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★
Trojan Records was never just a record label. Founded in 1968 and named after the Duke Reid sound system truck that had rattled through the streets of Kingston, it became the primary channel through which ska, rocksteady and reggae flowed from Jamaica into the living rooms, youth clubs and dance
Rating: 3.0★
Short-form documentary has long occupied an uneasy space in cinema, respected in festival circles and often overlooked everywhere else. The thirteen-minute runtime is its own kind of discipline: there is no room for padding, no space to bury a weak idea under running time. When it works, the
Rating: 2.0★
The crack cocaine epidemic that swept through American cities during the 1980s and into the 1990s is one of the most consequential and contested chapters in recent United States history. Its origins, its spread, and the role of various government agencies in either enabling or ignoring it remain subjects of
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
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