Best

★★★★☆

Dir: Daniel Gordon, 92 mins, featuring: George Best

Daniel Gordon’s new feature documentary reveals its subject at his most glorious – and at his most abject. It’s a portrayal of George Best that goes well beyond the received image of the footballer as a flawed genius and shows him as those closest to him, especially the women in his life, saw him. It is not a flattering picture.

Best at his lowest ebbs (of which there were many) was a shambling, self-pitying drunk who wrought destruction in his own life and in the lives of those closest to him. He is the wife beater who couldn't stop drinking even after his liver transplant, the wastrel who disappeared for days on ends on binges. At the same time, Gordon makes it clear that those he hurt the most retained a huge affection for him and that Best was a victim himself, preyed on by the media and unable to help himself.

Gordon makes ingenious use of voiceover from Best, who died in November 2005, to make it seem as if the footballer is narrating his own story. This is an illuminating and moving film which shows Best at his seediest and most pathetic but never loses sight of the brilliance that made the homesick kid from Belfast into football’s first superstar.