Reviewed by Simon Sweetman

JANUARY 2006 marked the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth; In Search of Mozart arrives in this same anniversary year and, somewhat surprisingly, is the first feature-length commentary on Mozart’s life and work.

Milos Forman’s Amadeus is a well-known film, a classic – many would say, but it is ultimately a work of fiction. It is a shaky biopic based on half-truths, rumours and wild and wilful speculation. It makes for good cinema – as is so often the case – and it certainly helped Forman to make a great film, but it is not a reliable telling of Mozart’s tale.

Reviewed by Imogen Neale

SOME MOVIES you go to see you can come home, after dinner, a few drinks, a little hit of espresso perhaps, and pen a fairly comprehensive and satisfying review that you feel, cleanly surmises all you thought and felt about that movie. Some movies you can not. The reasons differ; perhaps it annoyed you, perhaps you thought the ending was a self-conscious act of the world is all better again-ism. Perhaps it got you in that dark and daunting place some people quietly refer to as your soul...

Reviewed by Simon Sweetman

TIMOTHY TREADWELL is one of the great flawed characters of cinema. But he is (or rather was) – and this is the best part – real; he was no creation – Treadwell was a real human and he filmed himself on a strange quest to become something other than a real human – extra-real, unreal, surreal – whatever his ambition might have been we may never truly know. But from the hours of footage that survive, Werner Herzog has fashioned a superb, funny, grim, sensational(ist), sublime, bizarre and always compelling documentary work. Treadwell himself may have been stranger than fiction could ever concoct – and there are moments during Grizzly Man that will have you pondering how far po-faced documentary can prod before revealing itself as more than the actual authentic antecedent of mockumentary and in fact its own mad strain – but Treadwell is the stuff of documentary gold. And Herzog proves himself to be the alchemist.

Reviewed by Simon Sweetman

HOLLYWOOD has structured most of its worst comedies around one joke (try anything with Martin Lawrence, Chris Kattan or anything post-1990 with Steve Martin). Then again, Hollywood has managed to also create some of its finest comedies around one joke (try most things with Ben Stiller on his one-man shame quest or the early pairing of Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor). We all know it’s not the joke – it’s the way it’s told; not the tale but the telling. The Aristocrats is a documentary that centres itself on one joke; one very infamous joke, perhaps the worst of all time.