The major talking heads here are the significant figures who have spoken out about the ‘church’ since leaving. Thus we have filmmaker Paul Haggis and actor Jason Beghe, as well as Spanky Taylor, Mike Rinder and Marty Rathbun. Rinder and Rathbun are already well-known for leaving their high level positions in the church and subsequently spilling the beans. But their tales are no less compelling in the retelling.

There are bits and pieces here that I had read about before: ‘The Truth Rundown’ series of articles, the musical chairs story, Tom Cruise’s recruitment video and…well…any of the crazy stories that lurk in the wake of David Miscavage. But it’s so expertly wrapped up in this two hour doco that I never found myself bored.

There’s a surprising amount of footage, particularly of the Scientology rallies and recruitment videos. It’s also surprising to see just how much of Cruise features in the film, considering he presumably gave no permission. There are moments when Going Clear falls into the trap of thinking the audience must be watching moving pictures at all times – showing clips from Eyes Wide Shut when detailing the breakdown of Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s marriage would be one of them – but in the end, it’s the face-to-camera stuff that’s the most impressive. Jason Beghe always sounds a little unhinged (and after spending time in Scientology, who can blame him?) and at times I felt uncomfortable watching his footage. But when I realised he was one of the first significant figures to truly speak out about the church, and I had a new-found respect for the man.

The DVD presentation is slim when it comes to special features. An interview with Gibney is actually really interesting, so it’s a pity that it only runs for about 6 minutes. Then again, bonus features on home media usually comprise documentaries, so having a doco about a doco would be a little strange.

Half the internet has already raved about this Going Clear, so I’m afraid all I can do is echo that praise. It’s a thoroughly absorbing documentary that at the very least will mean you think twice before saying yes to any free personality tests you get offered when walking past the nearest chapterhouse.

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Unfortunately, for those of us still waiting for a cinematic adaptation of Steve Alten’s ‘Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror’, he doesn’t discover a megalodon lurking in the depths (belated spoiler warning! Sort of!) Instead, the focus of the documentary is the race against the clock to get their bathysphere ready in time for the small expedition window available to them.

As with the efforts that went into the production of The Abyss, Cameron’s work here involves facilitating the invention of stuff that’s never been invented before. Along with his team of engineers and deep sea divers (whom, frustratingly, we never learn enough about) he’s working to break records and bring back samples from the ocean floor for scientific study. The documentary is narrated by Cameron, and there’s more than a little bit of self-aggrandisement. He comes across as a watery Howard Hughes, splitting his time between adventures such as these and filmmaking. (That the Avatar sequels will be partly set underwater is hardly surprising.)

As an exciting documentary, the film is decisively middling. The thing about deep ocean trenches is that they don’t harbour much in the way of interesting scenery. And there’s not much to spot on the way down, either, since the submersible’s sinking like a stone with nothing but the plankton speeding by to provide an indication of movement.

The 3D aspect of the film varies greatly. The high quality stuff that was shot specifically for the documentary is rather neat, but the post production conversions are as unimpressive as you’d expect. There’s not much you can do with the behind the scenes footage shot during the production of 1989’s The Abyss, after all (for the record, this writer’s favourite James Cameron film.)

All this isn’t to say that the film isn’t enjoyable. It moves briskly through its 1.5 hour running time and never gets boring. The sheer audacity of the project is successfully portrayed and, despite that general feeling that he would not be a fun person to work beneath, Cameron makes for an interesting subject.

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The film opens with Stephen ‘Sugar’ Segerman, record store owner and self-styled musical detective, relating the mythology that surrounds the demise of the mysterious Rodriguez. The most common tales culminate in Rodriguez suiciding on stage, either with a gun to the head or through self-immolation. From there, the film jumps back and forth between South Africa and Detroit to discover who Rodriguez was and why he didn’t receive the success he deserved.

I’ve become increasingly cynical towards documentaries over the years, mainly because of their tendency to create a narrative out of real life. It’s an understandable trait of the genre – who’d want to watch a documentary with no narrative trajectory? – but sometimes it feels forced. The selective unravelling of the ‘mystery’ at the centre of Searching for Sugar Man occasionally feels a little contrived. At one stage an interviewee is reading from liner notes on a CD and we can see the filmmakers have cut out a crucial sentence, presumably in the interests of revealing the information bit by bit. Perhaps it’s an unfair criticism, but I was brothered by moments where the film

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The idea is this: YouTube asked people to send in videos of their thoughts and/or activities from the day of 24 July 2010. They received 4500 hours or so of footage and then managed to squeeze the best and most illuminating videos into a 95 minute documentary feature. The film begins just after midnight and basically works through footage chronologically (but of course pretending that there is no such thing as time zones.)

