THE LIBRARIANS*****

I was a nerdy, poor immigrant kid insatiable for books and my local public library and my school library were like treasure caves. I will forever be grateful to the librarians who guided me to books I might like based on my reading and provided a wonderful childhood of expanding horizons. The idea that anyone could villify and dox and physically threaten this wonderful profession of largely mild-mannered nerdy women is shocking to me.  And yet that's what's happening in Trump's America, where bigoted, illiterate, judgmental politicians and their activist lackeys are banning books and attempting to prosecute those that defend free speech and children's access to what are actually harmless titles.  Because this is never about child protection, and always about censorship and coercion. You may NOT learn about being gay or queer or feminism or racial or social injustice. I grew up with this bollocks too, in the shape of Section 28 of the Local Government Act, that banned teachers from being openly gay or "promoting a gay lifestyle".  

Kim A. Snyder's documentary is urgent, angry-making, and beautifully constructed. It foregrounds the real heroes - ordinary teachers and librarians and community activists who are showing up, week-in week-out, to school board meetings and local government meetings, often at extreme personal risk. They are people who are being coerced out of their jobs, forced into hiding, to arm themselves. It's beyond absurd. A lot of the footage is taken from meetings where we, in turn, see activists on either side of this issue taking iphone footage of each other, to be used later on social media and to whip up a storm.  And as Snyder points out, this so-called grassroots movement of conservative moms is in fact funded by major oligarchs.  

This is a fantastic must-see documentary.  I know that when people are literally being shot down by ICE the ability to read books might seem trivial. But this is where fascism starts. Almost a year ago we were in Berlin for the Film Festival and our hotel room overlooked the public square where the Nazis burned books.  Tourists were taking selfies at the commemorative spot. Let's not sit still on history when it's repeating itself before our eyes. Watch. This. Now.

THE LIBRARIANS has a running time of 92 minutes and is rated 15. It played Sundance and SXSW 2025. It was released in the USA last September and is available to stream in the UK on BBC IPlayer.

PETER HUJAR'S DAY**

PETER HUJAR'S DAY is an odd fish of a film that offers a fascinating glimpse into what life must have been like at the heart of the bohemian, queer arts scene in late 70s New York, before woefully outstaying its welcome. 

It stars Ben Whishaw as the titular real-life queer activist and portrait photographer Peter Hujar.  We spend the entire hour and a quarter in his stunning New York apartment (imagine enjoying THAT on a magazine salary now!) as he relates what happened to him the day before to his friend and writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall).  To be fair, this minute detail contains a lot of delicious gossip about iconic writers - not least Fran Lebowitz, Susan Sontag and Allen Ginsberg.  But the minute detail and almost deadpan tone bely the emotion of what Peter is actually experiencing.  Ginsberg, for example, is wildly, offensively, inappropriate. But we don't really see or feel what Hujar's response is to this.  Maybe that's because the film is based on a transcript of the real-life version of this interview that was recently uncovered in the Morgan Library.  It's not so much a scripted drama as a recreation of an admittedly and deliberately mundane retelling of the day in the life of a jobbing photographer. The problem is we never see or feel the importance of his art. 

That said, there is a tug back into emotional response at the end of the film. It's scored with the Mozart Requiem and cuts to white. Those of us who know anything about Hujar realise that this is the heyday of that beautiful moment of queer expression and activism in New York. The AIDS crisis was around the corner of the 1980s and would claim Hujar as a victim, iconically photographed on his deathbed.  None of that is in THIS film, to be clear. But for those of use who know, it adds some poignancy to Whishaw's final scenes.

PETER HUJAR'S DAY played Sundance, Berlin and London 2025. It has a running time of 76 minutes. It was released in the USA in November and will be released in the UK on Jan 2nd.

COVER-UP***** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 8

I have been reading Seymour “Sy” Hersch’s investigative journalism for just over 30 years. His reporting on the My Lai massacre was assigned to me at 17 as an A-level history student. Whenever I fell into a conspiracy rabbit hole, it felt like there was a Sy Hersch book that would confirm my worst suspicions about the inherent violence of the world’s superpower, a continuous flaunting of the Constitution by those in power, and a pattern of cover-up. I followed Hersch’s missives in the New Yorker and the London Review of Books (he had long since resigned from the New York Times when I came to my reading adulthood). And I have since followed him to Substack. This is the man who uncovered the US military’s massacre of children in Vietnam - who helped shepherd the Watergate and Pentagon Papers to public consciousness - who exposed the abuses at Abu Ghraib and continues to expose the war crimes in Gaza. He continues to fight for liberal democracy and accountability and the US Constitution. His method and message have never been more urgent.  

