My radio co-hosts and I discussed the lovely documentary Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery on a special two-hour edition of our Joy 94.9 radio show, Strictly Soundtrack, back in March for International Women's Day. Take a listen here with a few additional thoughts below. We had a
Yes, that Thierry Frémaux. The Cannes Film Festival director’s second feature, Lumière, Le Cinéma! is a follow-up of sorts to his first, Lumière!, from 2016. Like that film, Frémaux, with his editor Jonathan Cayssials and Simon Gemelli, has assembled a collection of short films by Auguste and Louis Lumière,
John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office (dir. Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens) Director Michael Almereyda is best known for dramatic features like his millennium-refresh of Hamlet 2000 (shoutout to Alex Ross Perry's Videoheaven) and the sublime ‘90s vampire flick Nadja. But he is not unfamiliar to
The poster for Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D) tell us “Billie Eilish and James Cameron reinvent the concert experience.” Look, I know Jim is not exactly wanting for ego, but I can’t help but feel like that’s a slight exaggeration. Although
You know what? It’s great that there is a documentary for stoners and acid trippers. Non-fiction for all, I say! Depending on your wavelength, Josef Gatti’s Phenomena could play like going to science class after smoking a joint behind the gymnasium and being mesmerised by the swirling colours
By the time that Alek Keshishian's Madonna: Truth or Dare was released in the United States on the 10th of May 1991, Madonna was approaching the end of what is considered her first near decades-long imperial phase. A period of all-consuming success, fame and artistic achievement. Two years
Patrick Creadon's documentary The King of Color is an at-times rather baffling expedition of self-promotion for its subject (and financial backer it would appear), Lawrence Herbert, inventor of the Pantone colour-matching system. The rest of the time it is a charming exploration of the history of how colour
When I planned to sit down and write about Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s (fabulously titled by the way) Steal This Story, Please!, I didn’t expect to be thinking so heavily about The Devil Wears Prada 2. The comparison of Anne Hathaway’s fictional Andy Sachs to the
Douglas Tirola’s Bernstein’s Wall about composer, conductor and musical legend Leonard Bernstein is getting its premiere theatrical release now in 2026, but it was actually first screened way back in 2021. I even have the old Tribeca Film Festival world premiere emails still sitting there in my inbox
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,
documentary review
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—
TV documentary review
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
documentary review
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,
documentary review
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
documentary review
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
docu-fiction review
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
documentary review
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
documentary review
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
documentary review
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