Also showing

Whitney 15 cert, 120 min. Dir: Kevin Macdonald

★★★★★ The second and more “official” feature documentary about the steep, upsetting parabola of Whitney Houston’s life, Kevin Macdonald’s Whitney comes about a year after Whitney: Can I Be Me, Nick Broomfield’s exploration of her pressurised career and drug-assisted burnout. This one has the Houston clan’s blessing, so we get a much more intimate sense of her upbringing, and one late-arriving bombshell as Macdonald looks to her childhood to contextualise why addiction took hold.

While Whitney’s ex-husband, Bobby Brown, clams up over drugs, Whitney’s assistant, Mary Jones, who found her body in the Beverly Hilton hotel, has much to add, including the new detail that her abuser was in fact Whitney’s older cousin, Dee Dee Warwick, sister of Dionne.

The film is oddly unmoving as a memorial, but as with Amy Winehouse, it inspires a collective mea culpa for the feeding frenzy of public judgment that only turned to sympathy when it was far too late. TR