You don’t realise how tough it is to make a good documentary until you see ones which fall short. For a documentary to succeed, it needs to back up its assertions in ways which will stand up in court, access to the people who will give you that backup, and …
We all know China is an industrial superpower, but we (especially in the west) don’t devote much time wondering how China has become an industrial superpower. Well, part of the answer is that it buys a lot of its raw materials in from Mongolia. China’s upstairs neighbour is a nation …
It is perhaps unfair to review a film based on the comments its director made at a festival Q&A, but what Kim A. Snyder said at the Sheffield DocFest summed up the flawed worldview of this film better than the documentary itself did. Filmed largely during the Biden years as …
This documentary is so bleak that it’s going to be very hard for it to find its audience. This is a shame because it shows what countless movies have shown, only for real: how exposure to the battlefield, whether as an observer or a participant, inalterably changes a person. A …
North South Man Woman is a documentary focused on a North Korean woman, Yujin, who has made her way to safety in South Korea and who now runs a matchmaking bureau for South Korean men who wish to marry North Korean women. The cameras follow Yujin’s personal life and that …
This documentary about the continuing phenomenon of Rocky Horror is directed by the son of the man who created the phenomenon. Normally this would lead to calls of nepotism, but somehow here the closeness to the material is appropriate. The stories within Strange Journey have clearly been told and revisited …
This movie is horrifying and shaming and unspeakable but it deserves our attention, because all the horrifying, shaming, unspeakable things within it are happening to human beings. This is often forgotten in prison discourse, that every prisoner is a person too. Regardless of the worst things we have ever done, …
This documentary, about the director’s mother’s alcoholism and its impact, makes vividly apparent the problem with most documentaries. If it has been anyone other than her daughter Myrid Carten making the film, it’s clear Nuala Carten would not have participated. But director Myrid Carten made the choice to be a …
The fundraising headline of The Gas Station Attendant was clearly that director Karla Murthy’s father, H. N. Shantha Murthy, worked in a gas station while Ms. Murthy was in college. But his life was considerably more complex than the stereotype mainstreamed into American society by The Simpsons. What clearly started …