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: 3.5★
There are films you would never stumble upon in a hundred years without actively going looking, and Sea and the Jungle is absolutely one of them. A fifty-two-minute documentary from São Tomé and Príncipe, a small island nation in the Gulf of Guinea whose entire cinematic output would
Rating: 0.5★
There is a version of cinema that asks you to slow down, to breathe, to let images and language wash over you without the usual apparatus of plot or performance. I understand that. I have even enjoyed it. But there is another version, rarer and less forgiving, that asks all
Rating: 2.0★
There is a version of this review where I rave about Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. I genuinely wanted to. The idea is irresistible: a film-maker plants himself in a great European city for a single day, dawn to dusk, and simply watches, lets the trains and the
Rating: 3.5★
The story behind This Is Not a Film is almost more extraordinary than anything within it. In 2010, the Iranian director Jafar Panahi was handed a six-year prison sentence and a staggering twenty-year ban on making films, for the crime of supporting the opposition during Iran's
Rating: 2.5★
You could be forgiven, watching The Arbor, for not quite knowing what it is you are looking at. There are actors, clearly performing scenes, and yet it plainly isn't fiction. So is it a documentary, a mockumentary, something else again? The answer, it turns out, is a clever
Rating: 3.5★
There is something quietly extraordinary about the project behind A Thousand Suns, and it starts with a piece of cinema history. Back in 1973, the Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty made Touki Bouki, a landmark of African cinema about two young lovers dreaming of escape to Paris. It is a
Rating: 1.0★
On paper, a silent, hour-long film about the life cycle of a container ship, built, sailed and eventually scrapped, sounds like a hard sell. And, well, it is. Peter Hutton's At Sea follows a freighter from construction to dismantling in long, static, wordless shots. I will admit
Rating: 2.0★
I'll say this for Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind: I understood exactly what it was going for. And understanding what a film is going for is, unfortunately, not the same thing as enjoying it, or even finding it fully alive as a piece of cinema. John Gianvito&
Rating: 2.5★
There's a moment early in A Gorilla Story: Told by David Attenborough that stops you cold. The archive footage of a young Attenborough, sitting amongst mountain gorillas in the Rwandan Virungas in the 1970s, a juvenile called Pablo clambering over him with the casual confidence of someone who
Rating: 3.0★
You cannot watch Anvil! The Story of Anvil without This Is Spinal Tap playing somewhere in the back of your mind. I don't mean that as a backhanded compliment or a cheap joke. It's just that the parallels are so striking, so eerie, that you'
Rating: 2.0★
Let me lay my cards on the table before we go any further: experimental, avant-garde cinema has never really been my thing. I find it fascinating in theory and frequently maddening in practice, and A Visit to the Louvre is about as pure a test of that tension as
Rating: 1.0★
A film named after a theorem in set theory ought, you would think, to have something clever up its sleeve. It ought to justify that title with ideas that crackle, that reward patience, that make the brain do something interesting. Zorns Lemma, Hollis Frampton's 1970 structuralist experiment, does
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