This new documentary by Laura Poitras (ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED) and Mark Oberhausen (a producer on the investigative show Frontline) was many years in the making because Hersch resisted it. He is prickly and angry and brutally funny about resisting the process even while agreeing to it. He is scrupulous about not revealing his sources, which in a Q&A he described as table stakes for a good journalist. But he is even resistant about describing why people trust him. Evidently, after the My Lai reporting, he was a famous name, and maybe not just a trustworthy name but also a glamorous name for people to confide in. But his key skills seem to be a talent for the written word, but more importantly a dogged tenacity, curiosity, and not giving a fuck about what people think or say about him. He might also add, as he does in this documentary, his talent for picking the right life partner, a wife who allowed him to grow up, and supported him through the dark emotional places that his reporting took him to. 

The documentary does a phenomenal job of surveying Hersch’s monumental career and giving a fair assessment of its importance and flaws. The first 45 minutes of the 2 hour documentary is a play by play of how he put together the My Lai reporting. This is where you see the skill and character required to put together a ground-breaking piece like that. Then we get a 15 minute biographical essay that shows you Hersch’s childhood in a working-class black neighbourhood where his Latvian Jewish immigrant father withheld any kind of information about the extended family’s fate in the Holocaust. By a stroke of luck and his own talent, Hersch was plucked from a mediocre Junior College and given a chance to study at the University of Chicago by a teacher who spotted his talent. He was ready for that moment because he had devoured books as a child. He says of his childhood “I lived through books: they taught me to think.” God bless those assiduous and wonderful teachers everywhere who spot talent and give it a chance. In a film where Hersch alternates between irritation and anger for much of the running time, he only ever gets sentimental on two subjects: his wife and that teacher. 

Act Three brings us through the 80s and 90s. Hersch finally quits the New York Times when they start blocking his reporting on corporate malfeasance at Gulf + Western. It’s kind of amazing to me that you can take on the CIA or the US President or the military, but somehow a company finally balks at you investigating another company. It’s also funny to think how contemporary readers think The Gray Lady has lost her courage and kowtowed to Trump but even back in the 70s, the NYT didn’t want to publish first on anything controversial. This section also covers Hersch’s mistakes, and they are grave indeed. First, a potentially career-ending error of judgment about some fraudulent letters between JFK and Marilyn Monroe. Second, giving a hideously nasty Syrian dictator the benefit of the doubt. 

The final act brings the story home to more recent investigative successes: exposing Abu Ghraib and the more recent work on Gaza. And then we are back to how the people who perpetrated My Lai got away with it. The message is very clear. There is a pattern of extrajudicial violence, cover-up and getting away with it at the heart of the American Republic. This may be depressing, but it’s no excuse not to continue to fight for accountability. If it’s not clear already, I absolutely loved this film. I am delighted that it has distribution with Netflix. To be honest, there’s nothing in here that I didn’t already know - although it was good to see Hersch’s career summarised and organised in such an effective and impactful way. I just really hope lots of younger viewers watch it and realise just how important supporting investigative journalism is.

COVER-UP played Venice, Telluride, Toronto and London. It does not yet have a commercial release date. It has a running time of 117 minutes.

HAIR, PAPER, WATER…* - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Official Competition

Trương Minh Quý and Nicolas Graux’s documentary HAIR, PAPER, water… is a proper art house movie, which means that I am really pleased that it exists and has an audience, and I am sure there people out there who will adore it, but that it’s a bit too left-field for my taste.  The film focuses on a real-life great-grandma who lives in thickly-forested rural Vietnam with her extended family, speaking a vanishing dialect and practising homeopathic medicine. It’s rather lovely derping around with her and seeing a world we would not normally have access to - her reactions to seeing people living in high-rises is particularly acute.  But the fun all turns sour when we see her recommend breathing in botanically scented steam as a cure for Covid, or her great-grandson lament that without learning to read and getting an education he will be trapped. Despite its short running time, the film tried my patience.  I think the directors are making a point with their 16mil lending, trying to create a feeling of intimacy and organic filming?  But I really would have enjoyed luxuriating more in the visuals and less of the ancient wisdom that is hard to swallow in these RFK Jr infected time. Your mileage may vary on that score, admittedly.

HAIR, PAPER, WATER… has a running time of 71 minutes. It played Busan and London 2025, where it is has been selected for the Official Competition.

ULTRAS**** - BFI London Film Festival 2025

Documentarian Ragnhild Ekner’s new documentary ULTRAS is a fascinating and nuanced look at football fan culture. Most of the depiction of football fans in the media shows the hooliganism and violence, even if it’s glorifying it in films like FOOTBALL FACTORY.  Ekner tries to show the more positive side of fan culture - the camaraderie, the sense of purpose, and, more seriously, sometimes the ability to protest an oppressive government.

