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
Sadie Frost’s second feature as director sees her once again peering into the archives of British fashion, this time with the life of iconic Dame Lesley Lawson aka Twiggy. Following on from Quant in 2021, Twiggy travels its viewers back to the 1960s and the invention of the mod
documentary review
I admit, I just really like Charlie Shackleton as a filmmaker. Like Marge Simpson and her potatoes, I just think his work is neat. Playful, but not obtuse. Shackleton’s films are “arty” in the sense that a casual documentary lover might choose to be turned off by, but they
documentary review
“You can’t retire from your life”, says Diane Warren and boy howdy is she not doing that. Even if Warren’s particular branch of music hasn’t quite continued to command the cultural and commercial pull of the first two decades of the career, lord knows she keeps plugging
documentary review
Citizen Sleuth is director Chris Kasick’s behind-the-scenes look at a true crime podcast in real time. That might sound like—and I thought it several times in its front half, too—it’s little more than a commercial for the Mile Marker 181 show hosted by Emily Nestor. But
documentary review
This is not a review of The Yogurt Shop Murders, the four-part documentary series about an infamous Texas murder where people were sent to prison based on false confessions. It’s not a review of that, no, but I found it kind of curious that both it and Deborah S.
documentary review
The words “Cutting Through Rocks” is such an evocative title for a documentary. It conjures up so many potential ideas as to what it is going to be about. That co-directors Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni choose to open their debut feature with the actual cutting of actual rocks almost
documentary review
I co-host and co-produce a radio show here in Melbourne called Strictly Soundtracks. As you may gather by the name, we discuss the music from film and television. It’s on Joy 94.9 if you care to listen, which you obviously should! On a recent Halloween episode, I put
documentary review
How does somebody come back from grief when it is their job to be funny? Even somebody like Marc Maron who’s professional (and personal) persona is that of what was maybe once known as a curmudgeon. A grouch with a sense of humour. A bit of a cynic about
music documentary
Taking a Depeche Mode superfan to IMAX that they had never been to before (and a real IMAX at that) to see a Depeche Mode concert documentary is a real treat that I recommend to others. You can replace Depeche Mode if you’d like. Although in the case of
documentary review
It’s curious to watch a film like Prime Minister in the very immediate shadow of this week’s American elections. Particularly so those in New York City, where a socially and politically progressive thirtysomething candidate who isn’t a cis white male turned a relatively quick-launch campaign into a
documentary review
Heidi Levitt is a familiar name in the credits of Hollywood productions, although you may not have noticed. She’s worked as a casting director on films by Oliver Stone, Wayne Wang, Adrian Lyne, Wim Wenders and Michael Bay, casting American presidents, groundbreaking ensembles, and big budget action spectacles as
documentary review
With River of Grass, the elegiac mood piece about the Floridian Everglades, director Sasha Wortzel does something that I really love to see in documentaries. This is in essence a nature documentary, but it’s not just concerned with that one facet of the area or of non-fiction filmmaking. Alongside
documentary review
I don’t ever really expect to watch too many films that have a direct relevance to what I do for a living five days a week. I mean, there’s certainly newsworthy elements to my day job, but in the grand scheme of things, at least here in Victoria,