My husband, Alex Hooper, who has died aged 82 after a long illness, had an extraordinarily varied career, including as an archaeologist, film-maker, merchant seaman, teacher and gallery curator. In the late 1960s, while doing an MA in film studies at the Slade School of Fine Art, Alex became close friends with Peter Gibson of Brett Marvin and the Thunderbolts, and the pair made a documentary about the blues musician John Mayall, The Turning Point (1969). Through going on tour with Mayall, and making the film, Alex hung out with musicians such as Fleetwood Mac, Mick Taylor of the Rolling Stones ..read more

Simon Chambers’ film about his late uncle David makes for candid and compelling viewing. Along with one of David’s former pupils, and a fan of his film, he talks care, contempt and infatuation ‘I’ve always liked the company of older people,” says Julian Clary, still smoothly beautiful at 64. “I like the fact they’ve lived a life they are often assumed not to have done.” He pauses. “What old people don’t know about recreational sex,” he continues, cadence familiar as a cuckoo, “you could write on the back of an incontinence pad.” There are plenty of those knocking about in Much Ado About Dying ..read more

Simon Chambers’ documentary is unsparing in capturing his theatrical relation’s endearing, sometimes desperate and often infuriating decline Films about film-makers and their kith and kin sometimes get dismissed as self-serving, self-indulgent or even – everyone’s favourite smear word these days – narcissistic. Director Simon Chambers’s wrenching film about his relationship with his aged uncle David is none of those things; I can think of few documentaries that are more honest, self-scrutinising and revelatory about ageing, familial love and its limits, and the whole tragicomic process of dyin ..read more

The disarmingly candid film follows Vincent and his loved ones as they try to find ways to deal with a devastating prognosis When he was 24, film-maker Kit Vincent was diagnosed with a brain tumour; doctors said that he could expect to live four to eight years. This emotional, raw and quietly powerful documentary started out as a study of how his dad Lawrence came to terms with his son getting ill. The title is a giveaway that the finished article is not that film. At times, it feels like family therapy. Vincent hangs out with his parents, who divorced when he was a teenager. Time is running o ..read more

The former player, once a world No 1, also inspired a defining Adidas shoe and is the subject of a revealing new documentary For sports fans of a certain age, the seasonal queues that form around shoe stores in anticipation of the latest Jordan sneakers are a painful reminder of the many young people who only know of the hoops legend as an athletic brand. But well before Nike reduced Michael to a Jumpman silhouette, Adidas was hawking Stan Smiths – the leather, low-top kicks that became such a fashion statement among rockers and rappers that perhaps more young people have no idea the mustachio ..read more

The port explosion of 2020 damaged just about everything in the city and this painful but tender doc follows a film crew who try to resume work ‘How much bad news can you get in one day?” That’s the production manager of a Lebanese movie called Costa Brava, which is due to start shooting any day. But Beirut is in chaos. It’s 2020, just weeks after the catastrophic port explosion that killed more than 200 people and injured thousands. The blast destroyed the office of the production company, and cinematographer Joe Saade lost an eye (ironic for a cinematographer, he jokes dryly). After agonised ..read more

Oleksiy Radynski chronicles the visionary architect Florian Yuriev’s drive to rescue Kyiv’s Institute of Information from destruction after he was given weeks to live The extraordinary mind of Florian Yuriev, a visionary Ukrainian architect and artist, visualises an astonishingly holistic view of the world. His abstract paintings brim with geometric colourful shapes and patterns that also carry a sonic component, as each shade has their own tonality. On his piano, whose keys are marked with their designated colours, Yuriev played out his painterly compositions, breaking down the barrier betwee ..read more

Documentary Bad Faith looks at the history of a group trying to affect and corrupt politics under the guise of religion Bad Faith, a new documentary on the rise of Christian nationalism in the United States, opens with an obvious, ominous scene – the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021 – though trained on details drowned out by the deluge of horror and easily recognizable images of chaos. That Paula White, Donald Trump’s faith adviser, led the Save America rally in a prayer to overturn the results for “a free and fair election”. That mixed among Trump flags, American flags and militia sy ..read more

In the Wes Anderson-produced documentary Uncropped, the acclaimed culture photographer discusses his career and a changing landscape The former Village Voice and New York Observer photographer James Hamilton lives in a small Manhattan apartment on University Place that also doubles as his studio. There’s a dark room in the corner, where Hamilton develops his images, using chemical ingredients plucked from a wine cooler. His walls are lined with books and stacks of photos, a treasure trove of portraits and reportage he’s shot over the decades, among them BB King in concert, Liza Minelli at home ..read more

Sombre documentary focuses on the former Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti, and how he is becoming a Mandela-like figure since his imprisonment in 2002 Here is a film that offers something not generally on offer in the media: an envisioning of the future and a road map, or part of a road map, out of the present situation in Israel and Palestine. It’s about Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti, an initial supporter of the 1993 and 1995 Oslo peace accords who became progressively disillusioned with the slow choreography of international consensus, and was ultimately imprisoned in 2002 for autho ..read more