Along the way we hear from a Spanish woman who finds solace in football after the tragic death of her young son. We see some young Indonesian women who are superfans and lobby for female inclusion in the fandom.  We hear from Polish and Egyptian men who feel that they have no place in the predominant culture and so create their own youth culture.  The best bit was some young men in Eastbourne - a town full of retirees - whose only chance to hang out with other young men is at a local club with a small supporter group.  

Ekner does not shy away from the darker side of football culture.  We hear about intra-fan violence and heavy-handed policing. Some of the Polish fans make the good point that the police are themselves a kind of mob of thugs who like having a Saturday afternoon punch-up - not that different from the fans they are policing. And the Spanish mum talks about having to explain to her son why a middle-aged woman refused to get on a bus with them and a whole bunch of superfans.  She had to explain the perceptions but also the reality of how intimidating a large group of very loud very adrenaline-hyped blokes can be.  Most movingly, the final sequence is a retelling of an horrific example of kettling in a stadium where one set of fans started stabbing the others.  72 people died of their injuries or of suffocation.

Overall, this is exactly the kind of documentary I love. Told with passion but also fairness, taking us into a world we might not otherwise see, full of empathy and insight.

ULTRAS has a running time of 89 minutes.

KHARTOUM***** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Preview

Khartoum is an evocative name but the capital city of Sudan has been ravaged by its latest military coup.  Apparently, Sudan is a country that has experienced the most military coups of any country in Africa.  In this superb documentary from a group of directors led by Phil Cox, we learn what it has been like for five of the ten million ordinary people displaced by the most recent political violence.

The first and most heartbreakingly brilliantly joyous of the two refugees are orphaned boys Lokain and Wilson.  They are still young but matter of factly describe what it's like to be surrounded by militia with guns. The juxtaposition of this horrific childhood with their more typical boisterous cheekiness is striking and affecting.  We see them now as kids in a Kenyan school, planning how to bunk off if the teacher is boring. But the director of their segment also puts them against a green screen with the other participants in the documentary, where they re-enact the painful events that caused them to flee, but also to imagine their most glorious dreams. It's a powerful technique - both whimsical and perilous - and speaks to the incredible trust the subjects must have had in their directors. 

Next we have mother Khadmallah who has had to flee with her daughter, also to Kenya, but misses lying beneath the trees in her beloved Nubian mountains. Then we have Jawad, who runs food stalls in Cairo with his fellow refugees and fondly remembers listening to music on a bus with a girl who he liked.  Finally we have civil servant and pigeon racer Majdi, who must let his son flee before he too can later leave. 

All of these stories are moving insofar as their memories and desires are so basic and simple: a memory of listening to music or lying beneath a tree. All are melancholy for home. All are hopeful for the future. I loved seeing the gorgeous buddies Lokain and Wilson wonder if their kids will be friends. Of course! They are so full of life it really is a fantastic testament to the strength and resilience of the human spirit that they are.  

But under the surface what hope is there? The documentary subjects are other Sudanese people interviewed comment on how fractured and fractious the country is. What even is Sudan but a patchwork of ancient kingdoms. Is their cultural identity African or Arab?  I think this film will prove an educational primer for the European viewer unfamiliar with that history.  And perhaps a provocation for viewers who think of slavery through a European lens. It's really quite shocking and provocative to hear Arab militia tell African residents of Khartoum that they are merely descendants of slaves, and that this is Arab country. 

KHARTOUM has a running time of 78 minutes. It played Berlin and Sundance. It will play the BFI London Film Festival 2025.

THE TRAVELERS aka LES VOYAGEURS***** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Preview

In a world where illegal immigration dominates the political agenda in almost every developed market - where undocumented migrants are in fear of being taken off the streets in America - and where even in multicultural London, lamp-posts are draped in St. George's flags - Cameroonian director David Bingong has made a film that drips with empathy, insight, and even joy. I challenge anyone to watch it and not feel greater empathy and even admiration for the young men who risk their lives, fully cognisant of the risks, in order to make it in Europe and send money back home.

THE TRAVELERS is David Bingong's own journey from Cameroon to the Northern coast of Africa, across the sea to Spain.  He made the journey just over a decade ago and documents it with his handheld camera.  He is with a group of twenty or so twenty-something Cameroonians who have to sleep rough in the forest, and then take shelter in safe houses and tents where they find them. At one point we watch them inflate a perilously flimsy dingy for the crossing. It was so flimsy at first I thought they were inflating a mattress for the night.  They worry about nature, the tides, the weather. They worry about the police and army who could shoot them. They face prejudice from the Arab-Africans in the North let alone the Europeans when they land. But throughout it all, this band of travellers are in buoyant spirits, and express their hopes, dreams and fears through a cappella singing.  These songs are infectious and wondrous, but are sharply juxtaposed with the reality of the journey.  One smash-cuts to the news that a group that made the journey ahead of them has all been shot in the water.

