documentary
Timeshift: When Coal Was King, BBC FourTuesday, 05 November 2013
Energy is this season’s dirty word. The big six fix prices from their ivory towers beyond the national borders, and wouldn’t dream of turning up in person to take a fearful wigging from a Commons Select Committee. In the old days, it was all a bit... Read more... |
A Very English Education, BBC TwoMonday, 28 October 2013
In the early 1980s the television producer Richard Denton was given considerable access and freedom of movement to make Public School. His documentary about Radley College remains the only really frank account of what goes on inside such an... Read more... |
Muscle ShoalsTuesday, 22 October 2013
“We grew up like animals,” says FAME Studios’ founder Rick Hall of his upbringing. “That made me better… I wanted to be somebody.” He did become somebody, and in the process put Alabama’s Muscle Shoals on the map. This film tells the story of how a... Read more... |
Stephen Fry: Out There, BBC TwoTuesday, 15 October 2013
Respect and dignity, intolerance and hatred: the poles were set far apart in Stephen Fry: Out There. It’s good to have Fry the thoughtful presenter back – it’s been a long time since his The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive – on a subject close... Read more... |
DVD: More Than HoneyTuesday, 15 October 2013
Bees, whenever called upon, have always been ready for their close-up. They had a sizeable cameo in Disney’s Winnie the Pooh, played the lead villain opposite Michael Caine in The Swarm and got to be heroes in Bee Movie. Most recently there was The... Read more... |
Meet the Russians, FoxThursday, 26 September 2013
There’s a great line near the beginning of Fox’s nine-parter Meet the Russians: “Money can’t buy you taste. It can buy you a personal shopper.” If this show's participants had splashed out on a bit of PR advice as well, you wonder whether the answer... Read more... |
O for Muse of FireMonday, 23 September 2013
The idea behind Muse of Fire was a simple one. We wanted to spend a year travelling the world and find out from as many sources as we could why Shakespeare is both so loved and so feared. We wanted to try and eradicate our own deep-rooted anxieties... Read more... |
DVD: 3 Documentaries by Sergei LoznitsaFriday, 20 September 2013
The Belarusian director Sergei Loznitsa recently made an impact with the powerful In the Fog, a delicately balanced examination of the pressures at play in World War II Russia. Before that, his international calling card was My Joy (2010), a first... Read more... |
DVD: Les InvisiblesTuesday, 17 September 2013
Eleven life stories, and memories stretching back more than half a century. The protagonists of Sebastian Lifshitz’s Les Invisibles (The Invisible Ones) tell their different stories of growing up homosexual in France in years when their sexual... Read more... |
DVD: Stories We TellMonday, 16 September 2013
The reason to obtain a DVD or Blu-ray disc of Sarah Polley's unforgettable documentary is because making sense of it requires several viewings. What starts out as a straightforward memoir centred on the presence of an absence – her mother Diane,... Read more... |
'Always on, never alone'Sunday, 15 September 2013
While newspapers alternately praise and panic about the glittering world of the Internet, there is a generation of children who have grown up with 24/7 connectivity and a smart phone in their hand.Public discourse seems to revolve around "grooming"... Read more... |
Sound of Cinema: The Music that Made the Movies, BBC FourFriday, 13 September 2013
BBC Four’s new series Sound of Cinema: The Music that Made the Movies is shocking. The overwhelming majority of arts-based TV consists of programmes consigning specialist knowledge/presenters to the sidelines in favour of dumbed-down, easily... Read more... |
