What Happened, Miss Simone? (2015)
★★★★☆
Charting the rise, fall and rise again of Nina Simone, Liz Garbus’s What Happened, Miss Simone? creates an icon of the High Priestess of Soul.
★★★★☆
Charting the rise, fall and rise again of Nina Simone, Liz Garbus’s What Happened, Miss Simone? creates an icon of the High Priestess of Soul.
★★★☆☆
A family portrait and a fly-on-the-wall bio-doc of a great pianist, Stéphanie Argerich’s Argerich – Bloody Daughter wraps itself up in maternal knots.
★★★☆☆
Diagnosing the internal conflict of high-ranking Nazi and family man Heinrich Himmler, Vanessa Lapa’s The Decent One exposes the indecency of the “decent”.
★★☆☆☆
Ron Mann’sAltman is a stoic by-the-numbers documentary celebrating the films of the great director, but offering little insight into the man behind the lens.
★★★★☆
With unique archive footage, Christian Braad Thomsen’s Fassbinder To Love Without Demands delivers an honest and intelligent portrait of the German director.
★★★☆☆
Israeli and Palestininan schoolchildren overcoming their prejudices as they are taught to ballroom dance together is movingly captured in a fly-on-the-wall documentary.
★★★★☆
Did video kill the radio? Nicolas Philibert uncovers the mystery of the medium in his warmly human documentary La Maison de la Radio.
★★★★☆
If this is a man. Claude Lanzmann’s The Last Of The Unjust recuts unused Shoah interviews to reveal the controversial figure of Benjamin Murmelstein – Europe’s last Jewish Elder.
★★★☆☆
A dramatic reconstruction of New Zealand’s worst air disaster, Charlotte Purdy’s Erebus: Into The Unknown loses itself in the snows of Antarctica.
★★★★☆
Going back to the future through interviews with Switzerland’s first gay married couple, Stefan Haupt’s half-documentary The Circle reveals a postwar openness ahead of its time.
★★★★☆
A fascinating glimpse of the goings-on at one of the grandes dames of Europe’s museum scene, The Great Museum offers a compelling portrait of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum.
★★★☆☆
A fascinating tale of friendship and betrayal, Nadav Schulman’s documentary The Green Prince reminds us of the importance of placing ethics over politics.
★★★★☆
French director Julie Bertuccelli’s classroom documentary School of Babel examines twenty-four foreign teenagers’ struggles as they adapt to a new life, culture and language in France.
★★★★★
Unseen footage from David Hockney’s personal video library and revealing interviews make this the definitive biography of Britain’s most influential living artist.