documentary
At BerkeleyMonday, 08 September 2014
Ever since his 1967 breakthrough film Titticut Follies, an unsparing look at a Massachusetts prison for the criminally insane, Frederick Wiseman has been turning his dispassionate observational camera on the workings of institutions ranging from the... Read more... |
Gems TV, ITVTuesday, 02 September 2014
The Bennet family had an issue. Time to get the Austenesque quips out of the way. For the Bennets in Gems TV the truth universally acknowledged was, roughly: “That a £100 million family-run jewellery television channel risking running out of its... Read more... |
Young Vets, BBC TwoWednesday, 20 August 2014
Britain, as Tamsin Greig’s soothing voiceover told us at the top of this hour, is a nation in love with its animals. Still, it’s unlikely that BBC Two is betting the house on this docu-soap, which will follow the lives of 10 students through their... Read more... |
Kate Adie's Women of World War One, BBC TwoMonday, 11 August 2014
The role of women during the First World War has been heavily mythologised in a way that has cast them as both the angels of the home front and a force for positive political change. What made this documentary, written and presented by revered war... Read more... |
Great War Diaries, BBC TwoSunday, 03 August 2014
As we approach the anniversary of the beginning of World War I, the television schedules devoted to it are becoming denser and denser. In volume, at least, rather more than insight. We wonder just what more can be broadcast, after all, about the... Read more... |
Red Arrows: Inside the Bubble, BBC TwoMonday, 28 July 2014
The RAF's renowned aerobatics team found itself at the centre of a political mini-storm last week when it was asked to use only blue and white smoke trails (but not red) at the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony in Glasgow. The MoD briskly quashed... Read more... |
Who Is Dayani Cristal?Friday, 25 July 2014
The struggle of the migrant journey from Mexico and Central America to el Norte has been much in the news recently, and, coincidentally, it’s a theme that cinema has been following too. After Diego Quemada-Diez's recent The Golden Dream, about... Read more... |
Finding Vivian MaierMonday, 14 July 2014
What makes an exciting “genuine” photographer is fairly simple: what do you see in the photographs? Do they compel you to look at them? How evocative are the images? How interesting are the compositions? These are among the criteria which separate... Read more... |
Opinion: The docusoap must die, againSaturday, 12 July 2014
Television is all about borrowing. One clever new format – a mock doc, a makeover show, a clever-clever quiz – spawns a stack of near-identical clones. Most of them do their time until the format starts to tire, eventually to die a natural death.... Read more... |
The Lance Armstrong Story - Stop at Nothing, BBC Four / The Nation's Favourite Motown Song, ITVMonday, 07 July 2014
The fall of super-cyclist Lance Armstrong is a subject fit for Euripides or Shakespeare. It has also worked pretty well for director Alex Holmes, who managed to round up virtually all the key players caught in Armstrong's vortex of deceit for this... Read more... |
Going to the Dogs, Channel 4Thursday, 12 June 2014
Two years ago Penny Woolcock was at the heart of Birmingham street gangs in her documentary One Mile Way; that one was titled after the fact that two of the city’s competing outfits were separated only by the distance of the film’s title. In Going... Read more... |
A Very British Airline, BBC TwoMonday, 02 June 2014
Once upon a time British Airways was our national carrier. It had a theme tune that made you want to go "aah"/croon along/flood your lugholes with liquid strychnine. You knew where you were with BA. Then along came the uppity Euro-oiks from Ryanair... Read more... |