I am no bleeding-heart liberal: this blog used to be called "Movie Reviews For Greedy Capitalist Bastards".  But my word, to spend time with these young men is to admire their courage, pluck and entrepreneurial flair. I cannot help but think that if young people with these minerals want to come and enrich our countries, why wouldn't we make an easier path for them?  

I truly hope this doc gets wide distribution. I will not forget its "characters" - or that they are real men, their stories and their drive.  It's so easy to see numbers and get scared. Far harder to see actual human beings and make those same judgments. This is film-making at its most powerful and urgent.

THE TRAVELERS has a running time of 60 minutes. It is playing at the BFI London Film Festival but both screenings are sold out.

SINGING WINGS**** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Preview

SINGING WINGS is the absolutely delightful debut feature doc from director Hemen Khaledi.  It features the warm and spiky seventy-something matriarch Khadijeh, living with her family in contemporary Iran. She cares for her elderly husband, goes fishing with her grandkids, and stumbles upon caring for an injured stork that cannot join its mates on the great migration.  A local vet gives her advice on her to bring it back to health.  Meanwhile, in a rather on the nose comparison, Khadijah's daughter is trying to migrate too. 

I cannot put a finger on why this film transfixed me so.  Maybe because it's so rare to get a glimpse into contemporary rural life in Iran, as opposed to the cosmopolitan urban life of Tehran. For sure, there was something in the way Khadijah reminds me of my old Asian aunties, even in the way she dresses and cooks. I love the scenes with her husband, alternatively bickering and caring. Despite being so old, Khadijah has a real energy to her, and her need to see the stork migrate is really touching and weirdly involving.  Finally, the lensing is beautiful.  Wherever this film is set, the landscape, mountains and wide expansive skies are quite lovely.

Overall SINGING WINGS is a really affecting, surprising and impactful documentary. I note that all of its BFI London Film Festival screenings are already sold out. I hope it gets a distributor. 

SINGING WINGS has a running time of 73 minutes. It will play the BFI London Film Festival and is competition for the Grierson Award.

ONLY ON EARTH** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Preview

Danish environmental documentarian Robin Petre follows up FROM THE WIDE SEA, with her study of wildfire prone Spain in ONLY ON EARTH, in competition for the Grierson Documentary prize at the year's BFI London Film Festival.

I can see why it was nominated. She beautifully captures the stunning Galician landscape and has an eye for framing the almost alien wind turbines that now  grace its ridges. It is ironic that these interlopers, no doubt earnestly erected to save the environment, have become monstrous invasions of a delicate ecosystem that had for centuries protected Spain from wildfires.  There are lots of shots where we see them looming over the landscape, utterly out of scale with the wild horses beneath, scored with an eery metallic droning audio design.   

The real focus of the documentary is the beautiful wild horses, uniquely designed to feast on the tough gorse of this region, becoming rarer as their inhabit is made more inhospitable. And with no-one to eat the gorse, and climate change creating more and more extreme heat, the area is now prone to the wildfires shown in the stunning photograph above.

Petre tells her story by centring the animals - but also showing us the people who try to live with them and in this environment, whether firefighters, veterinarians or aspiring cowboys.  It feels rather hopeless. The investigative firefighter warns of what is happening and is utterly unsurprised when the fires start. This gives the film a melancholy tone.  But I must admit to have being rather bored during the running time.  How many shots of ominous wind turbines can we see?  I think I would rather have had the stunning visuals as photographs.

ONLY ON EARTH has a running time of 93 minutes. It played the Berlinale. Tickets are still available for all three screenings at the BFI London Film Festival.

SECRET MALL APARTMENT*****

SECRET MALL APARTMENT is a documentary about a bunch of artists in Rhode Island who were pissed off at the creation of a giant ugly mall in their home town but discovered a small cavity in its architecture and decided to create a cool hang-out space there.  It's a story you just couldn't make up. Over days and weeks and months they scoped out the security guards' routine and where the security cameras were and through no small effort managed to scramble up into this space and make it their own. They literally carried in a SOFA! It wasn't that habitable really - cold and damp. But the sheer audacity of the plan turned from a bit of a stunt into something more provocative and meaningful. A way to take back real estate that was poorly designed and alienating to its local community and turn it into something beloved and community-minded. 

Director Jeremy Workman's film is tightly edited and neatly constructed and utterly compelling. I discovered a whole new world of artists using their art for good. Michael Townsend - the man at the centre of it all - had used his "tape art" to commemorate victims of 9/11 and to cheer up severely ill kids. He seems to be a really earnest human and probably impossible to live with. I love that people like this somehow exist, defying The Man, and I love that they recorded their endeavours. This a truly unique film about a truly unique set of people doing something crazy. It deserves the widest possible audience.

