Documentary Reviews

Monkey Man is a brutally exhilarating and exhausting ride - an extremely impressive directorial debut from Dev Patel (who also created the story, co-wrote the screenplay, produced the film and gives a powerful performance in its lead role).

In many ways, we are in familiar action territory here - the film follows an underdog on an impossible quest for revenge after a devastating act of unforgivable violence.

That violence, of course, begets further violence in a series of frenetic and imaginative set pieces. Patel's influences and his love for the action genre are clear and John Wick is never far from mind.

Rare moments of stillness come only in flashbacks to a far more idyllic time. A time that gradually reveals the unbearable tragedy and loss to come.

During a picaresque journey through the cities and woods of the Eastern seaboard of the United States, Lillian, a high school senior from South Carolina, gets her first glimpse of the wider world. Separated from her schoolmates while on a class trip to Washington, D.C, she embarks on a fractured road trip in search of America. Along the way, she falls in with a variety of strange factions, each living out their own alternative realities in our present day.

An AP team of Ukrainian journalists trapped in the besieged city of Mariupol struggle to continue their work documenting the atrocities of the Russian invasion. As the only international reporters who remain in the city, they capture what later became defining images of the war: dying children, mass graves, the bombing of a maternity hospital, and more.

The true story of the inseparable Von Erich brothers, who made history in the intensely competitive world of professional wrestling in the early 1980s. Through tragedy and triumph, under the shadow of their domineering father and coach, the brothers seek larger-than-life immortality on the biggest stage in sports.

For 20 years, peerless cook, Eugenie (Juliette Binoche), has worked for Dodin (Benoît Magimel), a famous gourmet. Over that time, the practice of gastronomy and mutual admiration turned into a romantic relationship. However, despite Dodin's proposals, Eugenie does not want to become a wife. Dodin decides to do something he has never done before: cook for her.

In 1972, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, chartered to fly a rugby team to Chile, crashed on a glacier in the heart of the Andes. Only 29 of the 45 passengers survived. In one of the world’s toughest environments, the survivors were forced to resort to extreme measures to stay alive.

The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his wife Hedwig, strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden next to the camp.

Novelist, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), is frustrated by the way society and the publishing world profits from “Black” entertainment that relies on tired and offensive tropes. Exasperated, Monk adopts a pseudonym to write a trope fuelled “Black” book of his own.

Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), a curmudgeonly teacher at a New England prep school, is forced to remain on campus during Christmas break to look after a handful of students who have nowhere to go. Eventually, he forms an unlikely bond with one of them – a smart but troubled boy called Angus (Dominic Sessa) -- and with the school’s head cook, Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), who has just lost her son in Vietnam.

On a January night in 1985, some of music’s biggest stars gathered to record We Are the World. Bao Nguyen’s documentary takes us behind the scenes at this historic event.

500 Days Of Film Reviews A Ghostly Classic - The Orphanage