Documentary cinema, at its best, does what no other form can: it places the real world under a patient, honest gaze and finds something stranger or more moving than fiction. From Alain Resnais's shattering Night and Fog to the quiet intimacy of Pictures of the Old World, the range here is enormous. Dig into Macca's reviews below.
Rating: 4.0★
In the spring of 1944, with the war visibly turning against the Third Reich, Nazi forces moved with extraordinary speed to deport the Jews of Hungary. It was one of the most rapid mass deportations in the history of the Holocaust, and it came at a point when the rest
Rating: 2.5★
There is something fitting about a film called Babilônia 2000 arriving at the turn of a millennium. Eduardo Coutinho's documentary, produced in collaboration between VideoFilmes, Centro de Criação de Imagem Popular (CECIP) and TvZERO, plants itself on New Year's Eve 1999 inside the Babilônia and Chapéu
Rating: 3.5★
Ryuichi Sakamoto is one of those rare figures whose career resists easy summary. A founding member of the Yellow Magic Orchestra, the pioneering electronic group that shaped Japanese pop and left fingerprints all over Western synth music in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he went on to become one
Rating: 3.5★
Werner Herzog has spent much of his career seeking out people who have pressed themselves against the outer edges of human experience, and Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997) may be the purest expression of that instinct he ever put on film. The subject is Dieter Dengler, a German-born
Rating: 3.0★
There are films that matter because of what they are, and there are films that matter because of what they started. Nanook of the North belongs firmly to the second category. Released in 1922 and produced under the banner of the French trading company Les Frères Revillon, it is widely
Rating: 4.0★
There is a particular kind of documentary that does not simply report on the world but attempts to reframe the entire way you perceive it. Adam Curtis has spent the better part of four decades making exactly that kind of film, and HyperNormalisation, released by the BBC in October 2016,
Rating: 3.5★
There is a particular kind of documentary that uses the camera not as an observational tool but as an act of love, almost of conjuration. Dick Johnson Is Dead, released in 2020 and distributed through Netflix after its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, belongs firmly to that tradition. Kirsten
Rating: 3.0★
Taylor Swift occupies a peculiar position in contemporary culture: she is one of the most commercially successful recording artists on the planet, a figure whose every public move generates column inches, and yet she has remained, for years, genuinely difficult to read as a private person. Miss Americana, released on
Rating: 3.5★
Katia and Maurice Krafft were, by most reasonable measures, operating at the outer limit of what a human being can choose to do and survive. The French volcanologist couple spent roughly two decades driving themselves as close as physically possible to active eruptions, camera in hand, building an extraordinary personal
Rating: 3.5★
Werner Herzog has spent five decades building one of the most singular bodies of work in world cinema, and the through-line connecting nearly all of it is a preoccupation with men who burn themselves up chasing something the rest of us would have the good sense to leave alone.
Rating: 3.0★
Terence Davies is one of British cinema's most singular voices, a filmmaker whose work sits at the uncomfortable crossroads of memory, faith, class and longing. Born and raised in Liverpool, he spent the early part of his career turning the landscapes and emotional textures of his childhood into
Rating: 2.5★
The Aran Islands sit off the west coast of County Galway, three limestone outcrops where the Atlantic has the run of things and the soil, such as it is, has to be coaxed from seaweed and sand. By the early twentieth century they had acquired a particular romantic charge in
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