Neil Young: Harvest Time review - a thrillingly intimate fly-on-the-wall documentary

★★★★ NEIL YOUNG: HARVEST TIME A thrillingly intimate fly-on-the-wall documentary

Warm, celebratory, charming, and fun - was the making of Neil Young's 'Harvest' the making of the singer?

“You’re filmin’ a movie or something – can you explain this?” the radio DJ turns to Neil Young, a laugh underpinning his question and setting the scene: light, jovial.

“We’re just makin’ a film about…” Young pauses for a second. “I dunno, just the things we wanna film… I’m making it like I make an album, sort of… It’s like… I’m cutting it, instead of… so it’s personal, like an album.”

“So some day someone’ll be able to go to a theatre and see it maybe?” the DJ asks.

“Yeah, I hope so, maybe pretty soon,” comes the reply. 

Wilko Johnson (1947-2022): The Bard of Canvey Island

RIP WILKO JOHNSON (1947-2022) Snug-bar confessions in an epic encounter with the Bard of Canvey Island

Snug-bar confessions in an epic Canvey Island encounter with the late Essex great

Wilko Johnson, who has died aged 75, enjoyed an astonishing afterlife while he was still alive. After Julien Temple’s Dr. Feelgood film Oil City Confidential (2009) restored his crucial former band's profile, a terminal cancer diagnosis in 2013 perversely flooded Wilko with the wonder of life, leaving this melancholy soul content for perhaps the first time.

TS Eliot: Into The Waste Land, BBC Two / Four Quartets, Starring Ralph Fiennes, BBC Four review - a great 100th birthday present to a giant of modern literature

Susanna White's documentary decodes a notorious poetic puzzle

Can you make modern poetry come to life on a TV screen? The BBC has had two stabs recently at answering this question, as part of the centennary celebrations for TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, seen by many as the greatest poem of the 20th century. One programme works significantly better than the other. 

Moonage Daydream review - sensory bombardment and secrets

★★★★ MOONAGE DAYDREAM Overwhelmingly immersive Bowie doc finds the boy behind Ziggy

Overwhelmingly immersive Bowie doc finds the boy behind Ziggy

Watching Bowie for the only time in what turned out to be his last tour in 2003, I wanted glamour and mystique, Ziggy preserved. Instead here was ordinary bloke Dave, badly dressed in faded jeans and a mismatched top. The beautifully sung, committed performance largely passed me by, as I ached to love the absent, alien Bowie.

Meeting Gorbachev review - Werner Herzog offers a swansong tribute

★★★★ MEETING GORBACHEV Engaging portrait becomes a moving meditation on history

Engaging documentary portrait becomes a moving meditation on history

You react differently to Meeting Gorbachev knowing that the film’s subject was on occasions brought to its interviews from hospital by ambulance; his interlocutor, Werner Herzog, doesn’t mention that fact, of course, anywhere in the three encounters on which this documentary is based, but he has alluded to it elsewhere.

My Old School review - a Glasgow schoolboy and his elaborate hoax

★★★ MY OLD SCHOOL A Glasgow schoolboy and his elaborate hoax, voiced by Alan Cumming

Jono McLeod mixes animation and real-life interviews in a compelling documentary

Back in 1995, the name Brandon Lee made the headlines. Not the Brandon Lee as in son of Bruce, who’d recently met his death on the set of The Crow, but a schoolboy who’d chosen to use the same name.
 
A strange hoax was uncovered. Lee was, in fact, Brian MacKinnon, and he was not 16 but 32, posing as a fifth-former at the august Bearsden Academy in Glasgow. He did, indeed, go back to his old school, where he was a pupil, first time around, in the 1970s.

McEnroe review - documentary about the original bad boy of tennis

★★★★ MCENROE Illuminating documentary about the original bad boy of tennis

Illuminating contributions from family and friends

Over the past few weeks, countless columns have been written about Nick Kyrgios, who lost in the Wimbledon final to Novak Djokovic. Who knows if the Australian will watch this illuminating documentary about the original “bad boy of tennis” to see how his own career may pan out?

Mick Jagger: My Life as a Rolling Stone review, BBC Two - the rock'n'roll enigma gives little away as the band reaches 60

★★ MICK JAGGER: MY LIFE AS A ROLLING STONE, BBC TWO The R&R enigma gives little away

Impressive archive footage but no new insights

At the beginning of this film, Mick Jagger says: “What most documentaries do is repeat the same thing over and over… all the mythology is repeated until it becomes true.” He’s right, as he so often is. This latest attempt to prise open the enigma of the Rolling Stones’ indefatigable frontman reveals nothing a reasonably observant Stones fan won’t already know.

We (Nous) review - a low-key look at life in the suburbs of Paris

★★ WE (NOUS) Nothing much happens in Alice Diop's documentary portrait of the Paris periphery

Nothing much happens in Alice Diop's documentary portrait of the periphery

Director Alice Diop read an article by Pierre Bergounioux in which he described how he began writing to draw attention to his overlooked neck of the woods – Correze, in central France. It was a lightbulb moment for her: “My approach as a film-maker suddenly became clear to me, I realised I’d been making films about the suburbs in an obsessive way for the past 15 years… to conserve the existence of ordinary lives, which would have disappeared without trace if I hadn’t filmed them.”

Eric Ravilious: Drawn to War review - a lovingly crafted documentary portrait

★★★★ ERIC RAVILIOUS: DRAWN TO WAR A lovingly crafted documentary portrait

In love and war: one of England's great watercolourists reappraised

There’s a sharp observation, delivered in Alan Bennett’s soft tones, that sums up the reputation of the painter Eric Ravilious: “Because his paintings are so accessible, I don’t think he’s thought to be a great artist. It’s because of his charm. He’s so easy to like and things have to be hard, if they’re not hard, then they’re not great."