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: 2.5★
Listen to Britain arrived in 1942 at a peculiar moment for British wartime propaganda. The Blitz had eased somewhat, the public mood was exhausted but holding, and the Ministry of Information was increasingly interested in films that portrayed the home front not as a crisis to be managed but as
Rating: 3.0★
Garrett Bradley is one of the more distinctive voices to have emerged from American documentary filmmaking in recent years, and America (2019) is one of the works that put her firmly on the map. Running at just thirty minutes, it sits comfortably in the tradition of the short-form essay
Rating: 4.0★
Tunisia's post-revolution years produced a wave of filmmaking that wrestled openly with what had been suppressed for decades: questions of religion, gender, state violence, and family. Four Daughters (2023) sits within that tradition while doing something altogether more unusual with it. The film begins from a real
Rating: 1.0★
Robert Breer is not a name that comes up often in casual film conversation, and that is, in its own way, rather telling. Born in Detroit in 1926, Breer spent decades working at the margins of mainstream cinema, producing short experimental films that sat comfortably in the world of gallery
Rating: 2.5★
The 1970s were a fertile period for politically committed documentary filmmaking across the Caribbean and South America, with filmmakers working outside mainstream broadcasting structures to produce work that mainstream channels had little appetite for. The Terror and the Time sits squarely in that tradition. Released in 1978, the film turns
Rating: 4.0★
The Shetland Islands sit at the very top of the British Isles, closer to Bergen than to Edinburgh, and they carry a particular kind of weather-beaten remoteness that feels almost mythological to anyone who has only seen them on a map. It is exactly the sort of place where
Rating: 2.5★
Jorge Mario Bergoglio became the 266th Pope of the Catholic Church in March 2013, and from the moment he stepped onto the balcony of St Peter's Basilica and asked the crowd to pray for him before he blessed them, it was clear that something had shifted in the
Rating: 1.5★
Artavazd Peleshian occupies a curious position in cinema history: enormously respected within academic and avant-garde circles, yet almost entirely unknown to general audiences outside Armenia and a small cluster of devoted film scholars. Born in 1938 in Leninakan (now Gyumri), Peleshian studied at the VGIK film school in Moscow
Rating: 2.0★
Víctor Erice is the sort of filmmaker whose name gets spoken in hushed, reverential tones in certain corners of the film world, and not without good reason. The Spanish director made his feature debut with The Spirit of the Beehive in 1973, a film that became one of the defining
Rating: 3.5★
Between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot oversaw one of the twentieth century's most catastrophic acts of mass murder, killing somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million Cambodians through execution, forced labour, famine, and disease. What is often less discussed is the regime's
Rating: 4.0★
Tourism, as an industry, generates somewhere in the region of ten per cent of global GDP and employs one in ten people on the planet. Those are staggering numbers, and yet the conversation about what mass tourism actually does to the places it touches, the communities it displaces, the ecosystems
Rating: 2.0★
Dominica, the small Eastern Caribbean island not to be confused with the Dominican Republic, sits in a curious position when it comes to cinema. With a population of under 75,000 and no established domestic film industry to speak of, the country's total cinematic output amounts to a
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