Telling the truth: my pick of the best documentaries
Over the past three months I have listed my 100 favourite feature films and now it’s time for the documentaries I cherish the most — the first batch this week, more next — with my favourite foreign language movies to come. I’ve had lots of feedback so far at filmclassics@dailymail.co.uk so please keep it coming. It keeps me on my toes! Meanwhile, in no particular order . . .
When We Were Kings (1996)
LEON GAST’S riveting film about the 1974 ‘Rumble In The Jungle’, the fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, in
Zaire, for the heavyweight championship of the world. It’s about so much more than boxing. An absolute classic.
For Sama (2019)
NOMINATED for Best Documentary at this year’s Oscars, it’s a truly heartrending Arabiclanguage film about the Syrian uprising and the challenge of raising children in a war zone, produced, narrated by and featuring the remarkable Waad Al-Kateab.
Man On Wire (2008)
FOR me, this is even more of a white-knuckle ride than 2018’s gripping Free Solo. Crafted more like a thriller, it’s about the French high-wire daredevil who in 1974 walked, illegally, between the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center.
Three Identical Strangers (2018)
IT’S fair to say we’re in a golden age of documentary-making and here is another pearler, telling the engrossing, and at times terribly sad, story of identical triplets who were all adopted and only met each other, by pure chance, when they were 19.
Amy (2015)
THE second of Asif Kapadia’s brilliant trilogy of films, all with one-name titles, about the perils that extravagant, precocious talent can bring. This biopic of the singer Amy Winehouse is unflinching, enlightening and, ultimately, heartbreaking. Stepping out: Man On Wire (far left) and Amy Winehouse