SECRET MALL APARTMENT has a 91 minute runtime. It was released in the US last month.

SALLY!***** - BFI Flare 2025

SALLY! is a superb documentary about "radical lesbian feminist" Sally Gearheart - a ridiculously intelligent, fiercely funny, and charismatic woman who argued for equality alongside Harvey Milk but has somehow been written out of history, not least via the Oscar-winning biopic.

Directed by Deborah Craig, Sylvia Turchin and Ondine Rarey, the film benefits from lots of archive footage of Sally addressing rallies and appearing in TV debates, as well as contemporary interviews with her and her fellow activists.

What emerges is a portrait of a well-educated woman in conservative Texas whose homosexuality threatened her career. So this outwardly conventional woman took the decision to give up tenure and went to San Francisco where she could finally be out and proud.  With her fellow academics she created the first ever women's history courses and with her fellow activists she lobbied against legislation that would restrict gay people's employment rights.  She even wrote a work of utopian fiction arguing for lesbian separatism! That ideal became a reality when she and her friends and lovers bought land in rural California and built their own cabins.  

But sooner or later these women left to rejoin mainstream society. Complex relationships started and ended. This clear-eyed documentary makes it clear that Sally could be challenging to be around: her charisma matched with bossy self-centredness.  But my goodness that charisma and good humour and love shines through as we see the older Sally interviewed, the last remaining commune dweller. It's evident how far she is loved in her local community and the goodwill that she has engendered.

I love documentaries like this - that take us into a part of the world or a slice of history that we should know about. It's education with a light touch, and with an importance beyond the LGBTQIA community given Sally Gearheart's importance to broader social history.  Sadly, the power of the film also lies in its relevance to contemporary battles that have to be fought once again against rising bigotry and prejudice.

SALLY! has a running time of 96 minutes.  The film is playing the festival circuit.

SLY LIVES! AKA THE BURDEN OF BLACK GENIUS*****

Questlove returns to our screens with another banging music doc, and the second this month, with his investigation of the genius that is Sly Stone.  We begin in the 60s in the Bay Area where this gangly multi-talented multi-instrumentalist is DJ'ing across genre-lines. Pretty soon Sly forms a band that will cross colour and gender-lines and make some of the most iconic funk tracks of the late 60s and early 70s. These are tracks that suffused by childhood on my parents' vinyl and then dominated the airwaves when sampled by the artists who decorated our walls and filled our bedrooms in the 80s - from Prince to Public Enemy.

Musical talent from Andre 3000 to Chaka Khan to Nile Rodgers to Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis are on hand to tell us just why Sly and the Family Stone's tracks were so gripping and so continuously influential. They are interspersed with archive footage of the band rehearsing and playing, and contemporaneous interviews with Sly. We see a man who is evidently a musical genius and demanding of his collaborators.   A man whose progressive message and musical style were overtaken when the 70s turned bad.  And a man who ultimately wasted his talent on decades of drug abuse.  He could have become an influential producer himself - like Nile Rodgers. 

Questlove's message is ultimately hopeful. Sly Lives! through every artist influenced by him today.  But I wasn't convinced by his thesis that there is something uniquely difficult and burdensome about black genius. The film argues that black artists are disposable commodities for a cruel entertainment industry and still predominantly white audience.  But having just watched heartbreaking documentaries about Boyzone and Robbie Williams (and I am NOT claiming equivalence of genius), I think the perils and pitfalls and exploitation are endemic in the industry no matter the colour of the artist.

SLY LIVES! AKA THE BURDEN OF BLACK GENIUS has a running time of 112 minutes. It was released on Hulu earlier this week.

CHASING CHASING AMY***

CHASING CHASING AMY is a wonderful and raw and vulnerable documentary about what the 1990s Kevin Smith dramedy CHASING AMY meant to those making it and those who watched it.  

The film is one that I loved when it came out: I was a deep-cut Kevin Smith fan, and even loved his critically panned second film MALLRATS. CHASING AMY was a film that was meant to revive his career after that failure and it did. It starred Ben Affleck as an earnest but insecure comic book writer called Holden who falls in love with a fellow artist called Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams) who is both way more sexually experienced and bisexual. 

The narrative arc centres Holden and his journey to emotional maturity.  The comedy, as in all of Kevin Smith, is crude and blunt and politically incorrect and brilliant.  Both Holden's best friend Banky (Jason Lee) and Alyssa's gay friends find it hard to understand their sexual relationship.  There's a lot of casually homophobic and biphobic language.  And worst of all to modern sensibilities, the film was written and directed by a straight white man centring his own journey.  So as much as the film was loved at the time of its release, it has since been condemned as tone-deaf and problematic and largely forgotten.

