentarian Philip Gröning’s film about life inside a silent Carthusian monastic order in France. For Into Great Silence is less of…

Errol Morris - Exclusive interview

Audio

5 Aug 2008

Paul Dale goes head to head with arguably the best documentarian and interviewer of his generation - Errol Morris. Morris was in town to promote his soon to be released film Standard Operating Procedure.

What's up doc?

31 Jul 2008

Borrowing from a classic heist movie, Man on Wire is the latest documentary to take its cue from the art of the feature film. Miles Fielder looks on as the line blurs between fact and fiction It's supposed to be a documentary about a daredevil…

Standard Operating Procedure

17 Jul 2008

Legendary American documentarian Errol Morris’ films fall into two catagories, political and wacky, and it was with the former that he won an Academy Award in 2003 for his astonishingly candid portrait of Vietnam-era US Secretary of Defense Robert…

Terror’s Advocate

22 May 2008

DOCUMENTARY (12A) 137min Filmmaker Barbet Schroeder starts his engrossing documentary with a written statement claiming that this is his view of Jacques Vergès and that the opinion of those interviewed may be different. He then proceeds to show an…

Manufactured Landscapes

8 May 2008

DOCUMENTARY (U) 86min Beginning with a bravura eight-minute lateral tracking shot through a giant Chinese factory, Canadian director Jennifer Baichwal’s thoughtful documentary explores the work of the photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose large-scale…

High Tech Soul

24 Apr 2008

DOCUMENTARY (E) 64 min Subtitled the ‘Creation of Techno Music’ this documentary sets out to detail just that very subject, going back to the roots of the Detroit scene, the birthplace of techno as we know it today. The film aims to position the…

Sheffield International Documentary Festival on Tour

24 Apr 2008

The highlights from one of Europe’s premier documentary festivals make their way to the capital’s number one arthouse cinema this fortnight. The four films selected for this showcase are Nitzan Gilady’s Jerusalem is Proud to Present, a record of the…

A Very British Gangster

10 Apr 2008

DOCUMENTARY (15) 98min (Contender DVD retail) A strange amalgam of fiction film devices and impressive access, Donal MacIntyre’s look at the life of infamous Manchester gangster Dominic Noonan is compelling viewing. As he follows the Noonan crime…

A Massacre Foretold

29 Nov 2007

Scottish documentary maker Nick Higgins’ commendable and deeply disturbing film investigates the murder of 45 people at a prayer meeting in a Mexican village in 1997. The film gets a brief outing in both cities this fortnight. Also showing is Higgins…

Cocaine Cowboys

29 Nov 2007

Billy Corben’s lively and scintillating documentary about how Columbian drug lords revolutionised the recreation scene in Miami in the 1980s is a must for anyone whose ideal dinner party guests include Robert Sabbag, Howard Marks and Tony Montana.

Hitler – A Career

15 Nov 2007

Hardly justifying a DVD release, this 1970s-made steady trot through Hitler’s rise and fall has the sanctimonious tone of an admonition. Joachim C Fest’s film is less a warning from history and more a sustained attack of Hitler’s one-dimensional…

The Tribe that Hides from Man

(E) 67min (Network DVD retail/rental)

23 Aug 2007

Co-photographed by the great Chris Menges (Kes, The Killing Fields), this British TV documentary from 1970 seems consistent with some of the best fiction films that explored the Amazonian jungle in the 1980s. Like Fitzcarraldo, The Emerald Forest and…

Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing

2 Jul 2007

DOCUMENTARY When the lead singer of the Dixie Chicks made an off-the-cuff remark at a concert in London in 2003 about the band being ashamed of President Bush coming from their home-state Texas, there’s no way they could have foreseen themselves…

Tony Blair Season

18 Jun 2007

DOCUMENTARY One of the most striking cultural factors of the Blair years has been the relatively easy ride he got from the satirists. When you compare the last ten years to the Thatcher period, the comedy clubs, print media and TV shows have hardly…

Scott Walker: 30th Century Man

7 May 2007

DOCUMENTARY

Blue Blood

7 May 2007

DOCUMENTARY

Iraq In Fragments

(15) 94min

13 Mar 2007

DOCUMENTARY Photographed, edited and directed by the American filmmaker James Longley over a two year period following the US invasion of Iraq in April 2003, this haunting documentary doesn’t take the familiar perspective of the occupying forces.

