Documentary

Heart of a Dog is a film by Laurie Anderson and it’s a meditative, free-associating rumination on life, loss, love and dogs, with particular reference to her and her late husband’s (Lou Reed, who died in 2013) beloved rat terrier, Lolabelle (who died the same year). It follows no linear logic. It’s a visual collage, a cine-poem, a dreamy documentary essay that was screened in London earlier this week to owners and their dogs — to rave reviews. ‘It’s great!’ said a golden retriever, but as he said the same of ‘a ball’ and also ‘a pizza crust’, he may not be the most reliable of critics. (This is why

The big returning show of the week began with servants laying out the silverware at a large country house in 1924. But rather than a shock comeback for Downton Abbey, this was — perhaps even more unexpectedly — Tommy Shelby’s new home in Peaky Blinders (BBC2, Thursday). Which explains why so many of the guests were carrying guns, and why the family matriarch was using the word ‘fuck’ a lot more than Lady Grantham ever did. When we last saw gang-leader Tommy (Cillian Murphy), he was still based in the Birmingham backstreets. He was also having a fairly tough time — what with juggling two women, trying not to get

Five Star Babies: Inside the Portland Hospital won’t, I suspect, have been a hard sell to BBC2’s commissioning editors. Childbirth and rich people are both reliably popular subjects for TV documentaries. So why not combine them into one handy package by showing us life at the UK’s only private maternity hospital? And yet, however artificial the programme’s conception, any sociologists studying contemporary Britain’s peculiar attitudes to the very wealthy could have done a lot worse than to tune in to Wednesday’s episode. ‘Parenthood: the great leveller,’ began the narrator — somehow managing not to add a hollow laugh. This sense of irony, though, was short-lived. Like most documentaries about luxury

On the face of it, the Netflix documentary serial Making a Murderer should only take up ten hours of your life. Judging from my experience, though, its ten episodes will prove so overwhelmingly riveting that you’re going to need at least two more days to scour the internet in an obsessive quest for every scrap of information about the Steven Avery case — and several evenings to discuss it with any fellow viewers you can find. If the fuss about the series has so far passed you by (and if it has, it probably won’t for much longer), you may have to trust me that the story it tells —

This is a documentary in which three men travel across Europe together, but they’re not pleasurably interrailing, even though there are often times they probably wished they were. For two of them, Niklas and Horst, the journey is about confronting their fathers, who were high-ranking Nazi officials responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews, while for the third, the eminent British human-rights lawyer Philippe Sands, it means visiting the place where his grandfather’s family was exterminated. This place, Galicia, which straddles the modern-day border between Poland and Ukraine, is the exact place my own grandmother’s family were murdered. Her father lost every one of his seven siblings. She lost

Listen to Me Marlon is a documentary portrait of Marlon Brando that has him burbling into your ear for 102 minutes, but if you have to have someone burbling in your ear for 102 minutes — and there is no law saying it’s obligatory — you could do a lot worse. This isn’t one of your regular documentaries. There are no talking heads, and it’s not blah-blah-blah and then he did this and then he did that and then his BMI got ridiculous, and so on. Instead, it is based on the hundreds of hours of personal audio tapes Brando made in his lifetime, which haven’t been heard until now,

Close to the Edge (BBC4, Tuesday) feels very much like an idea conceived during a particularly good night in the BBC bar. Why not take the ‘scripted reality’ methods of such youth hits as The Only Way Is Essex and apply them to a group of over-65s living in Bournemouth? So it is that the chosen oldies are given one main characteristic each, and required to act out events from their own lives — events that might or might not have happened if the cameras weren’t there. Or as Tuesday’s opening caption rather optimistically put it, ‘Some of the scenes have been constructed purely for your enjoyment.’ Which scenes these

When I was growing up in the 1970s, my three main fears were: being blown up by the IRA; being eaten by a Jaws-like great white shark; being vaporised by a nuclear bomb. I expect it was the same for most kids of my generation. The first two, obviously, were a function of the Birmingham bombings (et al.) and the Peter Benchley/Steven Spielberg axis of shark terror. And the third was the product of the relentless propagandising of CND as rehearsed faithfully on pretty much every BBC programme going from John Craven’s Newsround to The Archers, Animal Magic and Roobarb and Custard. I don’t actually remember the notorious episode where

With Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing you’d be minded to think that’s it, that’s the Indonesian genocide (1965–66) done, but now he’s returned with a second film that is equally stunning, equally riveting — in its horrifying way — and equally unforgettable. To have one such film in you, but two? I think it is now safe to conclude: there are good documentary makers and there are excellent documentary makers and then there is Joshua Oppenheimer, who is amazing. The Act of Killing showed Oppenheimer tracking down the ageing, unrepentant, positively gleeful members of the Indonesian civilian militia who, with the approval of the army and government, carried out

Big-screen documentaries never change the world. Blackfish has not shortened the queues to see maltreated killer whales leap through hoops at SeaWorld. Super Size Me reduced neither the all-American waistline nor the profit margin of McDonald’s. The Cove did not prevent the Japan whale industry slaughtering dolphins. So what possible chance, more than a decade after Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, has a mere film of bringing about that most chimerical of holy grails: an admission that the case for invading Iraq was knowingly built on a lie? We Are Many revisits the anti-war marches of 15 February 2003. On that date there were demonstrations in 789 cities across 72 countries,

My favourite scene in the first episode of the new series of Benefits Street (Mondays, Channel 4) — now relocated to a housing estate in the north-east, but otherwise pretty much unchanged — was the one where the street’s resident stoner and low-level crim Maxwell has to attend a court summons. Really, if the whole thing had been scripted and faked by the film-makers (as I’m sure it wasn’t: no need), it couldn’t have worked out better. With just 15 minutes to go before Maxwell’s court hearing seven miles away, his brother turns up to give him a lift on his motorbike. But there’s one small problem. Maxwell’s brother is

Every time I sit down to a Noah Baumbach film I think I’m going to hate it, but I never actually do. From the French New Wave idiosyncrasies of 2013’s Frances Ha to the growing pains of his semi-autobiographical breakthrough The Squid and the Whale, Baumbach always manages to stay just the right side of pretentious, creating lively hipster-filled worlds that amuse as much as they annoy. Nowhere is this delicate balance more on display than in While We’re Young, a heartbreaking and cautiously funny swipe both at unwelcome middle age and the follies of youth. For Josh (Ben Stiller) and Cornelia (Naomi Watts), the childlessness of their forties has

At the synagogue where I happened to be singing last Saturday, the rabbi wrapped up her regular notices with a timely exhortation to her congregants to try to watch the André Singer documentary Night Will Fall. In 1945, as the Allied forces fought their way across Europe, in the process uncovering the hideous network of Nazi death and slave-labour camps, film producer Sidney Bernstein was despatched by the Ministry of Information to lead a few dozen army cameramen tasked with documenting the astonishing extent of the German atrocities. The project was intended to serve not merely as a current affairs update for the edification (and/or mortification) of the British public,

Detectorists (BBC4) is a sad git’s niche comedy that would never have been commissioned if it hadn’t been written and directed by Mackenzie Crook (who sort of counts as a Hollywood star, now, because after making his name in The Office he went on to appear in the Pirates of the Caribbean series). But I’m glad it was because I’m one of the sad gits it’s targeting: desperate blokes who spend their every spare weekend at this time of year scouring ploughed fields for non-existent treasure. We’re a fairly eclectic bunch, we detectorists. Simon Heffer is one; Rolling Stone Bill Wyman is another; so, too, is Mackenzie Crook himself, which

You might (if you’re over a certain age) still think it pretty amazing that TV not only allows you to watch Mario Götze put in that amazing goal, live, as it happened, in Rio de Janeiro’s Estádio Maracanã, but also that you can witness so immediately and tangibly the passion, the drama of that moment — you on your sofa in twilit Surrey, Somerset or deepest Sutherland watching those emotions fleeting across the individual faces of traumatised Argentinians as they come to terms with bitter defeat. The impact of that extraordinary connection across the continents is nothing, though, when compared to the intimacy and immediacy of radio; the way a