The footage ranges from less than a second to three or four minutes long. We get the full variety, from random images to details of peoples’ life stories. At first, I was concerned the film wouldn’t be able to hold my attention for the duration, but after some pretty speedy montages, the film slows down for some extended segments, though these never outstay their welcome. By this time, I was completely sold on the project.

As if to duplicate society’s need for instantaneous, shorter interactions, Life in a Day plays out like an impatient version of one of the Seven Up films – more participants, less screen time – and by golly the end result is nigh euphoric. I’ve never felt quite so many emotions at the same time, particularly during a documentary. The footage varies enormously – we have an ‘army wife’ having a Skype conversation with her husband who’s currently serving overseas, a young boy who works all day shining shoes, a man guiding his son through his first shave, a birth by c-section and a man explaining that the thing he loves most in his life is his cat. There are some people that the film visits more than once, including a Korean man who’s nine years into his round the world bicycle trip, and the Love Parade stampede which happened to occur on that very day on Earth.

The film is accompanied by fitting musical scores from Harry Gregson-Williams and Matthew Herbert, which enables it to reach a stunning climax that is at once saddening, thrilling, euphoric and terrifying.

Life in a Day deliberately makes no judgment on any of the people or acts displayed on screen. This means that any reactions you have to such footage says more about the yourself than those depicted, and this is part of the film’s genius. There’s very little in the way of obvious juxtaposition and the film represents no bias that I could discern (except maybe ensuring that the majority of the footage chosen was high quality, which is appreciated on the big screen anyway.)

I appreciate that YouTube is often (correctly, many might say) viewed as simply a platform for narcissism, but the segments in Life in a Day have been selected and edited in such a brilliant manner that the same can’t be said for the film itself. This is an extraordinary experience and a definite must-see.

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The roster of talking heads here is incredible. You have the likes of Paul Vance, (writer of the hit “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini”), famous photographer Bunny Yeager, self-proclaimed ‘bikini scientist’ Judson Rosebush as well as several former models who were amongst the first to wear the infamous outfit. It’s a wonderful collection of experts, historians and enthusiasts, and I suppose that the timing of the documentary was perfect, since many of them won’t be with us much longer.

The film also deals with the surprising/horrifying history of the term ‘bikini’ itself. When the swimsuit was introduced to the unsuspecting public in 1946, it happened to coincide with a series of nuclear tests conducted by the US in the Bikini Atoll, which is part of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. The US, in a triumphant show of force, conducted a score of tests within the atoll’s lagoon, but not after forcing the Bikinians to move from their home, claiming that this was for the greater good of humanity (a weapon to end all wars, you see.) French engineer and inventor of the bikini, Louis Réard, called his creation the bikini simply because the atomic tests were all over the news of the day. The lazy yet brilliant connection between sexy women (bombshells) and atomic weapons on the beach was enough to make the name stick.

Directors Albert Knechtel and Kiko Ribeiro cut back and forth from studying the history of the bikini through the years to the current home of the former inhabitants of Bikini Island. Unsurprisingly, the bikini means nothing to them, and as a study of ‘forgotten’ people, this makes for rather sombre viewing. It is, of course, a generally light-hearted study of the bikini phenomenon – examining the differences between the European, North American and Brazilian approaches to skimpy swimwear, though it never delves very far into a feminist sociological approach to the subject matter. Indeed, the film only touches on feminism briefly. This is a pity because it’s easy to see that the bikini is regularly seen as being both freeing and a burden – women were free to express their sexuality in a way never before, but this only unleashed a culture of body sculpting (for lack of a better term) and impossibly high standards.

As a documentary, the film never gets sluggish. This is good, apart from the fact that it goes too far in the other direction – its kinetic, scattergun approach can be a little disorienting to the viewer, as they jump from topic to topic. This is a German production, though many of the interviewees are speaking in English. Unfortunately, the onscreen text that accompanies each person’s name wasn’t translated in the version I watched, which meant I often had to make an approximation as to their profession (my high school German being more than a little rusty.)

Exceptionally informative, Bikini Revolution is a great study of a sociological phenomenon that may at first seem insignificant but has had far-reaching consequences over the years.

