documentary
1967 and all that
As you may have spotted, the BBC is marking the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of male homosexuality with an…
Memories, dreams, reflections
Heart of a Dog is a film by Laurie Anderson and it’s a meditative, free-associating rumination on life, loss, love…
That’s entertainment
The big returning show of the week began with servants laying out the silverware at a large country house in…
Special delivery
Five Star Babies: Inside the Portland Hospital won’t, I suspect, have been a hard sell to BBC2’s commissioning editors. Childbirth…
An inconvenient truth
On the face of it, the Netflix documentary serial Making a Murderer should only take up ten hours of your…
Sins of the fathers
This is a documentary in which three men travel across Europe together, but they’re not pleasurably interrailing, even though there…
Self-pitying, despairing, often delusional: the real Marlon Brando
Listen to Me Marlon is a documentary portrait of Marlon Brando that has him burbling into your ear for 102…
Was BBC1’s Rooney hagiography more scripted reality than documentary?
Close to the Edge (BBC4, Tuesday) feels very much like an idea conceived during a particularly good night in the…
Nuclear overreaction
When I was growing up in the 1970s, my three main fears were: being blown up by the IRA; being…
Dead behind the eyes
With Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing you’d be minded to think that’s it, that’s the Indonesian genocide (1965–66) done,…
Sexed-up pacifism
Big-screen documentaries never change the world. Blackfish has not shortened the queues to see maltreated killer whales leap through hoops…
The lying game
My favourite scene in the first episode of the new series of Benefits Street (Mondays, Channel 4) — now relocated…
Twenty/forty vision
Every time I sit down to a Noah Baumbach film I think I’m going to hate it, but I never…