The Trap

BBC2, Sun 18 Mar, 9pm

13 Mar 2007

SOCIAL DOCUMENTARY Writer and director Adam Curtis gained waves of acclaim and acres of flak for his Power of Nightmares series which suggested that the threat to the West from a network of Arab terrorist cells is nothing short of a…

Occult Week TV

OCCULT WEEK

27 Feb 2007

SPOOKY DOCUMENTARIES It’s long been believed that with the death of mass popular religion in Britain the paranormal plays a much larger part in people’s belief systems. But if the double-bill opener to this short season is anything to go by…

Deep Water

(PG) 93min

11 Dec 2006

DOCUMENTARY This cogent and authoritative documentary feature recounts the sad, regrettably true story of a British eccentric and loser. In 1968, amateur sailor Donald Crowhurst decided that he would take part in The Sunday Times’ first Golden Globe…

Remote Control - documentaries round-up

Brian Donaldson uncovers some fine documentaries a

11 Dec 2006

One of the stories of the year had to be the big whale that swam to London. So, the cryptically titled The Whale that Swam to London (Channel 4, Thu 21 Dec, 8pm) launches upon us dividing opinion between those who thought that it was a natural…

When the Levees Broke

BBC4, Mon 18 & Tue 19 Dec, 9pm

11 Dec 2006

DISASTER DOCUMENTARY ‘Only in America’ is often a phrase you hear when some weirdness occurs or a mad technological advance has been made. But surely only in a Bush America could hundreds of thousands of people (the bulk of them black and poor) be…

Unknown White Male - DVD review

Unknown White Male

27 Nov 2006

DOCUMENTARY Having lost touch with his pal Douglas Bruce, now a successful New York stockbroker, word came to Rupert Murray that Bruce had woken up one day with his previous 37 years wiped from his memory. Having fended off other interested parties…

US Vs John Lennon, The

The US Vs John Lennon

27 Nov 2006

DOCUMENTARY This incisive and engrossing documentary is both a portrait of the former Beatle as political activist and a slice of secret history from America’s recent past. It follows its subject from 1966-76, the heady years during which Lennon left…

KZ

(12) 98min

13 Nov 2006

DOCUMENTARY Filmed over five weeks at the Austrian concentration camp, Mauthausen, documentarian Rex Bloomstein follows tour guides and tourists around the site as visitors discover the drip drip accumulation of the dehumanisation process. As the…

Pervert's Guide to Cinema, The

The Pervert's Guide to Cinema

13 Nov 2006

DOCUMENTARY/EDUCATIONAL If you want to know why Northern California’s avian population went nuts in The Birds, or how The Wizard of Oz was able to send Dorothy home to Kansas despite being a fraudulent huckster, then this is the film for you. A…

Pervert’s Guide To Cinema, The - interview

Popcorn and Brecht

13 Nov 2006

‘You enjoy a film immediately, naively, but theorising about films spoils enjoyment. I violently disagree with that,’ says outspoken and influential Slovenian philosopher and film lover Slavoj Zizek (pictured). ‘If anything I think it’s the opposite.’

Rampage

(15) 108min

13 Nov 2006

DOCUMENTARY Rampage is the middle film in a trilogy by Australian filmmaker George Gittoes. The first Soundtrack of War looked at how music plays a part in US army life in Iraq. Rampage follows Elliot Lovett, a very gifted young rapper who Gittoes…

Black Sun

70min

18 Sep 2006

DOCUMENTARY French artist, documentary filmmaker and author Hugues de Montalembert describes his life after he was attacked in his apartment in New York and blinded with paint stripper. This is less the story of an artist coming to terms with his…

This Film is Not Yet Rated

(18) 97min

18 Sep 2006

DOCUMENTARY Kirby Dick’s hilarious but deeply worrying exposé of the Motion Picture Association of America’s rating board is one of the most thoroughly entertaining documentaries of the year. A clearly partisan Dick (his own films, among them Sick…

Inconvenient Truth, An

An Inconvenient Truth

1 Sep 2006

DOCUMENTARY Perhaps because somebody pointed out that jetting all over the US warning the masses about climate change was just a tad hypocritical (he’s still happy to fly to film festivals, mind), Al Gore and director Davis Guggenheim have brought…