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I’d be lying if I said that the film didn’t lose me more than once, however. Since most things to do with the economy soar over my head, it isn’t surprising that I’d have trouble relating all of the critical points of the film back to you hooplarians. That being said, the alternative is the likes of Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story, and Moore is often the target of criticism for cutting corners and being overly simplistic in an effort to get his point across to the common man, so I guess we can’t have it both ways. Inside Job definitely can’t be accused of doing the same.

At first I was a little uneasy at how tightly edited the talking heads are in this film. We regularly see cuts used, either to get a point across more succinctly or to make a tongue-tied person on the receiving end of a particularly difficult question look even more foolish. But then I realised that this is actually a good thing – we know where the edits are, rather than in a lot of other docos which use cutaways to iron over the edits. It’s an honest, if less than glossy, approach.

The main culprits behind the deregulation of the financial sector, the Government response and the lobbying on behalf of financial institutions are absent from Inside Job, which the film goes out of its way to let us know. It’s hardly surprising, either, since the few people who would have ulterior motives – such as the heads of economics departments at various universities (who also make oodles of cash for speaking at various occasions for the big financial companies) – ultimately dig their own grave. The filmmaker constantly poses the question as to whether there is a conflict of interest when the heads of economics departments training the financial “engineers” of tomorrow are themselves given cash bonuses by Big Business and the people in question look the interviewer straight in the face and say “no”.

The film does get distracted once or twice. A particular sub-plot seems to be concerned with the type of things these Wall Street folks spend their money on (exceedingly expensive hookers, basically), and whilst it’s interesting, it’s not really relevant. A brief discussion with a psychologist that’s worked with many of these people is similarly off-topic – the best he can say is that these people are addicted to taking risks. But these are small complaints in an otherwise masterfully compiled documentary.

By the end of Inside Job, someone as naïve as me was stunned at this explanation of predatory lending, debt made profitable (whilst being turned into more debt) and the laws passed to free the financial sector from restrictive (read: common sense) regulations. This truly has to be seen to be believed.

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Then along comes Thierry Guetta – cousin of well-known street artist, Space Invader – who has a compulsion to film everything he sees, including the creation of street art. Ironically, the street artists he meets are quite happy to have him film them, the argument being that this transient art form needs to be recorded for posterity’s sake. His work with the handicam eventually amounts of thousands of hours of footage, some of which comprises this doco.

Whilst Thierry makes it his mission to seek out the world’s most famous street artist, the film surprisingly focuses on the determined cameraman himself rather than the elusive Banksy. Thierry is a bizarre mix of dedication and immaturity. More then once, mention is made of his wife and kids who remain at home whilst he goes globetrotting, helping out the artists he meets. Whilst he never really sees the big picture, Thierry is always thinking ten steps ahead.

To say that Exit Through the Gift Shop ends up surprising would be quite an understatement. The film leaves us with a very uncertain picture as to what exactly constitutes art. From the ninja tactics of street artists dodging the law, to the likes of Banksy making a fortune when he crosses over into the mainstream, the line between culture and counter-culture is practically non-existent. To think that one could theoretically leap from vandal to sell-out in such a short time is astounding.

The hours upon hours of footage have been compiled perfectly, however some of the face-to-cameras could have been more tightly edited. It’s difficult when Thierry seems to have such difficulty expressing himself in English and ends up merely repeating the same word several times to make his point. Banksy stays hidden in shadow throughout the film, as one would expect, and his detached, vaguely pompous attitude is funny enough to escape engendering hatred.

Narrated by Rhys Ifans, Exit Through the Gift Shop is a fascinating look at the street art world. It really is an extraordinary document of the subculture thanks to its subject’s refusal to simply turn the camera off.

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The idea of exploring the evils of capitalism in the USA is a much bigger job than exploring gun control, the healthcare system or even the political fallout from September 11. Capitalism rears its ugly head in almost every corner of the globe, so it’s a pretty hard sell – Moore doesn’t give us much with which to compare it. In Sicko he was able to go to France and the UK to show us just how wonderful the US health care system could be, but in his latest film he doesn’t really have anywhere to turn. Sure, there are some inspirational figures we should have listened to (President Roosevelt in his 1944 State of the Union address), and some who have managed to yell loudly enough to be heard (expert on white collar crime, William Black) but there aren’t many alternate models to which he can turn our attention, other than briefly mentioning how Germany and Japan have done things differently since World War II, but are now more interested in being like America.

As a general overview of the evils of capitalism, the film is reasonably successful. A lot of the blame seems to lie with Reagan – or rather his puppet masters – for making the US a lot more appealing to big business. The film highlights a score of significant events/trends since the changes he introduced, and it’s pretty obvious that it’s all heading towards the 2007-2009 financial crisis. The film feels like it didn’t quite know when it was to be released – Barack Obama’s victory is mentioned, but followed by a disclaimer, effectively stating that he’s an unknown quantity – we don’t really know what he’s going to do to or for the corporations.

