"When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion," writes Margaret Atwood in Alias Grace, and it's these words that open Stories We Tell, fellow Canadian Sarah Polley's fourth film. This is Polley's first documentary - although it hardly does it justice to call it that. It starts by telling a family story - a story Polley herself is indeed smack bang in the middle of - which requires her to be both director and detective, and presents her with the seemingly impossible task of distancing herself.

I bought a new car recently, but by the end of The Route Masters (***) I was feeling a powerful inclination to sell it. The film would have rung a masochistic bell with anybody accustomed to trying to travel round London on a regular basis, and the soundbite claiming that the average speed of the city's rush hour traffic is 9mph sounded like a wild exaggeration.

Being a woman soldier in the Afghan army must rate among the world’s “least wanted” jobs, if only 14 applicants came forward for 150 places in the year’s intake covered in Afghan Army Girls. It apparently took a year’s negotiations to get a single camera allowed in to follow them over their six months' training, and even then some on the course insisted on having their faces blanked (understandable, when the Taliban threaten retaliation).

“Chronicle of a Summer” (“Chronique d’un été”) is one of the great documentaries of all time – and a work that could only have been made in France, home of the immensely influential Cahiers du cinéma and the constant ferment of speculation on the nature of film. The BFI’s release of the 1960 classic by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin couldn't be more timely: documentary flourishes today as at no other time in the history of cinema and attracts some of the world's best film-makers.

For those familiar with Ginger Baker’s virtuosic musicianship, but not with his life, the biggest revelation of the warts-and-all documentary Beware of Mr Baker may be that next to drumming, playing polo was the great time-keeper’s obsession. One might expect a jet-setting country gent like Bryan Ferry to mount up for a chukka or two before teatime, but the wild man of Cream and Blind Faith, late of Lewisham? Does Topper Headon play bowls?

I was once the summer guest of friends in southern Calabria, where the head of a hapless “family traitor” in the nearby village of Taurianova had been hacked off and then kicked around the piazza like a football: the news was greeted by the locals with no more than raised eyebrows and a resigned shrug of the shoulders.

“A bunch of beardies rooting around with trowels. On the lookout for shinbones and such. It’ll be knockout.” There will have been naysayers at the meeting when they first pitched the idea for a series about archaeology and yet nearly 20 years on Time Team is still with us. It seems the viewing public’s appetite for digging is not restricted to Titchmarsh. Mirabile dictu, as the Romans no doubt said when they dug up three wooden crosses under a temple of Venus in Jerusalem, thus inventing archaeology.

"For youth, for change and always for the people" was the slogan with which Rupert Murdoch relaunched The Sun in 1969, having bought it from its previous owners IPC for a mere £800,000. Murdoch, the Aussie iconoclast who kept a bust of Lenin in his rooms at Oxford university in the early Fifties and claimed to be an ardent socialist, decreed that his new tabloid would be free from party political affiliations and would refuse to kow-tow to the British establishment, which he instinctively loathed.

The Eagles recorded their first two albums in London in the early Seventies, though they couldn't have imagined they'd be back 40 years later to present their new documentary, History of the Eagles Part One, at Sundance London. There is, as you may have surmised, also a Part Two, which is available in the DVD and Blu-ray package that goes on sale on Monday 29 April.

It feels a little as if BBC journalists are getting themselves into trouble every other week at the moment. As news emerges that new BBC chief Tony Hall will appear before MPs to discuss why they allowed a Panorama journalist to use a university field trip as cover for an exposé on North Korea, it's little wonder that the broadcaster's flagship investigative journalism programme has stuck with a far easier target this week.