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: 3.0★
Noah Kahan arrived somewhere between folk and indie-pop at precisely the right moment. The Vermont singer-songwriter had been quietly building a following for several years before "Stick Season" turned into something neither he nor anyone at his label had entirely predicted: a genuine cultural phenomenon, the
Rating: 3.5★
Short documentary filmmaking occupies a peculiar corner of cinema. Too brief to demand the commitment of a feature, too considered to be dismissed as mere footage, the short doc lives or dies by the clarity of its central idea. At its best, the format can distill something essential about a
Rating: 3.5★
The summer of 1967 was, by any reasonable measure, a peculiar and fascinating moment in American cultural life. The counterculture that had been quietly gathering momentum through coffeehouses and college campuses suddenly felt as though it had tipped into something bigger, louder, and altogether more colourful. The Monterey International Pop
Rating: 4.0★
There is a particular kind of documentary that asks almost nothing of you at first and then, quietly, takes everything. The Sailor (2021), directed by Slovak filmmaker Lucia Kašová and produced across Grenada and Slovakia, is precisely that sort of film. Its subject is Paul Earling Johnson, an eighty-year-
Rating: 2.5★
Robert Flaherty is one of those filmmakers whose reputation rests almost entirely on a handful of films made across a relatively short window, yet whose influence on documentary cinema is almost impossible to overstate. His debut feature, Nanook of the North (1922), established a model for location-based, observational filmmaking
Rating: 4.0★
Female genital mutilation is one of the most widely practised and least openly discussed human rights issues in the world. The World Health Organisation estimates that more than 200 million women and girls alive today have undergone some form of the procedure, with prevalence particularly high across parts of sub-
Rating: 3.0★
There is a particular kind of documentary that turns the camera not on its ostensible subject but on the people doing the looking, and Cannibal Tours (1988) is one of the more bracingly honest examples of the form. Directed by Australian filmmaker Dennis O'Rourke, the film accompanies a
Rating: 3.0★
The University of Bangui sits at something of a crossroads. Founded in 1970 and long regarded as the intellectual heart of the Central African Republic, it has spent much of the past two decades operating under extraordinary pressure: chronic underfunding, the displacement caused by recurring armed conflict across the country,
Rating: 2.0★
There are roughly 56,000 people living in Greenland, spread across one of the largest and most sparsely populated landmasses on Earth. Most of those people are concentrated in the coastal towns of the south and west. Go further north, further still into the frozen periphery, and the communities become
Rating: 3.5★
Montserrat is a small British Overseas Territory in the Lesser Antilles, roughly the size of a medium-sized English market town, and for most of its modern history it was best known for its lush hills, its recording studios (the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney both worked there in the
Rating: 4.0★
American Samoa is, by most conventional football metrics, about as far from the top of the world game as it is possible to get. A small archipelago in the South Pacific with a population of around 55,000, it fields a national side that, in the early 2000s, had become
Rating: 1.0★
Candomblé is a religion of West African origin, carried to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade and most associated today with Brazil, particularly the north-eastern state of Bahia. Its rituals involve music, movement, possession and a rich system of spiritual figures known as orixás, and it has survived
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