That's when trans male film-maker Sav Rodgers entered the story.  He was a teenager being bullied in school for being queer. Watching CHASING AMY was a lifeline. He saw Alyssa and her friends - proudly out, incredibly smart, sex-positive - as role model.  Sav asserts that the film literally saved his life.  Fast forward through a virally popular Ted Talk on the subject and Sav connects with Kevin Smith, is welcomed into the director's home, and makes this documentary.

What we get is a strange but compelling doc with three strands. The first is Sav's own story as geeky bullied lesbian woman who finds the courage to become a married trans man and film director thanks to the love of his amazing wife Riley, his amazing mum, and maybe also the friendship and mentorship of Kevin Smith.  

The second is the story of Kevin Smith and his evident joy and finding someone who appreciates his art and is deeply moved by it.  

But it's the final strand that is the most compelling and it's the story of the women who have a far more complex relationship with the film. 

The first woman is Joey Lauren Adams, who never found the stardom she might have expected, maybe because Harvey Weinstein didn't like her and maybe because she was playing these unconventional roles.  The movie was based on her real-life relationship with Smith and while she's glad the movie exists, she finds it really difficult to see their two-year painful relationship relived on screen. That real life Kevin or fictional Holden emotionally grow is great, but it came at her real-life expense. She is also far more damning of the idea that you can enjoy the success of the film at Sundance when you now know what Harvey Weinstein was doing to Rose McGowan at that very festival. Smith mentions it and acknowledges it but it's Adams who really feels it.

The second woman who got ripped off is film writer, director and actor Guinevere Turner - the real-life lesbian who inspired Alyssa. She describes seeing her real conversations with Smith transcribed in CHASING AMY, and her horror as her own female-centred, lesbian-authored film GO FISH faded into the background as Smith's more mainstream appealing CHASING AMY got all the plaudits.

This is all really complicated stuff and it's not clear that the young film-maker Sav Rodgers has the emotional maturity or film-making maturity to deal with the issues he stirs up with his interviews.  He does not go back to Smith to try to hold him to account or to pierce his rather earnestly complacent attitude toward the film.  He does not know what to say to Adams when she lays the reality down on him. That's not Sav's fault - he's so young and dealing with his own stuff. But it makes for a frustrating viewing experience.

CHASING CHASING AMY played Tribeca and London 2023. It has a running time of 93 minutes and is available to rent and own.

THE BIBI FILES*****

Alexis Bloom (CATCHING FIRE: THE STORY OF ANITA PALLENBERG) returns to our screens with a meticulously constructed and excoriating documentary about Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.  The documentary accuses him and his wife of gross and long-standing corruption, grifting jewellery and other perks from donors eager for favours.  It further argues that once these accusations became a criminal investigation, and Bibi was seen as beyond the pale by the centre right parties in the country, that he had an incentive to go further and further to the right to keep his hands on power.  She argues that his ultra-right nationalism is not necessarily authentic but a cheap, insincere means to an end. Moreover, leaked interrogation tapes show that Bibi himself had a hand in keeping Hamas in power because he didn't want the two Palestinian territories - one under Hamas and one under Fateh - to link up.  The documentary argues that this strategy of enabling Hamas AND stoking up of religious hatred had a direct hand in the appalling October 7th terrorist attacks. And that once those attacks occurred, Bibi had a convenient reason to further cling to power.

The documentary excels in intercutting the interrogation tapes of Bibi and his wife.  Bibi is all charm and charisma and blustering persuasion. By contrast his wife is far more strident and entitled and off-putting.  Neither seems to have any shame or guilt.  They seem to think leading Israel is their right.  We also get the benefit of insight from a number of talking heads from the Israeli establishment, including most damningly the former head of the Israeli intelligence service, Shin Bet.  All are united in thinking Bibi a leader who is both criminal in the literal sense, but also the moral sense, of dragging Israel into an extreme right position that cannot result in a peaceful and thriving Israeli state. 

THE BIBI FILES has a running time of 115 minutes. It played Toronto 2024 and was released in the USA and UK last December.

2073**

Just watched Asif Kapadia’s new film 2073. It’s an odd and not particularly successful mashup of 80pc contemporary political doc and 20pc dystopian fictional film. The doc is depressing but doesn’t have anything new to say about how Big Tech is subverting democracy. And even Samantha Morton can’t save the awkwardly morose 2073 sections set in a climate-ravaged world. I think the problem may be that in a week when Elon Musk is literally trying to subvert British democracy and Mark Zuckerberg decided to appease the Felon-In-Chief, we don't really need a nicely edited clip reel of how the world is going to hell in a hand basket. The issue isn't complacency. The issue is that we are all too well-informed and all too clueless as to how to stop it. (You notice here, that I assume no-one who like Musk and Trump are going to watch this, let alone be persuaded by it). So, in the final analysis, this is just a pointless but worthy agit-doc that is preaching to the converted.

