Film reviews and more
★★★★★ Waad al-Kateab moved to Aleppo, Syria, at the age of 18 to go to university. She fell in love with a doctor, they had a child and moved into a house they lovingly made their own. The house today is barely left standing, as the devastating airstrikes on her city have forced […]
★★☆☆☆ For six years, director Matthias Lintner lived in one of Berlin’s last squatter communities with a handful of absurd and colourful characters for neighbours. Clinging onto the last remnants of a bygone way of life, his film Property is as much a lament as it is a musing on what it truly means to […]
★★★★★ Brotherhood takes a lot of patience. Such is the nature of masculinity as a collective construct that fraternity can be at once one of the most powerful and fragile of bonds. Autistic 23-year-old Peter and his teen brother Matthew live a relatively comfortable life in an affluent Maryland suburb, but the turbulence […]
This Thursday (6 June) the seven hills of Sheffield will once again open up to the innovators and icons of documentary cinema as UK festival season gem Doc/Fest returns for 2019. From the sweeping to the specific, highlights among this year’s programme promise to open the lens on the world we live in […]
This week sees the return of one of the highlights of the UK’s festival calendar in the form of Sheffield Doc/Fest, which runs from 7-12 June for its 2018 edition. As ever, the programme of over 200 documentary shorts and features boasts an array of non-fiction from thrilling crowd-pleasers and thought-provoking journalism to […]
★★★☆☆ A pioneering and hugely unlikely legal case might seem like an ideal focus for legendary filmmaking duo Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker, whose partnership is perhaps best known for the apex in political campaign docs, The War Room. However, that film was more about illuminating the mechanics of a dark art, which […]
★★☆☆☆ Valeriy Lobanovskiy enjoyed a great deal of success during his 30-year career as a football manager, particularly for his time at the helm of Dynamo Kiev as the USSR and Ukrainian national teams. He was renowned for introducing scientific methodology to his work and as an authoritarian personality driven to succeed. Regrettably, […]
One of the annual highlights of the documentary calendar, Sheffield Doc/Fest returns this June (10-15) with another reassuringly full programme that’s true testament to the current health of factual filmmaking. Opening this year’s festival is the UK premiere of the wildly entertaining Where to Invade Next, Oscar-winning director Michael Moore’s valiant return to […]
One of the annual highlights of the documentary calender, Sheffield Doc/Fest returns today (5-10 June) with another reassuringly full programme that’s true testament to the current health of factual filmmaking. Opening this year’s festival is the UK premiere of The Look of Silence, director Joshua Oppenheimer’s acclaimed companion piece to the Bafta-winning The […]
★★★☆☆ The outpouring of emotion following the death of beloved American film critic Roger Ebert last year remains unparalleled in the modern day; few cultural commentators, on either side of the Atlantic, could lay claim to such a fervent and loyal fanbase. Charged with the task of commemorating an extraordinary career – and, […]
★★★☆☆ Unlike recent pioneering archive-led offerings such as Penny Woolcock’s British Sea Power collaboration From the Sea to the Land Beyond and John Akomfrah’s The Stuart Hall Project, Paul Kelly’s How We Used to Live (2013) isn’t a great deal more than what it appears at first glance – an audiovisual document of […]
★★☆☆☆ With approximately half of all marriages ending in divorce, what is it that still compels couples to take the matrimonial plunge? This is the question posed by 112 Weddings (2013), the latest film from documentary filmmaker Doug Block (51 Birch Street, The Kids Grow Up). For over two decades, Block, like many […]
★★★☆☆ It’s a well-known double standard: women are labelled as ‘sluts’ for being sexually liberal, whilst promiscuous men get a pat on the back for their numerous conquests. Or, as one young woman in Sunny Bergman’s candid Doc/Fest selected documentary Slut Phobia? (2013) puts it, “they organise a parade for him and bring […]
★★☆☆☆ An unapologetically personal open letter to the former South African president, Khalo Matabane’s Nelson Mandela: The Myth & Me (2014) is a sincere but ultimately dated piece, made as it was before Mandela’s death last year. Referred to throughout in the present tense – and not simply for the timeless legacy he […]
★★★★☆ Though we as a society have arguably become more desensitised to depictions of conflict and violence, every now and then a film comes along that challenges this notion. Rehad Desai’s distressing Sheffield Doc/Fest opener Miners Shot Down (2014) is one of the most recent examples. We’re used to seeing running street battles […]
★★★☆☆ In a world where abstract emotions like fear and terror have been distorted to mobilise society against an invisible foe, pirates have become the latest bogeymen of Western cinema. In Tommy Pallotta and Femke Wolting’s Last Hijack (2014), we’re offered the opportunity to explore behind the headlines and experience the world from […]
★★★★☆ Whilst drumming up support for his new Broadway musical, FELA!, producer Stephen Hendel described Nigerian Afrobeat exponent Fela Kuti as “without question one of the great composers and musicians and activists of the second half of the 20th century.” It sounds like a bold claim on first consideration, but becomes all the […]
★★★★★ Illustrating the provocative and combative concepts of Martinique-born Afro-French psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonial text The Wretched of the Earth, Göran Hugo Olsson’s Concerning Violence (2014) aims to explore Africa’s subjugated past in hope of understanding the continent’s current geopolitical condition. An abrasively worded thinkpiece, Olsson’s follow-up to 2011’s The Black […]