A double dose of documentaries here, starting with the Roger Ebert story:
It is what it is: a respectful but honest portrait (partly a self-portrait, I should add) of a rightly legendary film critic. If I expected more from the documentary itself, I’m sure I’ll get it from the book it’s vaguely adapted from, as then I’ll really be able to get inside Roger Ebert’s head and understand what made him who he was. And who he is, because his words haven’t died.
I also liked Showrunners but felt it could have been more:
Showrunners works best as supplementary viewing to Brett Martin’s book Difficult Men – a kind of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls for the creative renaissance in US television since the late 1990s. The Irish-made documentary takes its cameras into the writing rooms, onto the sets, the red carpets and all that, and at its best makes tangible the hopes and fears among the subjects of that book. On its own, I don’t think it has enough weight because, weirdly enough, the things that are its strengths to me (concentrating on lesser-known creative forces rather than the Whedons and the Abrams’ we all know) mean it doesn’t have as much to offer those with no previous exposure to its fairly inside-baseball subject matter.