 

2073 has a running time of 85 minutes. It played Venice, Sitges and London 2024. It opened in the USA on December 27th 2024 and in the UK on January 1st 2025.

BEATLES '64****

Producer Martin Scorsese and director David Tedeschi (THE 50 YEAR ARGUMENT) have created something rather wonderful in this slice of history carefully contextualised and constructed.  They begin with archive footage from the legendary Maysles brothers who were present at the peak of Beatlemania when the lads landed in JFK and played The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. We see them at press conferences, and follow them into their hotel suite, hostages to the screaming fans outside.  We follow them to a US Embassy reception where John is pissed off by the snobbery.  And we see the contemporary fans interviewed in all their teenage hysteria, or casual indifference as is the case of some jazz loving black teenagers in Harlem. 

It's fascinating to see how the surviving Beatles interpret the footage that the Maysles took. McCartney claims that America needed to let off steam and have some fun in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. That sounds about right. But when he claims that they didn't give a proverbial about the embassy snobbery, that sounds like defensiveness, and the archive insult closer to the truth.

We also get valuable context from eminent interviewees - whether the Ronnettes, Smokey Robinson or David Lynch. Robinson is particularly fascinating as he speaks to the racial politics of the time, and the balance between the Beatles appropriating black rock'n'roll but also crediting it - something no other white artists had bothered to do.

But perhaps the most fascinating part of the documentary is pairing contemporary footage of hysterical teens with their now middle-aged selves looking back on their feelings and actions in 1964.  They still seem passionate about the Beatles, and pairing both sets of interviews take us somewhat closer to understanding the nature of pop-culture mania. 

Overall, this is a surprisingly moving and immersive film-watching experience. I felt that had lived through this weird little bubble in pop culture history - its teenagers not distant relics but revivified as excited, hopeful, giddy.  This is documentary-making at its best.

BEATLES '64 has a running time of 105 minutes and was released on Disney+ last month.

ELTON JOHN: NEVER TOO LATE** - BFI London Film Festival 2024 - Day 2

I was desperately disappointed by this new documentary by the iconic R J Cutler (BILLIE EILISH: THE WORLD'S A LITTLE BLURRY) and Elton's husband David Furnish. The framing device is Elton preparing for his final American gig at Dodger Stadium, which then allows Elton to take us back to the height of his fame and his epic 1975 Dodger Stadium gigs. Don't get me wrong. Elton is an astoundingly good musician and performer and so charmingly candid about his life that he makes for an interesting subject. The problem is that there wasn't anything here that hadn't already been explored in the wonderfully entertaining and deeply moving ROCKETMAN. In that film we get the suburban childhood and gigging, the rebellion into rock and roll, the insecurity over appearance, the confusion over sexuality, the drug addiction and domestic abuse. I guess what we get here is the framing device - the miraculous recovery and fulfilled family life - but unfortunately that's not where the focus really is.  The balance is far more to the looking back to the career. As a result, this doc just felt a bit redundant.

ELTON JOHN: NEVER TOO LATE is rated PG-13. It played Toronto and London 2024 and was released on November 15th on Disney plus.

SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D'ETAT***** - BFI London Film Festival 2024

Johan Grimonprez’s documentary is one of the most unique, compelling, kinetic and insightful documentaries I have ever seen.  It is audacious in its scope and speed, assuming its audience can keep up with what is both a detailed micro description of events in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1960 - but also a wider discourse on racism, decolonisation and political activism in America.

Basically, we have Patrice Lumumba desperately agitating for democracy and self-determination in the DRC at a time when African states were exploited by each side of the Cold War.  At a time pre-dating the full-blown US civil rights struggle, we already have black musicians in the USA agitating for change too. We get the provocative contrast of the State Department exploiting iconic musicians like Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie - sending them on goodwill tours of Africa - with Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crashing the UN Security Council in protest at Lumumba's murder. 

Why does the State Department give a shit? Because the DNC happens to sit on massive uranium reserves!  Amazingly, I had studied this period for A-Level history, complete with Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on the desk at the UN. But I had never realised at which debate this was happening. Turns out, the Soviet premier was protesting the Cold War power grab in the DNC.

These strands and many more and interwoven into a dizzying, immersive and impressive film. It's a testament to its dynamic soundtrack and clarity of narrative construction that I never lost pace and could grasp its subtle arguments. Bravo to all involved.

SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D'ETAT has a running time of 150 minutes.

