Documentary

In 2011, congressman Anthony Weiner was forced to resign, after being caught sending selfies of his penis to political groupies. Weiner picks up the story in 2013, when he is campaigning to become mayor of New York. He has apologised for his misdeeds; his wife Huma Abedin, an aide of Hillary Clinton, is (gloomily) standing by him; he’s ahead in the polls – and then he does it all over again. It makes for riveting, disturbing viewing. “She took a flag and made a

place in rock’n’roll for women.” So says Melissa Etheridge in Janis: Little Girl Blue, an engrossing documentary about the brief and troubled life of Janis Joplin. “You can’t turn away, even when you feel you should,” said Nigel Andrews in the FT. Once just an isolated fishing community, Lampedusa is now also the main entry point into Europe for thousands of refugees from Africa and the Middle East. In Fire at Sea, a powerful and poetic portrait of the island, there is no voice-over; instead, said Kate Muir in The Times, Gianfranco Rosi juxtaposes footage of the migrants’ world against scenes from the residents’ everyday lives, to create a film that is “as timely as it is timeless”. Author: The J.T. Leroy Story (pictured right) is a “truth is stranger than fiction” film. J.T. Leroy was a former rent boy who, in the 1990s, published a series of

novels about life as a teenage hustler. He became a literary sensation – until it emerged that he didn’t exist, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. Narrated by the real author, Laura Albert, the documentary “proceeds with the finesse of a well-turned thriller”. The astonishing docudrama Notes on Blindness is built around the audio diaries made by the Birmingham-based theologian John M. Hull after he lost his sight in the 1980s. Innovative and extraordinary, it uses sound and images to explore what it is not to see.