documentary review
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,
documentary review
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
documentary review
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
Long-Form Retrospective Review
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
documentary review
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
documentary review
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
documentary review
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
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—
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