SUPER/MAN: THE CHRISTOPHER REEVE STORY**** - BFI London Film Festival 2024 - Day 6

For my generation, Christopher Reeve is the ultimate superhero - the dreamy, earnest Superman who flew through the skies with Lois Lane. (Sidebar - people think we only got strong female characters now, but I grew up with Princess Leia and Lois Lane, both massively professionally capable and far from blonde Barbies. What a time to be a kid!)  So when Superman was thrown from a horse and paralysed it was shocking and tragic.  He appeared once again at the Oscars making a moving and stirring speech, and then - at least for me - disappeared from view until his death ten years later.  This accomplished new documentary, from directors  Peter Ettedgui (MCQUEEN) and Ian Bonhote, fills in those gaps.

The Christopher Reeve that emerges from this film is an earnest theatre kid who makes it to Juilliard and rooms with his lifelong best friend Robin Williams.  He gets the break to be Superman and off-broadway co-star William Hurt cautions him against it.  Reeve finds international fame but also feels trapped in a certain kind of role, and people's impossible expectations of him as a perfect hero.

In fact he was a complex and flawed man, as we are all flawed. His father did a number on him, raising him in a type of toxic masculinity of hyper-competitiveness and impossible to meet expectations. Reeve was also surrounded by broken marriages and had trouble committing. He met a British woman filming SUPERMAN and had two children with her but didn't marry her and left her to go back to a single life in New York. Five months later he met the woman who would be by his side when the accident happened - Dana - and would actually marry her and have another son.

It's testament to Christopher's family, including his first partner, that they all agree to appear in this film and speak with honesty and vulnerability of what those broken relationships did to them. His elder two children argue that he was more of a present parent after the accident when hyper-competitive athletics were off the table. It's also testament to all three parents that the children seem so close and supportive of each other. I had no idea that the younger son Will lost his mother very soon after losing his father, and his big half-brother really stepped in to provide support. All three were at the London Film Festival screening and it was a privilege to watch this deeply moving film in their presence.

And what of Christopher post-accident?  He launched a foundation and became an activist for scientific research. Some in the disabled community bristled at his search for a cure, and Dana corrected that balance by focussing on care and quality of life. Both seem utterly admirable in their energy and commitment and courage. I was equally moved by the support given by his closest friends, not least Robin Williams. And it utterly broke me when Glenn Close, interviewed extensively here, says she thinks that Robin would still be with us if Christopher had not died.

I would recommend this film to those who loved Superman as children and still feel a thrill when they hear that score. It gives so much depth and insight to the man behind the cape and the extraordinary family who rose to the challenge of his catastrophic accident. I cried, but I was also uplifted. He is still my Superman.

SUPER/MAN: THE CHRISTOPHER REEVE STORY has a running time of 106 minutes and is rated PG-13. It was released in the USA last month and will be released in the UK on November 1st.

ENDURANCE***** - BFI London Film Festival 2024 - Day 4

The story of Sir Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance is one of those tales that obsesses land-lubbers like me.  I have always been fascinated by explorers who push themselves beyond the limits of ordinary endurance and especially those tails of against-the-odds survival. I am a sucker for docs on Everest, or films like SOCIETY OF THE SNOW, and an armchair specialist on Shackleton. So I came to the new documentary with high expectations, made even higher knowing that it featured restored and colorised stills and moving images from expedition photographer Frank Hurley thanks to my beloved BFI National Archive.

The film tells two stories in tandem. The first is that of the original expedition over a hundred years ago. Through contemporary photos and films, and audio and film recordings of its members, we hear of their journey to Antartica aboard the Endurance. We see how the ship is caught in pack ice and had to be abandoned. We see the men make camp on the ice, and then have to take to boats and row to an island on which they cannot survive.  At which point Shackleton takes one of the boats and four other men and attempts to reach the whaling station on South Georgia - an improbably journey and an improbable rescue. The men had been away for years, while a World War was raging. Most immediately signed up for service.

The story captures the imagination because it's one of failure but also of improbable survival. And it's also the story of a man who was a rogue, financially incontinent, and made several bad choices, but who also had tremendous courage and did his best by his men. 

The second story in the film is that of a 2022 expedition to discover the shipwreck of the Endurance, led by an international team of scientists and the popular British historian Dan Snow. We feel their excitement at finally uncovering the wreck and wonder at the HD scan of the largely in tact ship. 

Directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin (NYAD, FREE SOLO) and Natalie Hewit ably cut between the two stories and create a sense of excitement and tension even though we know the outcome of both stories. I particularly loved seeing the colourised archive footage which made the story seem vivid. And I also loved the way in which items in the wreckage were matched up to the iconic photos and movies at the end.  It made the whole thing feel real and contemporary rather than a tale of derring-do from the Edwardian era.

As I said before, I was primed to love this film and I was not disappointed. But I hope it will resonate with audiences less familiar with the Shackleton story.  Moreover, with its use of both archival footage and AI to recreate the expedition's voices, this feels like a documentary that shows mastery of how films can be created now and in the future. 

ENDURANCE has a running time of 103 minutes. It had its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival. It does not yet have a commercial release date.