To me, there are very few things that can be as evocative of an era as a documentary about the theatre from the 1970s or 1980s. Maybe starting with Original Cast Album: Company as the grand daddy of them all, the combination of those chilly Manhattan rehearsal spaces looking out
We are told at the start of Juanjo Pereira's Under the Flags, the Sun (Bajo las banderas, el sol) that little footage remains of Alfredo Stroessner's near-35-year reign of autocratic rule over Paraguay. Choosing to primarily rely on that which hasn’t been destroyed or disappeared
Even if Mount Vesuvius doesn’t feature in every shot of Gianfranco Rosi’s Pompei: Below the Clouds, the memory of the catastrophic destruction that it brought down upon Pompei and its surrounding areas lingers across every frame. And when it is there, it is imposing if seemingly quite modest,
I love Henry Fonda. I would probably say he is my favourite male actor from classic Hollywood. Even when I haven’t loved the films—like John Ford’s Young Mr Lincoln, which unsurprisingly takes up a lot of editorial real estate in the first half of this three-hour picture—
Like so many of the cultural legacies from y2k and early 2000s, America’s Next Top Model gets saddled with in-part defenses like, “It was such a different time.” And it’s true. Whether it’s Tyra Banks throwing impressionable young women into vulnerable, harmful situations, the ‘mean one’ on
Baz Luhrmann knows a thing or two about shiny things, and the shiniest may just be Elvis Presley. Luhrmann was an ideal fit for the singer’s over-the-top aesthetics on 2022’s Elvis and hopefully nobody feels the need to give us another biopic on the man any time soon
Me as I sit on my couch eating cheddar-flavoured Shapes and sipping on a Coke Zero as I watch people climb dangerous mountains covered in snow and ice and avalanches happen nearby: Good for them! Trango charts the efforts of a small group of crazy people (Christina Lustenberger, Jim Morrison,
I was not shocked to see Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow not get a nomination from the Academy’s documentary branch. Fickle as they can be (and honestly, who can ever really tell what they’re thinking from one year to another) it
Laura Poitras is just so damn good at this. Cover-Up, co-directed with Mark Obenhaus, is probably her most conventional film to day—a biography of famed American journalist Seymour ‘Sy’ Hersh. But conventions need not be a hindrance to good storytelling and documentaries needn’t be flashy or overtly form-pushing
Two films about the Israel government’s war against Palestine take two vastly different yet curiously connected storytelling approaches. One is a more traditional narrative feature that could be labelled docu-fiction because of its use of real audio within a dramatic structure. The other is a documentary that doesn’t
A successful all-archival documentary is actually really hard to achieve. Many don’t even try it because foregoing narration, talking heads, and any other sort of directorial embellishment is not easy and breaks something of an unspoken link between the film and the audience. You have to be really firm
Towards the final stretch of Selena y Los Dinos, director Isabel Castro’s documentary changes ever so slightly. And it does so into something that is genuinely intriguing for one of these celebrity biographies, something that I wasn’t expecting and hit me in the face like one of Selena