You would be wise to watch this film as a double with The Corporation. Jennifer Abbott and Mark Achbar’s 2003 film is a much more detailed examination of exactly why we have evil international companies which are quite content to metaphorically rape the world and its inhabitants, all in the interests of taking care of their stockholders.

Moore’s latest film is still entertaining and funny but lacks focus. One can’t simply make a documentary about ‘capitalism’ it seems, because the subject matter is too big. Or maybe one can and Moore simply fails, I’m not sure. This film is likely to continue the trend of preaching to the converted, though unlikely to influence much change in viewers’ habits, except for deliberately avoiding some of the companies targeted by the film and thinking twice before refinancing the homes they already own.

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Chronicles of a Kidnap is at its best when exploring the effect on those who remain of not knowing the fate of their loved one. How should one react? What demands can a citizen make of her government? And what can the response of a responsible government be? When is it long enough and time to ‘let go’? In eloquent vignettes, Karnit Goldwasser and her family and acquaintances describe the effect of living with such unknowns, forming an overall narrative that demonstrates significant insight.

Goldwasser obtained incredible access to world leaders during her campaign, and the viewer is witness to meetings with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. Her meeting with Peres is instructive in that director Nurit Kedar is able to show clearly the inability of the Israeli leadership to provide comfort, with the unfortunate Prime Minister often left with only silence as his response to Goldwasser’s questions.

It is most unfortunate, then, that these moving and insightful interviews are intercut with footage taken with a helmet camera on a bicycle ride along a rocky mountain path – these point-of-view shots are supposed to convey meaning for Kedar, and yet they make whole sections of the film almost unwatchable.

The shooting style also contributes to a sense that the filmmaker wants to tell her audience how to feel, with extreme close-ups favoured for many of the interview subjects, making their testimony seem all the more personal. It is, however, somewhat tiring to be subjected constantly to such shots, and one may be forgiven for longing for a better appreciation of the subjects’ body language and physicality.

Finally, the sound design features rather intrusive music and sound effects that frequently distract one from the vision. This has the effect of reducing the impact of the emotional journey of the subjects, and this surely can not have been the filmmaker’s intention.

The subjects have painful and remarkable stories to tell, and it is unfortunate that they are often buried under layers of artifice. Nonetheless, Chronicle of a Kidnap makes enough of Karnit Goldwasser’s struggle to remain a moving film, and has the good sense to keep the focus at the personal level and avoid discussion of the greater Israeli-Arab conflict.

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Double Take is a truly original filmic collage. Well, original concept anyway. Its primary source material comprises the many TV spots and commercials Hitchcock did for his films and the television series ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents’. Anyone who owns a few of his movies on DVD will recognise some of the footage – for example there’s the tongue in cheek tour of the Bates Motel he did for Psycho and the publicity shoots he did for The Birds, complete with the trained crow. It’s all cut up and mixed with newsreel footage of the era – from Richard Nixon’s televised meeting with Nikita Krushev up until the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Throughout all of this we keep hearing a rather famous sound bite of Hitchcock referencing the theory that everyone on Earth has an exact double, and that if you should happen to meet your double, you should kill them.

To add further creamy layers to this outstanding fictional reality cake, we have a voiceover provided by Mark Perry, who does an admirable impersonation of the great director’s laidback drawl. And then we have interviews with Ron Burrage, a man who’s had somewhat of a part time career as a Hitchcock lookalike. It’s all a little bit insane and somewhat mystifying, but it works.

Johan Grimonprez and Tom McCarthy have managed to create a Cold War thriller that has Hitchcock at the very centre. More impressive is the fact that they manage to link JFK and the master of suspense rather successfully. There’s some fantastic footage from many disparate sources, including a newsreel of the 1945 plane crash into the Empire State Building and – of all things – a series of atrociously offensive advertisements for Folger’s Coffee.

If it sounds a little too wacky and off-the-wall to be enjoyable then I’m not explaining it effectively. Whilst I can’t imagine a quasi-documentary/fiction film like this has much to offer in a second viewing, it’s a unique experience – a must for Hitchcock fans and anyone interested in the blurring of fact and fiction. At 80 minutes it’s just about the right length (any more would have become tedious) and it’s likely to provoke laughs, outrage and head scratching in equal doses.

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